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Various LLM Smells

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Re: Various LLM Smells

#271

Post by sofixa »

adamdb wrote: post #94
sofixa wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The LLM sameness in web design is good. Most sites shouldn't try to be idiosyncratic. The best design for a site with real utility is legibility, and LLMs are better at that than the median developer. Always laying out the same buttons? Always using the same type scales? Good! If it looks good to you, you weren't going to do better on your own, and you were very likely to do worse. See, I disagree. Having seen plen…

I'm going to play devil's advocate, who cares if it all looks generally the same? I grew up before everyone had dial-up, and I remember back then, when Web surfing on Netscape Navigator, all the websites also had a similar structure. Homogeneity in this context, to me, signals a design system that works best in the moment.

> who cares if it all looks generally the same?

It's not just about being the same, in which case the worst is that it has less to stand out with.

It's about looking the same as the other AI generated slops out there, which is a strong signal that the content is probably AI slop too, which doesn't merit time being spent on it and trying to understand if it's slop or a human that just used AI generated UI.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#272

Post by sofixa »

refactor_master wrote: post #206
sofixa wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The LLM sameness in web design is good. Most sites shouldn't try to be idiosyncratic. The best design for a site with real utility is legibility, and LLMs are better at that than the median developer. Always laying out the same buttons? Always using the same type scales? Good! If it looks good to you, you weren't going to do better on your own, and you were very likely to do worse. See, I disagree. Having seen plen…

Before LLM you could sum up the web as the hamburger menu, bootstrap and materialize. Even Apple threw everything in a hamburger at some point.

Yes, but not everyone used the same colour scheme with the exact same box designs, highlight visuals, etc. etc.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#273

Post by ted_bunny »

ruszki wrote: post #212
YZF wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree this is the source of the polarization. Maybe it's part of it. I have been coding since about 1983 or so. I shipped high quality products that have been used by millions of people. From embedded software to desktop applications to distributed systems. I don't think I'm in the "don't understand what code should look like camp" (I mean you never know but the evidence seems to show that I do know what I'm doi…

I’ve seen people coding for 4 decades, thinking the same as you about themselves, and were bad coders. Unfortunately, nobody can tell you whether you’re good or bad without seeing your code. Your claims means nothing on the internet.

That's why they mentioned that their software was successful, it wasn't intended as idle bragging.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#274

Post by paddycorr »

I've been letting typos and punctuation errors slide in my communication so that its clear that its a human that drafted the message. Almost typing faster to encourage them.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#275

Post by tptacek »

sofixa wrote: post #272
refactor_master wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before LLM you could sum up the web as the hamburger menu, bootstrap and materialize. Even Apple threw everything in a hamburger at some point.

Yes, but not everyone used the same colour scheme with the exact same box designs, highlight visuals, etc. etc.

Right, it totally wasn't the case that half the sites on the Internet were vanilla Bootstrap.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#276

Post by ryandrake »

dvt wrote: post #79
ryandrake wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The key difference is that code is not the end product I think this is open to debate. To me, the code has always been the goal, and the fact that writing it sometimes serves to produce a product is important to others (and what brings the paychecks in), but ultimately not something I've ever been excited about or interested in throughout my career. So I judge a developer based on the beauty and quality of the code…

Imo, this is like saying "I judge a carpenter based on how straight they can cut a piece of plywood." Or like saying "I judge an artist on how accurately they can draw a circle by hand." I mean that's certainly one way of looking at it, and both can be impressive technical feats. But most people judge carpenters and artists on their end products, their overall vision, their motifs, their philosophy, and so on. On the…

What I'm trying to get at is more like: I judge a carpenter based on how beautiful, minimal, and functional he makes a chest of drawers, not based on how quickly he can go to market with particle board and glue."

Re: Various LLM Smells

#277

Post by NoGravitas »

bitwize wrote: post #105
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…

Eric S. Raymond has basically stopped writing code by hand altogether. He consistently delivers high quality code without intervening to fix the LLM's output himself, much faster than he would have been able to alone. This is very bad news for camp 2 because it means one of three things: 1) he is extraordinarily lucky 2) he is extraordinary brilliant at manipulating LLMs 3) you really are "holding it wrong" and you a…

If ESR is consistently delivering high quality code now, it would be a first.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#280

Post by slopinthebag »

skydhash wrote: post #172
slopinthebag wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The better workflow, and I think the one adopted by people in the second group, is to take a step back from coding, do a bit of thinking about the domain, design a better abstraction for the problem (architecture, data structure, algorithms), and then write the small amount of code you probably need. Code should grow according to need, not for its own sake. Start small, use it in the real world , and then improve it.

I agree with that, but there still is some code that eventually needs to be written and there is a subset of that code which can be generated. I think it depends on the domain as well - for example, UI code is trivially generatable by LLMs.
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