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Greg Knauss Is Losing Himself

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Re: Greg Knauss Is Losing Himself

#21

Post by gtowey »

bee_rider wrote: post #16
troupo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why can’t LLMs understand the big picture? Because LLMs don't understand things to begin with. Because LLMs only have access to aource code and whatever .md files you've given them. Because they have biases in their training data that overfit them on certain solutions. Because LLMs have a tiny context window. Because LLMs largely suck at UI/UX/design especially when they don't have referense images. Because...

> Because LLMs don't understand things to begin with. Ok, that’s fair. But I think the comment was making a distinction between the big picture and other types of “understanding.” I agree that it is incorrect to say LLMs understand anything, but I think that was just an informal turn of phrase. I’m saying I don’t think there’s something special about “big picture” information processing tasks, compared to in-detail i…

I would say that it's very germane to my original statement. Understanding is absolutely fundamental to strategy and it is pretty much why I can say LLMs can't be strategic.

To really strategize you have to have mental model of well, everything and be able to sift through that model to know what elements are critical or not. And it includes absolutely everything -- human psychology to understand how people might feel about certain features or usage models, the future outlook for what popular framework to choose and will it as viable next year as it is today. The geographic and geopolitics of which cloud provider to use. The knowledge of human sentiment around ethical or moral concerns. The financial outlook for VC funding and interest rates. The list goes on and on. The scope of what information may be relevant is unlimited in time and space. It needs creativity, imagination, intuition, inventiveness, discernment.

LLMs are fundamentally incapable of this.

Re: Greg Knauss Is Losing Himself

#22

Post by zaphar »

butILoveLife wrote: post #10
gtowey wrote: post #5

LLMs can't be strategic because they do not understand the big picture -- that the real work of good software is balancing a hundred different constraints in a way that produces the optimal result for the humans who use it. It's not all that different from the state of big corp software today! Large organizations with layers of management tend to lose all abiliy to keep a consistent strategy. They tend to go all in o…

>Good software is about creating longer term value and takes consistent skill & vision to execute. >Those software engineers who focus on this big picture thinking are going to be more valuable than ever. Not to rain on our hopes, but AI can give us some options and we can pick the best. I think this eliminates all middle level positions. Newbies are low cost and make decisions that are low stakes. The most senior or…

So what you are a saying is that you removed the people who can make the decisions that keep your software maintainable and kept the people who will slowly over time cause your software to become less maintainable? I'm not sure that tradeoff is a a good one.

Re: Greg Knauss Is Losing Himself

#23

Post by butILoveLife »

zaphar wrote: post #22
butILoveLife wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Good software is about creating longer term value and takes consistent skill & vision to execute. >Those software engineers who focus on this big picture thinking are going to be more valuable than ever. Not to rain on our hopes, but AI can give us some options and we can pick the best. I think this eliminates all middle level positions. Newbies are low cost and make decisions that are low stakes. The most senior or…

So what you are a saying is that you removed the people who can make the decisions that keep your software maintainable and kept the people who will slowly over time cause your software to become less maintainable? I'm not sure that tradeoff is a a good one.

This might have been true pre-agent AI programming, but honestly the code seems better than ever. It finds edge cases better than me.

I know... I know buddy. The world changed and I don't know if I'm going to have a job.

Re: Greg Knauss Is Losing Himself

#24

Post by gtowey »

vonneumannstan wrote: post #20
gtowey wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While I do tend to believe you, what evidence based data do you have to prove this is true? IMO the onus is to prove that they can be strategic. Otherwise you're asking me to prove a negative.

Task Time horizons are improving exponentially with doubling times around 4 months per METR. At what timescale would you accept that they "can be strategic"? Theres little reason to think they wont be at multi week or month time horizons very soon. Do you need to be strategic to complete multi month tasks?

Can an LLM give you an upfront estimate that a task will take multiple months?

Can it decide intelligently what it would have to change if you said "do what you can to have it ready in half the time?"

Re: Greg Knauss Is Losing Himself

#26

Post by daveguy »

butILoveLife wrote: post #23
zaphar wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what you are a saying is that you removed the people who can make the decisions that keep your software maintainable and kept the people who will slowly over time cause your software to become less maintainable? I'm not sure that tradeoff is a a good one.

This might have been true pre-agent AI programming, but honestly the code seems better than ever. It finds edge cases better than me. I know... I know buddy. The world changed and I don't know if I'm going to have a job.

Finding edge cases is completely orthogonal to creating maintainable software. Finding edge cases ~= identifying test suites. Making software maintainable ~= minimizing future cost of effective changes.

Ignoring future maintenance cost because test suites are easier to create seems like disjointed logic.

Re: Greg Knauss Is Losing Himself

#27

Post by butILoveLife »

daveguy wrote: post #26
butILoveLife wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might have been true pre-agent AI programming, but honestly the code seems better than ever. It finds edge cases better than me. I know... I know buddy. The world changed and I don't know if I'm going to have a job.

Finding edge cases is completely orthogonal to creating maintainable software. Finding edge cases ~= identifying test suites. Making software maintainable ~= minimizing future cost of effective changes. Ignoring future maintenance cost because test suites are easier to create seems like disjointed logic.

[flagged]

Re: Greg Knauss Is Losing Himself

#28

Post by Terr_ »

pixl97 wrote: post #6
gtowey wrote: post #5

LLMs can't be strategic because they do not understand the big picture -- that the real work of good software is balancing a hundred different constraints in a way that produces the optimal result for the humans who use it. It's not all that different from the state of big corp software today! Large organizations with layers of management tend to lose all abiliy to keep a consistent strategy. They tend to go all in o…

>LLMs can't be strategic because they do not understand the big picture While I do tend to believe you, what evidence based data do you have to prove this is true?

Prompt-injection in all its forms. If the hyper-mad-libs machine doesn't reliably "understand" and model the difference between internal and external words, how can we trust them to model fancier stuff?

Re: Greg Knauss Is Losing Himself

#29

Post by hobs »

butILoveLife wrote: post #10
gtowey wrote: post #5

LLMs can't be strategic because they do not understand the big picture -- that the real work of good software is balancing a hundred different constraints in a way that produces the optimal result for the humans who use it. It's not all that different from the state of big corp software today! Large organizations with layers of management tend to lose all abiliy to keep a consistent strategy. They tend to go all in o…

>Good software is about creating longer term value and takes consistent skill & vision to execute. >Those software engineers who focus on this big picture thinking are going to be more valuable than ever. Not to rain on our hopes, but AI can give us some options and we can pick the best. I think this eliminates all middle level positions. Newbies are low cost and make decisions that are low stakes. The most senior or…

AI often simply does not offer the best options, does not think strategically, and if you constrained to its choices you will often make silly mistakes.

This is why all the arguments about context windows and RAG exist, because at the end of the day even if you asked the question of a human with all the context there's such a thing as opinions, stated vs unstated goals, requirements vs non functional requirements, etc which will give you wildly different answers.

Most of the time people don't even know the questions they want to ask.

Re: Greg Knauss Is Losing Himself

#30

Post by hobs »

butILoveLife wrote: post #27
daveguy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finding edge cases is completely orthogonal to creating maintainable software. Finding edge cases ~= identifying test suites. Making software maintainable ~= minimizing future cost of effective changes. Ignoring future maintenance cost because test suites are easier to create seems like disjointed logic.

[flagged]

And the human downstream of this random reorganization of things at will, how do they manage it?

If its AI agents all the way down its commoditization all the way down, if humans have to deal with it there's some sort of cost for change even if its 0 for code.

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