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The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

theocharis.dev

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Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#201

Post by ezst »

grayhatter wrote: post #179
cognitiveinline wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't be as diplomatic as the other reponse to you. You are welcome to your reticence to agentic coding. But as you're no doubt observing, all your peers are saying they're moving ahead leaps and bounds. Either all of them are wrong, or you will be left behind. Whatever the outcome, it will be on you, and you may make your peace with that.

I appreciate the candor :) But if I'm honest about the size of my ego; the people who write code I admire, the ones who feel remorse when something they built breaks. The people who care about others, and about quality, and don't list TC as something of value. Those are the people who I consider peers. None of them enjoy LLM codegen. They all tell me, that it's annoying because it takes more effort to fix it's output…

I'm a hobbyist and know the programming trade to a certain extent, but at work I'm "the client" and I have my employer contract developers to address all kinds of needs that I represent as a "business interface".

I'm with you on LLMs being in a different league than good developers curating a fine design with attention to detail, soundness and maintainability. It's just that 1- not all software/components within require that same amount of care: many capabilities are already commodified (as library code or boilerplate, or frameworks, or prior art in the training data that LLMs could easily parrot), and 2- till now, the financial calculus was leaning strongly towards "new developments are expensive, let's use restraint" (irrespective of the actual effort/ratio of commodified code).

So long story short, I don't see LLMs taking out skilled and caring developers: I'll still be reaching out to them for the critical/strategic projects, but on the other hand, I appreciate that the "ancillary" or "fancy" stuff can be cobbled together with the LLM glue gun and remove the impression to my management that engaging with software development is necessarily a costly/risky/exposing endeavour. Some software is to be treated like pets and cherished, and the new reality is to accept that we might have cattle software too, with swaths of prototypes, one-off's, very specific and niche and disposable, and it's fine because this no longer represents an unsustainable financial burden (my bean counting management already likes to kill useful software on a pure spec-sheet matching exercise and shovel everything into large "do it all" systems like ERPs: the fewer things the cheaper, right? Except for those underrepresented users thrown under the bus and their effective productivity).

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#202

Post by butterisgood »

msdz wrote: post #2

> LLM’s amplify what you already have: opinions, structure, frameworks. So far, so agreeable, but… > If you have thoughts, they come out sharper and faster. I can’t help but wonder whether constant use of “agent” harnesses will lead to an atrophy of the software engineering (or really any field) muscles. Actual muscles need exercise to stay in shape (let alone grow), so does the brain. Can we really be sure that thou…

C led to an atrophy of assembly muscles. Though this is mostly different.

A spec is NOT CODE.

Someone still needs to understand what the code means.

C optimizers are not the same as the radical departure of an LLM.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#203

Post by Aurornis »

breadzeppelin__ wrote: post #100
Diogenesian wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically my claim is "the relatively minor productivity uplift I would personally get out of agentic development is offset by the high cost, along with unresolved questions about long-term code maintainability, so I am not convinced that it is actually beneficial." IMO the bigger problem is that ~1.5x individual dev productivity uplift seems to translate into 1.05x uplift across the team. People have been waaaaay…

I am both a career developer and experienced team manager. from first hand experience the 1.5x im getting from AI is not flowing down to my team / org because why would i output 50% more when the pay environment and leadership are already underwhelming. That additional 50% productivity goes completely to side projects built on my second computer between 9-5 tasks

> because why would i output 50% more when the pay environment and leadership are already underwhelming

The productivity uplift measured in some of these reports is from more tasks being done, not from developers giving themselves more idle time during the day.

If we do see job losses from AI, my feeling is that it’s going to be concentrated in people with an attitude like this one where workers try to remain anchored to their old delivery pace. It’s becoming easier than ever to replace a worker in that position with a lower paid junior equipped with Claude who has an interest in learning. There’s no reason to keep a higher paid worker around to copy and paste between Jira and Claude.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#204

Post by Aurornis »

ra0x3 wrote: post #164
breadzeppelin__ wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am both a career developer and experienced team manager. from first hand experience the 1.5x im getting from AI is not flowing down to my team / org because why would i output 50% more when the pay environment and leadership are already underwhelming. That additional 50% productivity goes completely to side projects built on my second computer between 9-5 tasks

Great point. Devs have relatively no incentive to be more productive for their orgs, and all the incentive to be more productive on their own personal work. The AI benefit to devs is real, just not for large enterprises IMO outside of automating clerical/mundane work.

> Devs have relatively no incentive to be more productive for their orgs, and all the incentive to be more productive on their own personal work.

AI definitely supercharges the side project myth, but I think we’re going to see waves of developers quitting or losing their jobs because they’re chasing dreams of running a side code project that isn’t going to turn into a business.

The incentive to be more productive at work is that they get to keep their job and not be replaced by a cheaper junior. I think we’re in for a reckoning across the industry as companies realize that there’s little difference between a lazy senior armed with Claude and a halfway motivated junior who has aspirations of growing into something more. The latter costs less and might grow into a better dev.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#205

Post by pornel »

trescenzi wrote: post #28

It depends upon why you have issues with LLMs. If you’re just concerned about quality then sure the dissonance isn’t intolerable. If you’re concerned about their ethics then this becomes a much more challenging position to have.

But that's the thing - people can live with the contradictions. You can find people at a gas station who will totally agree that air pollution and CO2 emissions are killing people, but still fill up the tank.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#206

Post by Aurornis »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #78
mark_and_sweep wrote: post #61

> a genuinely good tool that enriches your thinking A smartphone is also a genuinely good all-around tool. Even social media is a genuinely good tool for connecting people. Yet, I feel like we've been overly optimistic about the impact of said tools on us and our societies in the past two decades. Smartphones are so good, in fact, in some societies, half of us are addicted to them. Billions of people world-wide. I as…

There's a saying that the intelligence of an average prehistoric cave man should be, in general, higher than a modern day human simply because the lack of technology required stone age humans to be far more intelligent then we are today. Now you can survive by working as a clerk in McDs, but in the stone age you needed to be on your toes and smart af. LLMs are just continuing the trend humanity has long been travelin…

> There's a saying that the intelligence of an average prehistoric cave man should be, in general, higher than a modern day human simply because the lack of technology required stone age humans to be far more intelligent then we are today. Now you can survive by working as a clerk in McDs, but in the stone age you needed to be on your toes and smart af.

This is a funny twist on the glorification of the past.

Modern humans have been getting smarter even over the relatively short time periods that we’ve been measuring.

It’s called the Flynn effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

Modern day humans still can and do survive in the wild if they so desire. It’s not some lost intelligence that was only achievable by past ancient humans.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#207

Post by jagenabler2 »

westurner wrote: post #188
BalinKing wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never really understood this argument. If someone's a manager of an incompetent team, no amount of management skill will save the quality of the resulting software. I don't think "just treat LLMs like smart junior developers" fixes this, because well-functioning teams usually also have senior developers to keep things on track. Like, if we handed a team of genius-but-junior developers to the best "people person"…

If you have a "this is an incompetent team" attitude, that's what quality software you'll get back; whether or not there's LLM use. If you have a "I trust my competent team to write good enough tests and test coverage isn't my responsibility" attitude, that's what quality software you'll get back. There are people producing good and excellent quality software with LLMs. Presumably you must discard low-quality code in…

I don't think this argument holds. The OP made the very good point that most quality software teams are composed of both seniors and juniors, with the seniors (and even staff members sometimes) drawing the lines so that the system stays on rails.

If you're a manager now and your "team" is a bunch of coding agents, those agents are hardly junior engineers at best. It is equivalent or even worse than hiring a team of 3-5 junior engineers and letting them run rampant with your code.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#208

Post by threethirtytwo »

Aurornis wrote: post #206
threethirtytwo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a saying that the intelligence of an average prehistoric cave man should be, in general, higher than a modern day human simply because the lack of technology required stone age humans to be far more intelligent then we are today. Now you can survive by working as a clerk in McDs, but in the stone age you needed to be on your toes and smart af. LLMs are just continuing the trend humanity has long been travelin…

> There's a saying that the intelligence of an average prehistoric cave man should be, in general, higher than a modern day human simply because the lack of technology required stone age humans to be far more intelligent then we are today. Now you can survive by working as a clerk in McDs, but in the stone age you needed to be on your toes and smart af. This is a funny twist on the glorification of the past. Modern h…

1. No IQ tests for prehistoric humans. 2. IQ is going down in the US.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#209

Post by threethirtytwo »

dTal wrote: post #170
threethirtytwo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a saying that the intelligence of an average prehistoric cave man should be, in general, higher than a modern day human simply because the lack of technology required stone age humans to be far more intelligent then we are today. Now you can survive by working as a clerk in McDs, but in the stone age you needed to be on your toes and smart af. LLMs are just continuing the trend humanity has long been travelin…

That doesn't pass the sniff test, or chimpanzees would be smarter than humans.

Stone age humans. Not pre hominids.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#210

Post by threethirtytwo »

throw4847285 wrote: post #97
threethirtytwo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a saying that the intelligence of an average prehistoric cave man should be, in general, higher than a modern day human simply because the lack of technology required stone age humans to be far more intelligent then we are today. Now you can survive by working as a clerk in McDs, but in the stone age you needed to be on your toes and smart af. LLMs are just continuing the trend humanity has long been travelin…

How do you know that? What do you know about prehistory? Nothing. You might as well be picturing the Flintstones in your head. You're using broadly shared but totally unsubstantiated about past humans just to argue that things are good right now.

So you're claim is prehistoric humans are stupider? Also unsubstantiated. And insulting to prehistoric humans. That kind of behavior isn't allowed on HN. Don't disparage a group.
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