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How I program with LLMs

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Re: How I program with LLMs

#281

Post by ryanobjc »

aulin wrote: post #170
lm28469 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m not sure how a responsible enterprise class company could rely on “trust us bro” EULAs or repo readmes. Isn't that what we do with operating systems, internet providers, &c. ?

How is that related? we're talking of continuously sending proprietary code and related IP to a third party, seems a pretty valid concern to me. I, for one, work every day with plenty of proprietary vendor code under very restrictive NDAs. I don't think they would be very happy knowing I let AIs crawl our whole code base and send it to remote language models just to have fancy autocompletion.

"Continuously sending proprietary code and related IP to a third party"

Isn't this... github?

Companies and people are doing this all day every day. LLM APIs are really no different. Only when you magic it up as "the AI is doing thinking" ... but in reality text -> tokens -> math -> tokens -> text. It's a transformation of numbers into other numbers.

The EULAs and ToS say they don't log or retain information from API requests. This is really no different than Google Drive, Atlassian Cloud, Github, and any number of online services that people store valuable IP and proprietary business and code in.

Re: How I program with LLMs

#282

Post by ryanobjc »

brabel wrote: post #98

What the author is asking about, a quick sketchpad where you can try out code quickly and chat with the AI, already exists in the JetBrains IDEs. It's called a scratch file[1]. As far as I know, the idea of a scratch "buffer" comes from emacs. But in Jetbrains IDEs, you have the full IDE support even with context from your current project (you can pick the "modules" you want to have in context). Given the good integr…

It's also available in emacs with packages like gptel which let you send the content of any buffer to your LLM of choice.

I think emacs + LLM is a killer feature: the integration is super deep, deeper than any IDE I've seen, and it's just available... everywhere! Any text in emacs is sendable to a LLM.

Re: How I program with LLMs

#283

Post by ryanobjc »

cratermoon wrote: post #186

But the question must be asked: At what cost? Are the results a paradigm shift so much better that it's worth the hundreds of billions sunk into the hardware and data centers? Is spicy autocomplete worth the equivalent of flying from New York to London while guzzling thousands of liters of water? It might work, for some definition of useful, but what happens when the AI companies try to claw back some of that half a…

That's why open research (which "open" ai has never really contributed to!) and foundational models that everyone can contribute to are essential.

This stuff is a pretty neat magical evolution and it should not be the domain of any single company.

Also a lot of the hardware and so on has/is being paid for. AWS gcloud, etc aren't taking massive losses on their H100 and other compute services. This bubble is no different than any prior bubble ultimately, and bankruptcy will recycle useful assets into new companies and new purposes.

Which btw why the US is still a huge winner and will continue to be -> robust and functioning bankruptcy laws and courts.

Re: How I program with LLMs

#284

Post by ge96 »

nunez wrote: post #187

I definitely respect David's opinion given his caliber, but pieces like this make me feel strange that I just don't have a burning desire to use them. Like, yesterday I made some light changes to a containerized VPN proxy that I maintain. My first thought wasn't "how would Claude do this?" Same thing with an API I made a few weeks ago that scrapes a flight data website to summarize flights in JSON form. I knew I woul…

I'm an avg dev, I was never into LLMs/co-pilot etc mocking prompt engineering but... my current job is working with an LLM framework so idk... future proofs me I guess. I do like computer vision and ML on dataset eg. training hand writing IMU by gestures that's cool.

The embeddings I feel like there is something there even if it doesn't actually understand. My journey has just begun.

I scoff every time someone says "this + AI". AI is this thing they just throw in there. Last time I didn't want to work with some tech I quit my job was not a good move not being financially independent. Anyway yeah I'll keep digging into this. I still don't use co-pilot right now but I'm reading up more on the embedding stuff for cross training or some case like RAG.

Re: How I program with LLMs

#285

Post by Vampiero »

HappMacDonald wrote: post #272
Vampiero wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> International Islamic University Chittagong ??? What's up with native English speakers and random acronyms of stuff that isn't said that often? YMMV, IIUC, IANAL, YSK... Just say it and save everyone else a google search.

So just to make sure I'm on the same page: you're bemoaning how commonly people abbreviate uncommon sayings?

I'm bemoaning the fact that I have to google random acronyms every time an American wants to say the most basic shit as if everyone on the internet knows their slang and weird four letter abbreviations

And googling those acronyms usually returns unrelated shit unless you go specifically to urban dictionary

And then it's "If I understand correctly". Oh. Of course. He couldn't be arsed to type that

Re: How I program with LLMs

#286

Post by glouwbug »

valenterry wrote: post #144
singpolyma3 wrote: post #42

It seems like everything I see about success using LLMs for this kind of work is for greenfield. What about three weeks later when the job changes to maintenance and interation on something that's already working? Are people applying LLMs to that space?

Yeah, it sucks. LLMs are not great with a big context yet. I hope that is being worked on. I need the LLM to read my whole project AND optimally all related slack conversations, the wiki and related libraries.

Then what will you do?

Re: How I program with LLMs

#287

Post by Balgair »

I'm not a 'programmer'. At best, I'm a hacker, at best. I don't work in a team. All my code is mostly one time usage to just get some little thing done, sometimes a bit of personal stuff too. I mostly use Excel anyways, and then python, and even then, I hate python because half the time I'm just dealing with library issues (not a joke, I measured it (and, no, I'm not learning another language, but thank you)). I'm in biotech, a very non code-y section of it too.

LLMs are just a life saver. Literally.

They take my code time down from weeks to an afternoon, sometimes less. Any they're kind.

I'm trying to write a baseball simulator on my own, as a stretch goal. I'm writing my own functions now, a step up for me. The code is to take in real stats, do Monte Carlo, get results. Basic stuff. Such a task was impossible for me before LLMs. I've tried it a few times. No go. Now with LLMs, I've got the skeleton working and should be good to go before opening day. I'm hoping that I can use it for some novels that I am writing to get more realistic stats (don't ask).

I know a lot of HN is very dismissive of LLMs as code help. But to me, a non programmer, they've opened it up. I can do things I never imagined that I could. Is it prod ready? Hell no, please God no. But is it good enough for me to putz with and get just working? Absolutely.

I've downloaded a bunch of free ones from huggingface and Meta just to be sure they can't take them away from me. I'm never going back to that frustration, that 'Why can't I just be not so stupid?', that self-hating, that darkness. They have liberated me.

Re: How I program with LLMs

#288

Post by antirez »

rudiksz wrote: post #244
antirez wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have also many years of programming experience and find myself strongly "accelerated" by LLMs when writing code. But, if you think at it, it makes sense that many seasoned programmers are using LLMs better. LLMs are a helpful tool, but also a hard-to-use tool, and in general it's fair to think that better programmers can do a better use of some assistant (human or otherwise): better understanding its strengths, ide…

> "seasoned programmers are using LLMs better". I do not remember a single instance when code provided to me by an LLM worked at all. Even if I ask something small that cand be done in 4-5 lines of code is always broken. From a fellow "seasoned" programmer to another: how the hell do you write the prompts to get back correct working code?

Check my YouTube channel if you have a few minutes. I just published a video about adding a complex feature (UTF-8) to the Kilo editor, using Claude.

Re: How I program with LLMs

#289

Post by zmmmmm »

billmcneale wrote: post #24
mlepath wrote: post #2

The first rule of programming with LLMs is don't use them for anything you don't know how to do. If you can look at the solution and immediately know what's wrong with it, they are a time saver otherwise... I find chat for search is really helpful (as the article states)

That's the wrong approach. I use chat for things I don't know how to do all the time. I might not know how to do it, but I sure know how to test that what I'm being told is correct. And as long as it's not, I iterate with the chat bot.

I think it's just a broader definition of "know how to do". If you can write a test for it then I'm going to argue you know "how" to do it in a bigger picture sense. As in, you understand the requirements and inherent underlying technical challenges behind what you are asking to be done.

The issue is, there are always subtle aspects to problems that most developers only know by instinct. Like, "how is it doing the unicode conversion here" or "what about the case when the buffer is exactly the same size as the message, is there room for the terminating character?". You need the instincts for these to properly construct tests and review the code it did. If you do have those instincts, I argue you could write the code, it's just a lot of effort. But if you don't, I will argue you can't test it either and can't use LLMs to produce (at least) professional level code.

Re: How I program with LLMs

#290

Post by zmmmmm »

itsgrimetime wrote: post #11
mlepath wrote: post #2

The first rule of programming with LLMs is don't use them for anything you don't know how to do. If you can look at the solution and immediately know what's wrong with it, they are a time saver otherwise... I find chat for search is really helpful (as the article states)

IMO this is a bad take. I use LLMs for things I don’t know how to do myself all the time. Now, I wouldn’t use one to write some new crypto functions because the risk associated with getting it wrong is huge, but if I need to write something like a wrapper around some cloud provider SDK that I’m unfamiliar with, it gets me 90% of the way there. It also is way more likely to know at least _some_ of the best practices w…

> write something like a wrapper around some cloud provider SDK that I’m unfamiliar with

you're equating "unfamliar" with "don't know how to do" but I will claim you do know how to do it, you would just be slow because you have to reference documentation and learn which functions do what.

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