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LLM Inevitabilism

tomrenner.com

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#291

Post by mns »

baxuz wrote: post #151
mg wrote: post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

The thing is that the data from actual research doesn't support your anecdotal proof of quality: - https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... - https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/29/ai_agents_fail_a_lot/ But more importantly, it makes you stupid: - https://www.404media.co/microsoft-study-finds-ai-makes-human... - https://archive.is/M3lCG And it's an unsustainable bubble and wishful thinking, muc…

> So with that in mind — Who is the product (LLM coding tools) actually for, and what is its purpose?

It's for grifters to make more money by getting viral on Twitter and non technical managers that want to get rid of their workforce.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#292

Post by keeda »

lmm wrote: post #250
keeda wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People can't be trusted to do anything either, which is why we have guardrails and checks and balances and audits. That is why in software, for instance, we have code reviews and tests and monitoring and other best practices. That is probably also why LLMs have made the most headway in software development; we already know how to deal with unreliable workers that are humans and we can simply transfer that knowledge o…

> People can't be trusted to do anything either, which is why we have guardrails and checks and balances and audits. That is why in software, for instance, we have code reviews and tests and monitoring and other best practices. That is probably also why LLMs have made the most headway in software development; we already know how to deal with unreliable workers that are humans and we can simply transfer that knowledge…

LLMs may not learn on the fly (yet), but these days they do have some sort of a memory that they automatically bring into their context. It's probably just a summary that's loaded into its context, but I've had dozens of conversations with ChatGPT over the years and it remembers my past discussions, interests and preferences. It has many times connected dots across conversations many months apart to intuit what I had in mind and proactively steered the discussion to where I wanted it to go.

Worst case, if they don't do this automatically, you can simply "teach" them by updating the prompt to watch for a specific mistake (similar to how we often add a test when we catch a bug.)

But it need not even be that cumbersome. Even weaker models do surprisingly well with broad guidelines. Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42150769

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#293

Post by GardenLetter27 »

mg wrote: post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

The full rewrites approach must be costly on the tokens though?

Especially putting formatting rules in there, I just ask it to run a formatter and linter afterwards (or do it myself).

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#294

Post by bambax »

eru wrote: post #280
bambax wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with LLM is when they're used for creativity or for thinking. Just because LLMs are indeed useful in some (even many!) context, including coding, esp. to either get something started, or, like in your example, to transcode an existing code base to another platform, doesn't mean they will change everything . It doesn't mean “AI is the new electricity.” (actual quote from Andrew Ng in the post). More like A…

I don't know about VBA, but spreadsheets actually delivered (to a large extent) on the promise that 'everyone can write simple programs'. So much so that people don't see creating a spreadsheet as coding. Before spreadsheets you had to beg for months for the IT department to pick your request, and then you'd have to wait a quarter or two for them to implement a buggy version of your idea. After spreadsheets, you can…

True, Excel is in the same category, yes.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#295

Post by wizzwizz4 »

mg wrote: post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

> As a first try, I just copy+pasted the whole library and my whole program into GPT 4.1 and told it to rewrite it using the library.

That's a translation task. Transformer models are excellent at translation tasks (and, for the same reasons, half-decent at fuzzy search and compression), and that's basically all they can do, but generative models tend to be worse at translation tasks than seq2seq models.

So the fact that a GPT model can one-shot this correspondence, given a description of the library, suggests there's a better way to wire a transformer model up that'd be way more powerful. Unfortunately, this isn't my field, so I'm not familiar with the literature and don't know what approaches would be promising.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#296

Post by [deleted] »

mlsu wrote: post #6

I hate AI. I'm so sick of it. I read a story about 14 year olds that are adopting AI boyfriends. They spend 18 hours a day in conversation with chatbots. Their parents are worried because they are withdrawing from school and losing their friends. I hate second guessing emails that I've read, wondering if my colleagues are even talking to me or if they are using AI. I hate the idea that AI will replace my job. Even if…

[deleted]

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#298

Post by guelo »

keiferski wrote: post #107

One of the negative consequences of the “modern secular age” is that many very intelligent, thoughtful people feel justified in brushing away millennia of philosophical and religious thought because they deem it outdated or no longer relevant. (The book A Secular Age is a great read on this, btw, I think I’ve recommended it here on HN at least half a dozen times.) And so a result of this is that they fail to notice t…

Sorry I don't buy your argument.

(First I disagree with A Secular Age's thesis that secularism is a new force. Christian and Muslim churches were jailing and killing nonbelievers from the beginning. People weren't dumber than we are today, all the absurdity and self-serving hypocrisy that turns a lot of people off to authoritarian religion were as evident to them as they are to us.)

The idea is not that AI is on a pre-planned path, it's just that technological progress will continue, and from our vantage point today predicting improving AI is a no brainer. Technology has been accelerating since the invention of fire. Invention is a positive feedback loop where previous inventions enable new inventions at an accelerating pace. Even when large civilizations of the past collapsed and libraries of knowledge were lost and we entered dark ages human ingenuity did not rest and eventually the feedback loop started up again. It's just not stoppable. I highly recommend Scott Alexander's essay Meditations On Moloch on why tech will always move forward, even when the results are disastrous to humans.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#299

Post by bubblebeard »

LLM:s and CA:s are most likely here to stay. The question is how we use them correctly. I’ve tried using an LLM to help me learn new programming languages, suggest alternative solutions to some mess I’ve created, and explain things I do not understand. For all of these things, it’s been very helpful. You can’t rely on it, you have to use common sense and cross reference things you do not at least have some prior knowledge of. Just saying, it’s way easier than attempting the same using traditional search engines.

One thing it will not do is replace developers. I do not see that happening. But, in the future, our work may be a little less about syntax and more about actual problem solving. Not sure how I feel about that yet though.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#300

Post by snickmy »

Just wanted to callout how well written is this blog post (not necessarily from a substance standpoint, which in my opinion is very good as well), but from a fluidity and narrative standpoint.

It's quite rare in this day and age. Thank you, OP

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