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LLMs can be exhausting

tomjohnell.com

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Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#201

Post by ssivark »

Tenemo wrote: post #188
Schlagbohrer wrote: post #176

Reminds me of the best saying I ever got from my CS professor. She would make us first write out our code and answer the question, "What will the output be?" before we were allowed to run it. "If you don't know what you want your code to do, the computer sure as heck won't know either." I keep this with me today. Before I run my code for the first time or turn on my hardware for the first time, I ask myself, "What _e…

I'm not 100% convinced, while iterating fast on an early prototype, what's wrong with legitimately not knowing what e.g. the data structure will end up looking? Just let it run, check debugger/stdout/localhost page and adjust: "Oh, right, the entries are missing canonical IDs, but at the same time there are already all the comments in them, forgot they would be there – neat". What's wrong with that? Especially at uni…

> what's wrong with legitimately not knowing what e.g. the data structure will end up looking?

But that's not what the above comment said.

> Just let it run, check debugger/stdout/localhost page and adjust: "Oh, right, the entries are missing canonical IDs, but at the same time there are already all the comments in them, forgot they would be there

So you did have an expectation that the entries should have some canonical IDs, and anticipated/desired a certain specific behavior of the system.

Which is basically the meaning of "what will the output be?" when simplified for programming novices at university.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#202

Post by danielbln »

simonask wrote: post #163
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it's because you need to keep more things in your head yourself; after a while of coding by hand, it becomes more labor and doesn't cost as much brain power anymore. But when offloading the majority of that coding to an LLM, you're left with the higher level tasks of software engineering, you don't get the "breaks" while writing code anymore.

The tactical process of writing the code is also when you discover the errors in your design. Like, did we think waterfall suddenly works now just because typing can be automated? No.

Who says you can't iterate on a design just because an LLM does the manual typing?

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#203

Post by vinceguidry »

I'm not going to go so far as to say author is doing it wrong, but the one major thing AI can't do that you can is have flashes of inspiration. And if you're letting it exhaust you then you're robbing yourself of that advantage. Yesterday an adventure I had last year came back to bite me in the butt and my machine wouldn't boot. The me that had context for debugging boot problems was months gone. I spent a few hours feeding error messages into ChatGPT until it ran out of ideas, so I went to bed, got up at 1am the morning and tried again. Eventually I realized I needed to work with it and not just let it do everything, so I widened the scope, realized I didn't need to fix GRUB, and within 15 minutes replaced it with systemd-boot.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#205

Post by lelanthran »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #20
hombre_fatal wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the upper limit is your ability to decide what to build among infinite possibilities. How should it work, what should it be like to use it, what makes the most sense, etc. The code part is trivial and a waste of time in some ways compared to time spent making decisions about what to build. And sometimes even a procrastination to avoid thinking about what to build, like how people who polish their game engine…

Right when you're coding with LLM it's not you asking the LLM questions, it's LLM asking you questions, about what to build, how should it work exactly, should it do this or that under what conditions. Because the LLM does the coding, it's you have to do more thinking. :-) And when you make the decisions it is you who is responsible for them. Whereas if you just do the coding the decisions about the code are left lar…

> Because the LLM does the coding, it's you have to do more thinking. :-)

I keep seeing this sentiment, but it sure sounds wrong to me.

Coding requires thinking (in humans, at any rate). When you're doing coding, you're doing both coding-thinking and the design thinking.

Now you're only doing one half of it.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#206

Post by lelanthran »

onion2k wrote: post #132
raincole wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you care at code quality of course it is exhausting. It's supposed to be. Now there is more code for you to assure quality in the same length of time.

If you care about code quality you should be steering your LLM towards generating high quality code rather than writing just 'more code' though. What's exhausting is believing you care about high quality code, then assuming the only way to get high quality code from an LLM is to get it to write lots of low quality code that you have to fix yourself. LLMs will do pretty much exactly what you tell them, and if you don'…

> LLMs will do pretty much exactly what you tell them

That bit is quiet funny :-)

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#207

Post by empath75 »

cglan wrote: post #3

I find LLMs so much more exhausting than manual coding. It’s interesting. I think you quickly bump into how much a single human can feasibly keep track of pretty fast with modern LLMs. I assume until LLMs are 100% better than humans in all cases, as long as I have to be in the loop there will be a pretty hard upper bound on what I can do and it seems like we’ve roughly hit that limit. Funny enough, I get this feeling…

I go through phases with it where I am extraordinarily productive and times where i can't even bear to open a terminal window.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#209

Post by shimman »

chewbacha wrote: post #107
bmurphy1976 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now corporate has mandated AI usage and is asking people to do 10k LOC PRs every day. That's a big red flag if I ever saw one. Corporate should be empowering the engineering team to use AI tooling to improve their own process organically. Is this true or exaggeration? If it's true I'd start looking for a more balanced position at more disciplined org.

Mandates are becoming normal. Most devs don’t seem to want to but they want to keep their jobs.

Definitely a sign that workers aren't being exploited.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#210

Post by claytongulick »

orbisvicis wrote: post #74
jeremyjh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some cases, yes. But I’ve been doing this awhile now and there is a lot of code that has to be written that I will not learn anything from. And now, I have a choice to not write it.

Ehh, I find that the most tedious code is also the most sensitive to errors, stuff that blurs the divide between code and data.

I actually like writing the tedious code by hand.

The whole time I'm doing it, I'm trying to think of better ways. I'm thinking of libraries, utilities or even frameworks I could create to reduce the tedium.

This is actually one of the things I dislike the most about LLM coding: they have no problem with tedium and will happily generate tens of thousands of lines where a much better approach could exist.

I think it's an innovation killer. Would any of the ORMs or frameworks we have today exist if we'd had LLMs this whole time?

I doubt it.

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