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

241–250 of 284 posts

Re: Using LLMs at Oxide

#241

Post by sevensor »

ares623 wrote: post #157
philippta wrote: post #145

> LLM-generated code should not be reviewed by others if the responsible engineer has not themselves reviewed it. To extend that: If the LLM is the author and the responsible engineer is the genuine first reviewer, do you need a second engineer at all? Typically in my experience one review is enough.

Yeesss this is what I’ve been (semi-sarcastically) thinking about. Historically it’s one author and one reviewer before code gets shipped. Why introduce a second reviewer and reduce the rumoured velocity gained by LLMs? After all, “it doesn’t matter what wrote the code” right. I say let her rip. Or as the kids say, code goes brrr.

I disagree. Code review has a social purpose as well as a technical one. It reinforces a shared understanding of the code and requires one person to assure another that the code is ready for review. It develops consensus about design decisions and agreement about what the code is for. With only one person, this is impossible. “Code goes brrr” is a neutral property. It can just as easily take you to the wrong destination as the right one.

Re: Using LLMs at Oxide

#242

Post by sethops1 »

0x0000000 wrote: post #65

> Ironically, LLMs are especially good at evaluating documents to assess the degree that an LLM assisted their creation Is there any evidence for this?

If anything my experience has been the opposite of this. LLM detection is guesswork for an LLM.

Re: Using LLMs at Oxide

#243

Post by ambicapter »

aatd86 wrote: post #81
pests wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That junior engineer possibly hasn't programmed without the tantalizing, even desperately tempting option to be assisted by an LLM. Years ago I had to spend many months building nothing but Models (as in MVC) for a huge data import / ingest the company I worked on was rewriting. It was just messy enough that it couldn't be automated. I almost lost my mind from the dull monotony and started even having attendance is…

The issue is that it might look good but an LLM often inserts weird mistakes. Or ellipses. Or overindex on the training data. If someone is not careful it is easy to completely wreck the codebase by piling on seemingly innocuous commits. So far I have developed a good sense for when I need to push the llm to avoid sloppy code. It is all in the details. But a junior engineer would never find/anticipate those issues. I…

If it's such a mind numbing problem it's easy to check it though, and the checking you do after the LLM will be much smaller than you writing every field (implicitly "checking" it when you write it).

Obviously if it's anything even minorly complex you can't trust the LLM hasn't found a new way to fool you.

Re: Using LLMs at Oxide

#245

Post by leecommamichael »

hexo wrote: post #138

"LLMs are amazingly good at writing code" that one was good. I cant stop laughing.

I agree with your sentiment, but I do find it amazing that the underlying techniques of inference can emit code that is as apparently coherent as it is. (This does not imply actual coherence.)

Re: Using LLMs at Oxide

#246

Post by thundergolfer »

bcantrill wrote: post #225
smcameron wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

Too much has been written about em-dashes and LLMs, but I'd highly recommend If it cites em dashes as proof, it came from a tool from Scott Smitelli if you haven't read it.

It's a brilliant skewering of the 'em dash means LLM' heuristic as a broken trick.

1. https://www.scottsmitelli.com/articles/em-dash-tool/

Re: Using LLMs at Oxide

#247

Post by weitendorf »

rgoulter wrote: post #23

> LLM-generated writing undermines the authenticity of not just one’s writing but of the thinking behind it as well. I think this points out a key point.. but I'm not sure the right way to articulate it. A human-written comment may be worth something, but an LLM-generated is cheap/worthless. The nicest phrase capturing the thought I saw was: "I'd rather read the prompt". It's probably just as good to let an LLM gener…

This is something that I feel rather conflicted about, because while I greatly dislike the LLM-slop-style writing that so many people are trying to abuse our attention with, I’ve started noticing that there are a large number of people (varying across “audiences”/communities/platforms”) who don’t really notice it, or at least that whoever is behind the slop is making the “right kind” of slop so that they don’t.

For example, I recently was perusing the /r/SaaS subreddit and could tell that most of the submissions were obviously LLM-generated, but often by telling a story that was meant to spark outrage, resonate with the “audience” (eg being doubted and later proven right), and ultimately conclude by validating them by making the kind of decision they typically would.

I also would never pass this off as anything else, but I’ve been finding it effective to have LLMs write certain kinds of documentation or benchmarks in my repos, just so that they/I/someone else have access to metrics and code snippets that I would otherwise not have time to write myself. I’ve seen non-native English speakers write pretty technically useful/interesting docs and tech articles by translating through LLMs too, though a lot more bad attempts than good (and you might not be able to tell if you can’t speak the language)…

Honestly the lines are starting to blur ever so slightly for me, I’d still not want someone using an LLM to chat with me directly, but if someone who could have an LLM build a simple WASM/interesting game and then write an interesting/informative/useful article about it, or steer it into doing so… I might actually enjoy it. And not because the prompt was good: instructions telling an LLM to go make a game and do a write up don’t help me as much or in the same way as being able to quickly see how well it went and any useful takeaways/tricks/gotchas it uncovered. It would genuinely be giving me valuable information and probably wouldn’t be something I’d speculatively try or run myself.

Re: Using LLMs at Oxide

#249

Post by gpm »

leecommamichael wrote: post #244

What is the downside of using them to prototype? to generate throwaway code? What do we lose if we default to that behavior?

Time wasted on failed prototypes? Understanding that could have been generated by the act of prototyping?

Doesn't mean you shouldn't ever do so, but there are tradeoffs that become obvious as soon as you start attempting it.

Re: Using LLMs at Oxide

#250

Post by IshKebab »

rafterydj wrote: post #211
IshKebab wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>it seems likely that it's going to be on the LLM user to know if the out is protected by copyright. To me, this is what seems more insane! If you've never read Harry Potter, and you ask an LLM to write you a story about a wizard boy, and it outputs 80% Harry Potter - how would you even know? > there will be probably be some "reasonable belief" defence in eventual laws. This is probably true, but it's irksome to shif…

> how would you even know?

The obvious way is by searching the training data for close matches. LLMs need to do that and warn you about it. Of course the problem is they all trained on pirated books and then deleted them...

But either way it's kind of a "your problem" thing. You can't really just say "I invented this great tool and it sometimes lets me violate copyright without realising. You don't mind do you, copyright holders?"

Post reply on HN