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

How I write software with LLMs

stavros.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 544 posts

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#271

Post by cousin_it »

I'm thinking more and more that there's an ethical problem with using LLMs for programming. You might be reusing someone's GPL code with the license washed off. It's especially worrisome if the results end up in a closed product, competing with the open source project and making more money than it. Of course neither you nor the AI companies will face any consequence, the government is all-in and won't let you be hurt. But ethically, people need to start asking themselves some questions.

For me personally, in my projects there's not a single line of LLM code. At most I ask LLMs for advice about specific APIs. And the more I think about it, the more I want to stop doing even that.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#273

Post by sarchertech »

vova_hn2 wrote: post #241
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also developer UX, common antipatterns, etc This “the only thing that matters about code is whether it meets requirements” is such a tired take and I can’t imagine anyone seriously spouting it has has had to maintain real software.

I personally haven't made my my mind either way yet, but I imagine that a vibecoding advocate could say to you that maintaining code makes sense only when the code is expensive to produce. If the code is cheap to produce, you don't maintain it, you just throw it away and regenerate.

If you have users, this only works if you have managed to encode nearly every user observable behavior into your test suite.

I’ve never seen this done even with LLMs. Not even close. And even if you did it, the test suite is almost definitely more complex than the code and will suffer from all the same maintainability problems.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#274

Post by grzesiaka »

cousin_it wrote: post #271

I'm thinking more and more that there's an ethical problem with using LLMs for programming. You might be reusing someone's GPL code with the license washed off. It's especially worrisome if the results end up in a closed product, competing with the open source project and making more money than it. Of course neither you nor the AI companies will face any consequence, the government is all-in and won't let you be hurt…

The same here. I find big AI-corpos pretty evil and drastically misaligned with broader well-being of the society.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#275

Post by petcat »

sarchertech wrote: post #270
petcat wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A compiler uses rigorous modeling and testing to ensure that generated code is semantically equivalent. Here are the reported miscompilation bugs in GCC so far in 2026. The ones labeled "wrong-code". https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?chfield=%5BBug%20cr... I count 121 of them.

If you can’t understand the difference between a bug that will rarely cause a compiler encountering an edge case to generate a wrong instruction and an LLM that will generate 2 completely different programs with zero overlap because you added a single word to your prompt, then I don’t know what to tell you.

The point is that expert humans (the GCC developers) writing code (C++) that generates code (ASM) does not appear to be as deterministic as you seem to think it is.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#276

Post by LogicFailsMe »

sarchertech wrote: post #244
petcat wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As human developers, I think we're struggling with "letting go" of the code. The code we write (or agents write) is really just an intermediate representation (IR) of the solution. For instance, GCC will inline functions, unroll loops, and myriad other optimizations that we don't care about (and actually want!). But when we review the ASM that GCC generates we are not concerned with the "spaghetti" and the "high coup…

A compiler uses rigorous modeling and testing to ensure that generated code is semantically equivalent. It can do this because it is translating from one formal language to another. Translating a natural prompt on the other hand requires the LLM to make thousands of small decisions that will be different each time you regenerate the artifact. Even ignoring non-determinism, prompt instability means that any small chan…

I don't see a world where a motivated soul can build a business from a laptop and a token service as a problem. I see it as opportunity.

I feel similarly about Hollywood and the creation of media. We're not there in either case yet, but we will be. That's pretty clear. and when I look at the feudal society that is the entertainment industry here, I don't understand why so many of the serfs are trying to perpetuate it in its current state. And I really don't get why engineers think this technology is going to turn them into serfs unless they let that happen to them themselves. If you can build things, AI coding agents will let you build faster and more for the same amount of effort.

I am assuming given the rate of advance of AI coding systems in the past year that there is plenty of improvement to come before this plateaus. I'm sure that will include AI generated systems to do security reviews that will be at human or better level. I've already seen Claude find 20 plus-year-old bugs in my own code. They weren't particularly mission critical but they were there the whole time. I've also seen it do amazingly sophisticated reverse engineering of assembly code only to fall over flat on its face for the simplest tasks.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#277

Post by sarchertech »

petcat wrote: post #275
sarchertech wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can’t understand the difference between a bug that will rarely cause a compiler encountering an edge case to generate a wrong instruction and an LLM that will generate 2 completely different programs with zero overlap because you added a single word to your prompt, then I don’t know what to tell you.

The point is that expert humans (the GCC developers) writing code (C++) that generates code (ASM) does not appear to be as deterministic as you seem to think it is.

I’m very aware of that, but I’m also aware that it’s rare enough that the compiler doesn’t emit semantically equivalent code that most people can ignore it. That’s not the case with LLMs.

I’m also not particularly concerned with non-determinism but with chaos. Determinism in LLMs is likely solvable, prompt instability is not.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#278

Post by IanCal »

ruszki wrote: post #257
petcat wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you tell a human junior developer just "fix this" then they will spend a week on a wild-goose chase with nothing to show for it. At least the LLM will only take 5 minutes to tell you they don't know what to do.

Do they? I’ve never got a response that something was impossible, or stupid. LLMs are happy to verify that a noop does nothing, if they don’t know how to fix something. They rather make something useless than really tackle a problem, if they can make tests green that way, or they can claim that something “works”. And’ve I never asked Claude Code something which is really impossible, or even really difficult.

I've definitely had pushback on what to do or approaches, yes. I've had this more recently because I've been pushing more on a side of "I want to know if this would end up being fast enough / allow something that it'd be worth doing". I've had to argue harder for something recently, and I'm genuinely not sure if it is possible or not. While it's not flat out refused to do it, it's explained to me why it won't work, and taken some pushing to implement parts of it. My gut feeling is that the blockers it is describing are real but we can sidestep them by taking a wilder swing at the change, but I'm not sure I'm right.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#280

Post by sarchertech »

LogicFailsMe wrote: post #276
sarchertech wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A compiler uses rigorous modeling and testing to ensure that generated code is semantically equivalent. It can do this because it is translating from one formal language to another. Translating a natural prompt on the other hand requires the LLM to make thousands of small decisions that will be different each time you regenerate the artifact. Even ignoring non-determinism, prompt instability means that any small chan…

I don't see a world where a motivated soul can build a business from a laptop and a token service as a problem. I see it as opportunity. I feel similarly about Hollywood and the creation of media. We're not there in either case yet, but we will be. That's pretty clear. and when I look at the feudal society that is the entertainment industry here, I don't understand why so many of the serfs are trying to perpetuate it…

That depends on how fast that change happens. If 45% of jobs evaporate in a a 5 year period, a complete societal collapse is the likely outcome.
Post reply on HN