Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

lewiscampbell.tech

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 295 posts

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#21

Post by christophilus »

rudedogg wrote: post #3

Hearing people on tech twitter say that LLMs always produce better code than they do by hand was pretty enlightening for me. LLMs can produce better code for languages and domains I’m not proficient in, at a much faster rate, but damn it’s rare I look at LLM output and don’t spot something I’d do measurably better. These things are average text generation machines. Yes you can improve the output quality by writing a…

Claude Code is way better than I am at rummaging through Git history, handling merge conflicts, renaming things, writing SQL queries whose syntax I always forget (window functions and the like). But yeah. If I give it a big, non-specific task, it generates a lot of mediocre (or worse) code.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#22

Post by habinero »

I'm dubbing this "podcast driven development" because so many of them aren't building things to build things, they just want to _have built something_ so they can go on podcasts and talk about how great it is.

For what it's worth, I think most of them are genuine when they say they're seeing 10X gains,they just went from, like, a 0.01X engineer (centi-swe) to to a 0.1X engineer (deci-swe).

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#23

Post by meowface »

I feel no strong need to convince others. I've been seeing major productivity boosts for myself and others since Sonnet 3.5. Maybe for certain kinds of projects and use cases it's less good, maybe they're not using it well; I dunno. I do think a lot of these people probably will be left behind if they don't adopt it within the next 3 years, but that's not really my problem.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#24

Post by ymyms »

budududuroiu wrote: post #2

I somewhat agree with this poster. However, I think the unfortunate reality of programming for money is that a mediocre programmer that pumps out millions of lines of slop that seems to drive the business forward and manages to hide disastrous bugs until after the contract / promotion cycle is over will get further ahead than the more competent programmer that delivers better, less buggy, less spaghetti code.

I mean, isn't driving the business forward really what matters (outside of academia, open source, and other such endeavors). We live in a hyper competitive market. All else being equal, if company A can produce "millions of lines of slop", constantly living on the knife-edge of disaster but not falling over it, they will beat company B that artificially slows themselves down. Up until the point company A implodes, but that's not necessarily a given if pre-LLM companies are any indication.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#25

Post by jimbo1167 »

rudedogg wrote: post #3

Hearing people on tech twitter say that LLMs always produce better code than they do by hand was pretty enlightening for me. LLMs can produce better code for languages and domains I’m not proficient in, at a much faster rate, but damn it’s rare I look at LLM output and don’t spot something I’d do measurably better. These things are average text generation machines. Yes you can improve the output quality by writing a…

How are you judging that you'd write "better" code? More maintainable? More efficient? Does it produce bugs in the underlying code it's generating? Genuinely curious where you see the current gaps.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#26

Post by godzillabrennus »

rudedogg wrote: post #3

Hearing people on tech twitter say that LLMs always produce better code than they do by hand was pretty enlightening for me. LLMs can produce better code for languages and domains I’m not proficient in, at a much faster rate, but damn it’s rare I look at LLM output and don’t spot something I’d do measurably better. These things are average text generation machines. Yes you can improve the output quality by writing a…

As someone who: 1.) Has a brain that is not wired to think like a computer and write code. 2.) Falls asleep at the keyboard while writing code for more than an hour or two. 3.) Has a lot of passion for sticking with an idea and making it happen, even if that means writing code and knowing the code is crap.

So, in short, LLMs write better code than I do. I'm not alone.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#27

Post by bashtoni »

The tech industry seems to attract people that feel personally attacked when someone else makes different choices that they do.

"Why are you using Go? Rust is best! You should be using that!" "Don't use AWS CDK, use Terraform! Don't you know anything?"

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#28

Post by lijok »

> You see a lot of accomplished, prominent developers claiming they are more productive without it.

Demonstrably impossible if you’re actually properly trying to use them in non-esoteric domains. I challenge anyone to very honestly showcase a non-esoteric domain in which opus4.5 does not make even the most experienced developer more productive.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#29

Post by ookblah »

"LLM evangelists - are you willing to admit that you just might not be that good at programming computers? Maybe you once were. Maybe you never were."

lol. is this supposed to be like some sort of "gotcha"! yes? like maybe i am a really shitty programmer and always just wanted to hack things together. what it has allowed me to do is prevent burnout to some extent, outsource the "boring" parts and getting back to building things i like.

also getting tired of these extreme takes but whatever, it's #1 so mission accomplished. llms are neither this or that. just another tool in the toolbox, one that has been frustrating in some contexts and a godsend in others and part of that process is figuring out where it excels and doesn't.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#30

Post by meowface »

kiernanmcgowan wrote: post #5

LLMs are really great at copy/pasting answers from stack overflow and fitting them to work in a given system. If your work is outside what is answerable on stack overflow you're going to end up fighting the results constantly. Front end pages like a user settings page? Done. One shottable. Nuanced data migration problems specific to your stack? You're going to be yelling at the agent. > LLM evangelists - are you will…

From my heavy experience using every frontier model for a year now, LLMs are actually probably much, much better at nuanced data migration problems specific to your stack than at a frontend user settings page. (Though still pretty good at both. And the user settings page will work, sure.)
Post reply on HN