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

The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

lewiscampbell.tech

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 295 posts

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#231

Post by trollbridge »

casey2 wrote: post #95
lbrito wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be mistaking set and members here. The piece's critique is against the set (LLM Evangelists), not against specific members of the set (the ones you mentioned). One can agree with the point of the piece while still acknowledging there are good programmers who are also LLM evangelists.

Look into the Motte-and-bailey fallacy. That set seriously doesn't exist. Even the people on youtube doing "vibe coding" benchmarks mostly say it's crap. (Well they probably exist on twitter/linkedin.) This article just functions as flamebait for people who use LLMs to implement whole features to argue the semantics of "vibe coding". All while everyone is ignoring the writing on the wall. That we will soon have boxes…

Ah, here we go again. "You have to learn this new skill or get left behind." As if computer science has fundamentally changed.

There is not some new skill that you need to learn if you were already a competent programmer.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#232

Post by trollbridge »

ymyms wrote: post #129
throwawayffffas wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM generated code is technical debt. If you are still working on the codebase the next day it will bite you. It might be as simple as an inconvenient interface, a bunch of duplicated functions that could just be imported, but eventually you are going to have to pay it.

All code is technical debt though. We can't spend infinite hours finding the absolute minima of technical debt introduced for a change, so it is just finding the right balance. That balance is highly dependent on a huge amount of factors: how core is the system, what is the system used for, what stage of development is the system, etc.

I spend about half my day working on LLM-generated code and half my day working on non-LLM-generated code, some written by senior devs, some written by juniors.

The LLM-generated code is by far the worst technical debt. And a fair bit of that time is spent debugging subtle issues where it doesn't quite do what was prompted.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#233

Post by trollbridge »

visarga wrote: post #148
throwawayffffas wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM generated code is technical debt. If you are still working on the codebase the next day it will bite you. It might be as simple as an inconvenient interface, a bunch of duplicated functions that could just be imported, but eventually you are going to have to pay it.

Untested undocumented LLM code is technical debt, but if you do specs and tests it's actually the opposite, you can go beyond technical debt and regenerate your code as you like. You just need testing to be so good it guarantees the behavior you care about, and that is easier in our age of AI coding agents.

... so you hand-write the specs and tests?

I use LLMs to generate tests as well, but sometimes the tests are also buggy. As any competent dev knows, writing high-quality tests generally takes more time than writing the original code.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#234

Post by trollbridge »

ambicapter wrote: post #146
Arch-TK wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"actually good enough to meet the goals?" There's "okay for now" and then there's "this is so crap that if we set our bar this low we'll be knee deep in tech debt in a month". A lot of LLM output in the specific areas _I_ work in is firmly in that latter category and many times just doesn't work.

I mean, there's also, "this looks fine but if I actually had written this code I would've naturally spent more time on it which would have led me to anticipate the future of this code just a little bit more and I will only feel that awkwardness when I come back to this code in two weeks, and then we'll do it all over again". It's a spectrum.

Right.

And greenfield code is some of the most enjoyable to write, yet apparently we should let robots do the thing we enjoy the most, and reserve the most miserable tasks for humans, since the robots appear to be unable to do this.

I have yet to see an LLM or coding agent that can be prompted with "Please fix subtle bugs" or "Please retire this technical debt as described in issue #6712."

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#235

Post by trollbridge »

CapsAdmin wrote: post #79
rudedogg wrote: post #3

Hearing people on tech twitter say that LLMs always produce better code than they do by hand was pretty enlightening for me. LLMs can produce better code for languages and domains I’m not proficient in, at a much faster rate, but damn it’s rare I look at LLM output and don’t spot something I’d do measurably better. These things are average text generation machines. Yes you can improve the output quality by writing a…

I've been playing with vibe coding a lot lately and I think in most cases, the current SOTA LLM's don't produce code that I'd be satisfied with. I kind of feel like LLM's are really really good at hacking on a messy and fragile structure, because they can "keep track many things in their head" BUT An LLM can write a PNG decoder that works in whatever language I choose in one or a few shots. I can do that too, but it…

Yet it is rare someone ever needs to write a PNG decoder.

In the unlikely event you did, you would be doing something quite special to not be using an off-the-shelf library. Would an LLM be able to do whatever that special thing would be?

It's true that quality doesn't matter for code that doesn't matter. If you're writing code that isn't important, then quality can slip, and it's true an LLM is good candidate for generating that code.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#236

Post by sandos »

northfield27 wrote: post #226

This has been my experience as well. What I use LLMs for I don't use Claude Code, Codex or any other hyped-up, VC-approved, buzzword-compliant, productivity-theater SF tool for actual day-to-day coding . I just use ChatGPT outside of my editor in browser. The only tasks that I feel LLMs right now can do somewhat-reliably without human supervision include: 1. Search: To search and compare different things; that is bor…

If you do not at least have a tool to feed the context of the LLM then you will always have a b*tch of an experience, I believe. We tried out an LLM in our company which had almost no context management. It sucked. Everyone hated it.

Queue copilot (which is arguably likelty not the ultimate toolchain) which can at least read files it needs etc, either explicitly or implicitly, is a whole other ballgame and it works 100x better.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#237

Post by pxc »

Terr_ wrote: post #86
Cornbilly wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share your fear. We have a hard enough time finding juniors (hell, non-juniors) that know how to program and design effectively. The industry jerking itself off over Leetcode practice already stunted the growth of many by having them focus on rote memorization and gaming interviews. With ubiquitous AI and all of these “very smart people” pushing LLMs as an alternative to coding, I fear we’re heading into an era whe…

> to cut out all of the people that never really had an interest in CS I had assumed most of them had either filtered out at some stage (an early one being college intro CS classes), ended up employed somewhere that didn't seem to mind their output, or perpetually circle on LinkedIn as "Lemons" for their next prey/employer. My gut feeling is that messy code-gen will increase their numbers rather than decrease them. L…

> filtered out at some stage (an early one being college intro CS classes)

Most schools' CS departments have shifted away from letting introductory CS courses perform this function— they go out of their way to court students who are unmotivated or uninterested in computer science fundamentals. Hiring rates for computer science majors are good, so anything to up those enrollment numbers makes the school look better on average.

That's why intro courses (which were often already paced painfully slowly for anyone with talent or interest, even without any prior experience) are being split into more gradual sequences, Python has gradually replaced Scheme virtually everywhere in schools (access to libs subordinating fundamental understanding even in academia), the relaxation of the major's math requirements, etc.

Undergraduate computer science classrooms are increasingly full of mercenaries who not only don't give a shit about computer science, but lack basic curiosity about computation.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#238

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

woah wrote: post #51

The anti-LLM side seems much more insecure. Pro-LLM influencers are sometimes corny, but it's sort of like any other influencer, they are incentivized to make everything sound exciting to get clicks. Nobody was complaining about 3d printer influencers raving about how printing replacement dishwasher parts was going to change everything. LLMs have also become kind of a political issue, except only the "anti" side even…

> The anti-LLM side seems much more insecure.

I can't agree with that.

The pro-LLM side is relentlessly pushing everyone into using it, even when very few people want it (e.g. WhatsApp not even allowing people to turn it off). That smacks of insecurity to me.

Anti-LLM people are happy to continue coding/writing/drawing without the new digital tools - that sounds like someone who knows what they're doing and feels secure about their abilities.

> LLMs have also become kind of a political issue, except only the "anti" side even really cares about it

The stock market would disagree to the tune of a large sum of money. What the "anti" side care most about is being forced to pay for (typically hidden costs such as a percentage of your pension investments) and often forced to use "AI" despite knowing that the service is substantially worse than getting people to do the same job (e.g. "AI" support service agents)

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#239

Post by northfield27 »

sandos wrote: post #236
northfield27 wrote: post #226

This has been my experience as well. What I use LLMs for I don't use Claude Code, Codex or any other hyped-up, VC-approved, buzzword-compliant, productivity-theater SF tool for actual day-to-day coding . I just use ChatGPT outside of my editor in browser. The only tasks that I feel LLMs right now can do somewhat-reliably without human supervision include: 1. Search: To search and compare different things; that is bor…

If you do not at least have a tool to feed the context of the LLM then you will always have a b*tch of an experience, I believe. We tried out an LLM in our company which had almost no context management. It sucked. Everyone hated it. Queue copilot (which is arguably likelty not the ultimate toolchain) which can at least read files it needs etc, either explicitly or implicitly, is a whole other ballgame and it works 1…

Is it a promotion?

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#240

Post by habinero »

iwontberude wrote: post #109
habinero wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most prolific coders are also more competent than average This is absolutely not true lol, as anyone who's worked with a fabled 10X engineer will tell you. It's like saying the best civil engineer is the one that builds the most bridges. The best code looks real boring.

I've worked with a 10x engineer and indeed they were significantly more competent than the rest of the team in their execution and design. They've seen so many problems and had a chance to discard bad patterns and adopt/try out new ones.

Nah, just better at marketing and coming up with plausible things that make them sound good. You learn to spot that type after a while. There are a rare few people who do get a lot done, but usually it's because they work 80 hour weeks.
Post reply on HN