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

Using LLMs at Oxide

rfd.shared.oxide.computer

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 284 posts

Re: Using LLMs at Oxide

#221

Post by [deleted] »

sunshowers wrote: post #109
bgwalter wrote: post #32

Cantrill jumps on every bandwagon. When he assisted in cancelling a Node developer (not a native English speaker) over pronouns he was following the Zeitgeist, now "Broadly speaking, LLM use is encouraged at Oxide." He is a long way from Sun.

I didn't know about that incident before starting at Oxide, but if I'd known about it, it absolutely would have attracted me. I've written a large amount of technical content and not once in over a decade have I needed to use he/him pronouns in it. Bryan was 100% correct.

[deleted]

Re: Using LLMs at Oxide

#222

Post by menaerus »

ccortes wrote: post #200
menaerus wrote: post #161

Earlier 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

Did you take a look at the code? Given your response I figure you did not because if you did you would see that the code was _not_ cloned but genuinely compiled by the LLM.

Re: Using LLMs at Oxide

#223

Post by menaerus »

kfajdsl wrote: post #219
menaerus wrote: post #161

Earlier 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.

It’s one thing for you (yes, you, the user using the tool) to generate code you don’t understand for a side project or one off tool. It’s another thing to expect your code to be upstreamed into a large project and let others take on the maintenance burden, not to mention review code you haven’t even reviewed yourself! Note: I, myself, am guilty of forking projects, adding some simple feature I need with an LLM quickl…

What are you talking about? It was ridiculously useful debugging feature that nobody in their sanity would block because "added maintenance". MR was rejected purely because of political/social reasons.

Re: Using LLMs at Oxide

#224

Post by bgwalter »

sunshowers wrote: post #109
bgwalter wrote: post #32

Cantrill jumps on every bandwagon. When he assisted in cancelling a Node developer (not a native English speaker) over pronouns he was following the Zeitgeist, now "Broadly speaking, LLM use is encouraged at Oxide." He is a long way from Sun.

I didn't know about that incident before starting at Oxide, but if I'd known about it, it absolutely would have attracted me. I've written a large amount of technical content and not once in over a decade have I needed to use he/him pronouns in it. Bryan was 100% correct.

Joyent took funding from Peter Thiel. I have not seen attacks from Cantrill against Thiel for his political opinions, so he just punches down for street cred and goes against those he considers expendable.

What about Oxide? Oxide is funded by Eclipse ventures, which now installed a Trump friendly person:

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/vc-firm-eclipse-tap...

Re: Using LLMs at Oxide

#225

Post by bcantrill »

smcameron wrote: post #203
thundergolfer wrote: post #4

A 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.

The em-dash alone is not an LLM-reveal -- it's how the em-dash is used to pace a sentence. In my experience, with an LLM, em-dashes are used to even pacing; for humans (and certainly, for me!), the em-dash is used to deliberately change pacing -- to introduce a pause (like that one!), followed by a bit of a (metaphorical) punch. The goal is to have you read the sentence as I would read it -- and I think if you have heard me speak, you can hear me in my writing.

Re: Using LLMs at Oxide

#226

Post by Philpax »

_zagj wrote: post #50
bryancoxwell wrote: post #7

Find it interesting that the section about LLM’s tells when using it for writing is absolutely littered with emdashes

There was a comment recently by HN's most enthusiastic LLM cheerleader, Simon Willison, that I stopped reading almost immediately (before seeing who posted it), because it exuded the slop stench of an LLM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46011877 However, I was surprised to see that when someone (not me) accused him of using an LLM to write his comment, he flatly denied it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4…

I don't know what to tell you: that really does not read like it was written by a LLM. You were perhaps set off by the very first sentence, which sounds like it was responding to a prompt?

Re: Using LLMs at Oxide

#227

Post by ornornor »

pmg101 wrote: post #177
mulmboy wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do these look like?

1. Take every single function, even private ones. 2. Mock every argument and collaborator. 3. Call the function. 4. Assert the mocks were called in the expected way. These tests help you find inadvertent changes, yes, but they also create constant noise about changes you intend.

Juniors on one of the teams I work with only write this kind of tests. It’s tiring, and I have to tell them to test the behaviour, not the implementation. And yet every time they do the same thing. Or rather their AI IDE spits these out.

Re: Using LLMs at Oxide

#228

Post by OptionOfT »

> 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.

I think the review by the prompt writer should be at a higher level than another person who reviews the code.

If I know how to do something, it is easier for me to avoid mistakes while doing it. When I'm reviewing it it requires different pathways in my brain. Since there is code out there I'm drawn to that path, and I might not not always spot the problem points. Or code might be written in a way that I don't recognize, but still exhibits the same mistake.

In the past, as a reviewer I used to be able to count on my colleagues' professionalism to be a moat.

The size of the moat is inverse to the amount of LLM generated code in a PR / project. At a certain moment you can no longer guarantee that you stand behind everything.

Combine that with the push to do more faster, with less, meaning we're increasing the amount of tech debt we're taking on.

Re: Using LLMs at Oxide

#229

Post by minimaxir »

jgalt212 wrote: post #214
minimaxir wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can stop LLMs from using em-dashes by just telling it to "never use em-dashes". This same type of prompt engineering works to mitigate almost every sign of AI-generated writing, which is one reason why AI writing heuristics/detectors can never be fully reliable.

I guess, but if even in you set aside any obvious tells, pretty much all expository writing out of an LLM still reads like pablum without any real conviction or tons of hedges against observed opinions. "lack of conviction" would be a useful LLM metric.

I ran a test for a potential blog post where I take every indicator of AI writing and tell the LLM "don't do any of these" and resulted in high school AP English quality writing. Which could be considered a lack of conviction level of writing.

Re: Using LLMs at Oxide

#230

Post by bcantrill »

cobertos wrote: post #96

> LLMs are especially good at evaluating documents to assess the degree that an LLM assisted their creation!) That's a bold claim. Do they have data to back this up? I'd only have confidence to say this after testing this against multiple LLM outputs, but does this really work for, e.g. the em dash leaderboard of HN or people who tell an LLM to not do these 10 LLM-y writing cliches? I would need to see their reasonin…

I am really surprised that people are surprised by this, and honestly the reference was so casual in the RFD because it's probably the way that I use LLMs the most (so very much coming from my own personal experience). I will add a footnote to the RFD to explain this, but just for everyone's benefit here: at Oxide, we have a very writing-intensive hiring process.[0] Unsurprisingly, over the last six months, we have seen an explosion of LLM-authored materials (especially for our technical positions). We have told applicants to be careful about doing this[1], but they do it anyway. We have also seen this coupled with outright fraud (though less frequently). Speaking personally, I spend a lot of time reviewing candidate materials, and my ear has become very sensitive to LLM-generated materials. So while I generally only engage an LLM to aid in detection when I already have a suspicion, they have proven adept. (I also elaborated on this a little in our podcast episode with Ben Shindel on using LLMs to explore the fraud of Aidan Toner-Rodgers.[2])

I wasn't trying to assert that LLMs can find all LLM-generated content (which feels tautologically impossible?), just that they are useful for the kind of LLM-generated content that we seek to detect.

[0] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003

[1] https://oxide.computer/careers

[2] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/ai-material...

Post reply on HN