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The human-in-the-loop is tired

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Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#191

Post by zelphirkalt »

thinkindie wrote: post #180
DanielHB wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't understand what the OP said, your brain can get a intrinsic reward from seeing users use your LLM work. But LLM remove all the little intrinsic rewards from coding elegant systems to get to the point where you see users using your work. It is all about the destination now where it used to be about the journey and the destination.

I know exactly what he means - and as I said it all depends on personal drivers/motivation etc etc. take doctors: some starts the profession to make money other to care about people. Both categories can live under the same roof in a hospital.

Going with the doctor analogy: One type tries to be genuinely helpful, the other type suggests unnecessary operations, since it costs more.

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#192

Post by [deleted] »

thinkindie wrote: post #181
customguy wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All you're saying is that for you only the destination ever mattered. But it's very apparent that is not true for a lot of people. And "solving needs" is kinda vague. We drank from lead cups for a long time, because perfect knowledge of material and biology was secondary to just having a cup. And no single sip from any lead cup killed or maybe even much harmed any person, but it all added and adds up. Of course the c…

It’s not just the destination - there are infinite shades of caring too much about every single line of code (spaces! Tabs! Inline open curly braces! Next line) and caring about the final result without attention to what is running under the hood.

[deleted]

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#193

Post by customguy »

iso1631 wrote: post #165
customguy wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All you're saying is that for you only the destination ever mattered. But it's very apparent that is not true for a lot of people. And "solving needs" is kinda vague. We drank from lead cups for a long time, because perfect knowledge of material and biology was secondary to just having a cup. And no single sip from any lead cup killed or maybe even much harmed any person, but it all added and adds up. Of course the c…

And it is true for a lot of people. It's also true for the people paying my salary. If you're making a plane, crashing 1 in 1000 times is terrible, if you're making some administrative thing which if it crashes costs 5 minutes work then it's likely fine But you're still implying that the fancy software crafted by hand is better. I have handmade crafted products and I have assembly line products. Not only are the latt…

> If you're making a plane, crashing 1 in 1000 times is terrible, if you're making some administrative thing which if it crashes costs 5 minutes work then it's likely fine

Yes, and if it doesn't crash it's better than fine. Objectively.

> I have handmade crafted products and I have assembly line products. Not only are the latter cheaper and more consistent, they're often better.

Completely ignoring the care and work that (ideally) goes into making and running the machines at assembly lines, and the cleaning that takes place every day, or sometimes several times a day, all the strict regulations. You cannot compare 99% of software engineering with food production in modern countries. Similar for furniture, it can hurt or even kill, and it would do at a much higher rate if it was made like most software is.

There's gross factory food, and super nice street food, there's healthy factory food and super gross street food. That has nothing to do with anything. All else being the same, you want the person who prepares your food or runs the factory to pay attention and not be sloppy, or you end up with food poisoning, glass shards, and other fun stuff. You just take allll of that for granted, instead of imagining how awesome computing could be if the people involved in it took it similarly seriously instead of just applauding their own laziness.

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#194

Post by pegasus »

DanielHB wrote: post #127
thinkindie wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it all depends on your personal driver: personally I rather see a product I built in whatever way used by ever growing number of people because they find it useful. It means that the time I spent working on that helped other people solving a problem (hopefully). That’s why a was always keen on cutting some corners when and where necessary in order to think about the user first and the code beauty second. Of c…

You don't understand what the OP said, your brain can get a intrinsic reward from seeing users use your LLM work. But LLM remove all the little intrinsic rewards from coding elegant systems to get to the point where you see users using your work. It is all about the destination now where it used to be about the journey and the destination.

Isn't steering the agent the new journey? Why shouldn't that provide "little intrinsic rewards"?

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#195

Post by ryandrake »

BrandonM wrote: post #96

> But the bottleneck was never the code. It was always the human attention, the engineering judgment, the ability to hold a coherent vision for a system. We just didn't notice because writing code felt like the hard part. I keep wondering what I’m missing in the AI enthusiasm, and maybe this is a big part of it? Writing code has never felt like the hard part to me. In my 20s, I was excited about using a computer. AIM…

Someone in a HN thread a few months ago put it in a way that makes a lot of sense to me: "AI seems good at things you are not good at."

So, if you're not actually a programmer, or not a good programmer, you look at AI output and think "Wow, I could never have done that so well/fast. AI is great at this!" It's solving something he's not good at.

On the other hand, if you already are a good/skilled programmer, AI is not solving anything for you. Its output is flawed and has to be manually fixed and refactored. When you consider the prompting and the waiting and the cajoling and the fixing and the refactoring, it's not really doing things faster than you could.

I'm not an artist. To me, AI art seems great, because it's doing something I am very bad at. I think the same is true for AI programming.

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#196

Post by ryandrake »

adamddev1 wrote: post #93
Terr_ wrote: post #37

> I felt that one in my bones. I was up until nearly 2am recently, prompting, because I was so close to getting a plan right. Or so I thought. [...] And it's addictive in a way that makes the isolation worse. Right, it's more like pulling the lever on slot machine. Oooh, 677, bad luck, do a ritual and try again, and maybe this time... Sure, regular programming also has a feedback loop, but normal errors are--as much…

I remember when I was just learning how to code and making some web app, I had to do a lot more blind guessing and running. "Ok let me try this... Will that work now?" I remember staying up really late, feeling stuck to the computer in that slot machine mode. Then when I learned more I got less and less of that guessing feeling. I understood what I was building and what would work, I began using typed languages and c…

Sadly, I've met too many professional software developers in the industry, who never progressed beyond "Try something, see if it works, then try something else." AI is great for these programmers, since it's somewhat better than what they've done as a career for decades.

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#197

Post by JimmaDaRustla »

> ...but the human reviewing, directing, and course-correcting feels worse, not better.

Has this person ever been a design or tech-lead for a team? I'm still tired and I've moved on from that role over 5 years ago. Gathering requirements, designing a solution, implementing as tickets, handing off to developers, staying involved in the feedback loop, then reviewing the code and iterating on PRs is absolutely exhausting. The only thing greater than the naive take that HITM is tiring is the privilege to not understand how asinine it is.

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#198

Post by ryandrake »

xtracto wrote: post #45

>It's also, frankly, quite lonely. Programming with an LLM is an intensely solitary activity. > You and the machine, going back and forth, refining and prompting and reviewing. I just want to comment on this. Maybe im part of some spectrum, but building stuff with AI in that "solitary mode" ive found it really enjoyable. It takes me too the times 30 years ago when I was a 14 year old writing my own games on Basic and…

Yes, that was a weird one for me, too. I've always thought of programming as, at its purest form, a solitary activity. "Pair Programming" and "Programming Teams" are ideas companies graft onto the activity, or force on us, to build bigger things. At its core, programming is a single person, typing commands into a computer.

Working with an LLM doesn't really feel like programming at all. It's more like telling an intern to program, which some might like, but I find totally unsatisfying and not anything like programming.

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#199

Post by claudiulodro »

baq wrote: post #188
encyclopedism wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attempting to illustrate why your analogy is flawed and explain myself a little better I would add that there are quantitive things and qualitative things. If the object was to remove some volume of earth (quantitive) then whether it is moved by a Caterpillar or by 100 men with shovels does not matter. If you're 'no longer looking at the code' or 'looping everything' then you are implicitly moving towards a more quan…

I'm saying I'd rather have a dude in a digger than a hundred folks who need to be supplied, some of them drunk, some of them thieves, some of them just plain bad at digging and only making a mess of the dig site.

In this metaphor, your dude in a digger could also be drunk or a thief or bad at his job, and that'd be a bigger problem vs. a few people from a 100 person hand crew.

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#200

Post by adamddev1 »

skydhash wrote: post #151
throw1234567891 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a trip back to a guesswork stage because most of the training data looks like the process you described your beginnings have been like. Now you know how to do things first shot. When you write the code, your inner voice reminds you ahead of time to do it like this and that. And that "this and that" is what your prompt needs to have to avoid the trip to guesswork. Working with agents is like working with juniors.…

> The difference is, your brain finds guardrails as you solve the problem, the LLM doesn't have this context, you have to give it upfront. Like, you know, a good manager would Not really the same feeling. It’s more like speaking a foreign language. At the beginning, you’re always guessing at words, and what’s the correct structure/expression. After a few years, you can go direct from idea to sentences. Today, my brai…

> Using LLM is like hiring an unreliable translator when I already know the language.

Fantastic analogy. And when you don't really know the language that well you're just amazed at the translator, like "wow you can speak really well!"

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