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Using LLMs at Oxide
201–210 of 284 posts
Re: Using LLMs at Oxide
#202Funny how the article states that "LLMs can be excellent editors" and then the post repeats all the mistakes that no editor would make:
1. Because reading posts like this 2. Is actually frustrating as hell 3. When everything gets dragged around and filled with useless anecdotes and 3 adjective mumbojumbos and endless emdashes — because somehow it's better than actually just writing something up.
Which just means that people in tech or in general have no understanding what an editor does.
Re: Using LLMs at Oxide
#203A measured, comprehensive, and sensible take. Not surprising from Bryan. This was a nice line: > it’s just embarrassing — it’s as if the writer is walking around with their intellectual fly open. I think Oxide didn't include this in the RFD because they exclusively hire senior engineers, but in an organization that contains junior engineers I'd add something specific to help junior engineers understand how they shoul…
I found it funny that in a sentence that mentions "those who can recognize an LLM’s reveals", a few words later, there's an em-dash. I've often used em-dashes myself, so I find it a bit annoying that use of em-dashes is widely considered to be an AI tell.
Re: Using LLMs at Oxide
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, although LLMs definitely qualify as enabling developers compared to of today. The Internet itself is full of distractions. My younger self spent a crazy amount of time on IRC. So it's not different than spending time on say, Discord today. LLMs have pretty much a direct relationship with Google. The quality of the response has much to do with the quality of the prompt. If anything, it's the overwhelming natur…
Watching my juniors constantly fight the nonsense auto completion suggestions their LLM editor of choice put in front of them, or worse watching them accept it and proceed to get entirely lost in the sauce, I’m not entirely convinced that the autocompletion part of it is the best one. Tools like Claude code with ask/plan mode seem to be better in my experience, though I absolutely do wonder about the lack of typing c…
> never copy paste code from stack overflow
I have the same policy. I do the same thing for example code in the official documentation. I also put in a comment linking to the source if I end up using it. For me, it’s like the RFD says, it’s about taking responsibility for your output. Whether you originated it or not, you’re the reason it’s in the codebase now.
Re: Using LLMs at Oxide
#205> Wherever LLM-generated code is used, it becomes the responsibility of the engineer. As part of this process of taking responsibility, self-review becomes essential: LLM-generated code should not be reviewed by others if the responsible engineer has not themselves reviewed it. Moreover, once in the loop of peer review, generation should more or less be removed: if code review comments are addressed by wholesale re-g…
Insert before 4: make it generate tests that fail, review, then have it implement and make sure the tests pass.
Insert before that: have it creates tasks with beads and force it to let you review before marking a task complete
Re: Using LLMs at Oxide
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
After 25 or so years doing this, I think there are two kinds of developers: craftsmen and practical “does it get the job done” types. I’m the former. The latter seem to be what makes the world go round.
I am both, I own a small agency when I have to be practical, and have fun crafting code on the hobby side. I think what craftsmen miss is the different goals. Projects fall on a spectrum from long lived app that constantly evolve with a huge team working on it to not opened again after release. In the latter, like movie or music production (or most video games), only the end result matters, the how is not part of the…
I also do third party software development, and my approach is always: bill (highly, $300+/hr) for the features and requirements, but do the manual refactoring and architecture/performance/detail work on your own time. It benefits you, it benefits the client, it benefits the relationship, and it handles the misunderstanding of your normie clients with regard to what constitutes "working".
Say it takes 2 hours to implement a feature, and another hour making it logically/architecturally correct. You bill $600 and eat $200 for goodwill and your own personal/organizational development. You're still making $200/hr and you never find yourself in meetings with normie clients about why refactoring, cohesiveness, or quality was necessary.
Re: Using LLMs at Oxide
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on what your prose is for. If it's for documentation, then prose which matches the expected tone and form of other similar docs would be clichéd in this perspective. I think this is a really good use of LLMs - making docs consistent across a large library / codebase.
A problem I’ve found with LLMs for docs is that they are like ten times too wordy. They want to document every path and edge case rather focusing on what really matters. It can be addressed with prompting, but you have to fight this constantly.
> A problem I’ve found with LLMs for docs is that they are like ten times too wordy
This is one of the problems I feel with LLM-generated code, as well. It's almost always between 5x and long and 20x (!) as long as it needs to be. Though in the case of code verbosity, it's usually not because of thoroughness so much as extremely bad style.
Re: Using LLMs at Oxide
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also since LLM generated content is not copyrightable what happens to code you publish as Copyleft license? The entire copyleft system is based on the idea of a human holding copyright to copyleft code. Is a big chunk of it, the LLM part, basically public domain? How do you ensure theres enough human content to make it copyrightable and hence copyleftable….
> since LLM generated content is not copyrightable That's not how it works. If you ask an LLM to write Harry Potter and it writes something that is 99% the same as Harry Potter, it isn't magically free of copyright. That would obviously be insane. The legal system is still figuring out exactly what the rules are here but it seems likely that it's going to be on the LLM user to know if the output is protected by copyr…
I think the poster is looking at it from the other way: purely machine-generated content is not generally copryrightable, even if it can violate copyright. So it's more a question of can a coplyleft license like GPL actually protect something that's original but primarily LLM generated? Should it do so?
(From what I understand, the amount of human input that's required to make the result copyrightable can be pretty small, perhaps even as little as selecting from multiple options. But this is likely to be quite a gray area.)
Re: Using LLMs at Oxide
#209> When debugging a vexing problem one has little to lose by using an LLM — but perhaps also little to gain. This probably doesn't give them enough credit. If you can feed an LLM a list of crash dumps it can do a remarkable job producing both analyses and fixes. And I don't mean just for super obvious crashes. I was most impressed with a deadlock where numerous engineers and tried and failed to understand exactly how…
After the latest production issue, I have a feeling that opus-4.5 and gpt-5.1-codex-max are perhaps better than me at debugging. Indeed my role was relegated to combing through the logs, finding the abnormal / suspicious ones, and feeding those to the models.
Re: Using LLMs at Oxide
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right? If this is really true, that some random folk without compiler engineering experience, implemented a completely new feature in ocaml compiler by prompting the LLM to produce the code for him, then I think it really is remarkable.
Oh wow, is that what you got from this? It seems more like a non experienced guy asked the LLM to implement something and the LLM just output what and experienced guy did before, and it even gave him the credit
Copyright notices and signatures in generative AI output are generally a result of the expectation created by the training data that such things exist, and are generally unrelated to how much the output corresponds to any particular piece of training data, and especially to who exactly produced that work.
(It is, of course, exceptionally lazy to leave such things in if you are using the LLM to assist you with a task, and can cause problems of false attribution. Especially in this case where it seems to have just picked a name of one of the maintainers of the project)