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Various LLM Smells

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Re: Various LLM Smells

#251

Post by zero_bias »

koonsolo wrote: post #208
ryandrake wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A general pattern for LLMs is that they look really good at things you are bad at. This is true for coding, too, which I think, to a large degree, might explain the polarized differences in opinions on HN about the quality of LLM-produced code. You have the 1. "AI produces code better than I could possibly write, one shots things it would take me days to do, and has made me 10X more productive!" camp, and you have…

I'm in camp 3, where sometimes I don't really care how good or bad the code is. For internal tools for example, you can let the LLM crunch out code really fast, you can validate output but don't even have to look at the code. These kind of "weekend projects" can get finished in an hour or two, and so are really 10x. For bigger production ready code, you indeed have to guard the architecture. But for the code, in some…

That judgment is an essential skill of an experienced programmer, and it is required at every level of the big picture, from high level architecture decisions to the development of particular features: what should I polish and what needs to be developed fast? How exactly should I cut corners in the safest way?

So there are still only two camps

Re: Various LLM Smells

#252

Post by Applejinx »

unshavedyak wrote: post #141
spiffistan wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These seem mostly like Claudeisms. I feel each model (and even generation) has their own set of these isms.

Which seems logical - if they were somehow consistent between all LLMs i'd be even more curious how LLMs are... crab-evolving to 'isms, but hopefully that's not the case hah. (i say crab-evolving in jest)

That's the gremlin to keep an eye on ;)

Re: Various LLM Smells

#253

Post by [deleted] »

slopinthebag wrote: post #127
fluidcruft wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a third camp between these extremes who is like "goddamn it just type this shit out for me so I don't have to do it myself".

Yes, the third camp and probably the most effective is to do a decent amount of writing yourself and use the LLMs as codegen machines, but where the DSL is natural language. Deepseek v4 flash is an incredible model for this, you can actually get into flow state as you write code and then delegate boring code to the magic autocompletion machine to autocomplete.

[deleted]

Re: Various LLM Smells

#254

Post by xboxnolifes »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #174
chatmasta wrote: post #151

If you have Claude at work and are willing to point it to your emails, ask it to “read all my sent emails and create a skill to draft an email in my voice.” Even if you don’t want to use the skill, it’s fun to read the skill file it creates. It’s a bizarre feeling, asking Claude “who am I?” I haven’t tried it with Slack messages because I’m a little scared to read what it says, haha. But the same concept surely appli…

I've done this with Discord chat history to distill my friends' speech to review League of Legends games. For example: https://github.com/shepherdjerred/monorepo/blob/main/package... It actually works quite well

My friend also made a discord bot for this. It got too real so it was shut down.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#255

Post by MrScruff »

svelle wrote: post #247
MrScruff wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, but what is also true is that with each new generation of models (and not just for code generation) it becomes less and less true.

IMO LLM writing hasn't significantly improved since maybe GPT4. It still does the exact same "It's not x, it's actually y" tropes and many of the other common LLM smells. Most LLM generated text is immediately discernible as such.

You can avoid the smells with a prompt. I have a benchmark involving short story writing within specific styles and the level of sophistication achievable is increasing over time, in my opinion.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#256

Post by chantepierre »

spdustin wrote: post #18

- “(The) honest caveat:” (or “genuine caveat:”, both with the colon) - “(The) honest answer:” (again, with colon) - “The thing to internalize:” - “The smoking gun:” (really, sentences that start with “The :” are a strong tell, but those four are the most prolific) - “load bearing” (when not talking about architecture) - “blast radius” (when not talking about actual explosives, but rather the effect of an event/action…

I routinely use "load bearing" in conversations and writing, both seriously and ironically (like a "load bearing just" or "load bearing paint").. maybe I should stop.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#257

Post by petesergeant »

ryandrake wrote: post #66
Planktonne wrote: post #8

> The LLM generated writing obviously felt significantly better than my own writing. A general pattern for LLMs is that they look really good at things you are bad at. What that means is that if you find yourself thinking of its output as significantly better than yours in a particular domain, there's a high chance that you are not equipped to judge that quality effectively.

> A general pattern for LLMs is that they look really good at things you are bad at. This is true for coding, too, which I think, to a large degree, might explain the polarized differences in opinions on HN about the quality of LLM-produced code. You have the 1. "AI produces code better than I could possibly write, one shots things it would take me days to do, and has made me 10X more productive!" camp, and you have…

I think this is a straw man.

> the polarized differences in opinions on HN about the quality of LLM-produced code

Are there strong differences of opinion about the quality? I've seen very few people claim that LLMs write better code than they do.

> one shots things it would take me days to do, and has made me 10X more productive

This is an entirely different claim from the former, and you're conflating them.

The boost from LLM-assisted code isn't _expertise_, it's the power of having an always-on team of reasonable junior developers from every discipline you can possibly imagine willing to do your whim.

Take for example Jesse Vincent / obra[0], who is an exceptional developer, with great taste, and a stack of well-received open-source software to his name. He posts a lot on how he's being made more productive by AI-assisted development. Do you have bad news for him about the quality of his work...?

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Vincent

Re: Various LLM Smells

#258

Post by strogonoff »

chantepierre wrote: post #256
spdustin wrote: post #18

- “(The) honest caveat:” (or “genuine caveat:”, both with the colon) - “(The) honest answer:” (again, with colon) - “The thing to internalize:” - “The smoking gun:” (really, sentences that start with “The :” are a strong tell, but those four are the most prolific) - “load bearing” (when not talking about architecture) - “blast radius” (when not talking about actual explosives, but rather the effect of an event/action…

I routinely use "load bearing" in conversations and writing, both seriously and ironically (like a "load bearing just" or "load bearing paint").. maybe I should stop.

Considering that LLMs output continuously becomes more human-sounding (by design), you’d either have to continuously run what you write through various detectors and keep changing it or you must resign to inevitably be called an LLM at some point.

Simultaneously, because humans subconsciously mimic what we see, we also converge to sound more LLM-ish.

The harsh reality is that no matter what you write and how much research you put into it—especially if you try to be legible to others and not make grammatical mistakes—someone could discount all that and claim you just prompted an LLM. If they want, they can always find some magic “AI checker” that will return a high enough probability. We all know that with a good enough prompt and with round-trip validation against a checker (there are definitely products with this all built in) it will avoid the common tells, it’s just the matter of a few extra tokens.

It’s somewhat demotivating.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#259

Post by sebastianmestre »

ryandrake wrote: post #66
Planktonne wrote: post #8

> The LLM generated writing obviously felt significantly better than my own writing. A general pattern for LLMs is that they look really good at things you are bad at. What that means is that if you find yourself thinking of its output as significantly better than yours in a particular domain, there's a high chance that you are not equipped to judge that quality effectively.

> A general pattern for LLMs is that they look really good at things you are bad at. This is true for coding, too, which I think, to a large degree, might explain the polarized differences in opinions on HN about the quality of LLM-produced code. You have the 1. "AI produces code better than I could possibly write, one shots things it would take me days to do, and has made me 10X more productive!" camp, and you have…

Is this really a split that exists?

In my case I see Claude produce code much worse than I would, but it's certainly much quicker and, even after reworking, it makes me finish tasks in less time.

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