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

The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

lewiscampbell.tech

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 295 posts

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#31

Post by j2kun »

jraph wrote: post #14

This doesn't feel completely right. Simon Wilson (known for Django) has been doing a lot of LLM evangelism on his blog these days. Antirez (Redis) wrote a blog post recently with the same vibe. I doubt they are not good programmers. They are probably better than most of us, and I doubt they feel insecure because of the LLMs. Either I'm wrong, or there's something more to this. edit: to clarify, I'm not saying Simon a…

The author claims it's not just that one evangelizes it, but that they become hostile when someone claims to not have the same experience in response. I don't recall Either Willison or Antirez scaring people by saying they will be left behind or that they are just afraid of becoming irrelevant. Instead they just talk about their positive experiences using it. Willison and Antirez seem to be fine to live and let live (maybe Antirez a bit less, but they're still not mean about it).

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#32

Post by WolfeReader »

reb wrote: post #10

How much longer until we get to just... let the results speak for themselves and stop relitigating an open question with no clear answer. We're well past ad nauseum now. Let's talk about anything else.

Given how much energy LLMs use, I'd greatly prefer not to let the results speak for themselves.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#33

Post by iwontberude »

rudedogg wrote: post #3

Hearing people on tech twitter say that LLMs always produce better code than they do by hand was pretty enlightening for me. LLMs can produce better code for languages and domains I’m not proficient in, at a much faster rate, but damn it’s rare I look at LLM output and don’t spot something I’d do measurably better. These things are average text generation machines. Yes you can improve the output quality by writing a…

The most prolific coders are also more competent than average. Their proliferations are what have trained these models. These models are trained on incredibly successful projects written by masters of their fields. This is usually where I find the most pushback is that the most competent SWEs see it as theft and also useless to them since they have already spend years honing skills to work relentlessly and efficiently towards solutions -- sometimes at great expense.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#34

Post by developerDan »

ymyms wrote: post #13

"I find LLMs useful as a sort of digital clerk - searching the web for me, finding documentation, looking up algorithms. I even find them useful1 in a limited coding capacity; with a small context and clear guidelines." I am curious why the author doesn't think this saves them time (i.e. makes them more productive). I never had terribly high output as a programmer. I certainly think LLMs have helped increased the amo…

It seems you find LoC as a measure of productivity. This would answer your question as to why the author does not find it makes them more productive. If total output increases, but quality decreases (which in terms of code means more bugs) then has productivity increased or has it stayed the same?

To answer my own question, if you can pump out features faster but turn around and spend more time on bugs than you do previously then your productivity is likely net neutral.

There is a reason LoC as a measure of productivity has been shunned from the industry for many, many years.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#35

Post by habinero »

rudedogg wrote: post #3

Hearing people on tech twitter say that LLMs always produce better code than they do by hand was pretty enlightening for me. LLMs can produce better code for languages and domains I’m not proficient in, at a much faster rate, but damn it’s rare I look at LLM output and don’t spot something I’d do measurably better. These things are average text generation machines. Yes you can improve the output quality by writing a…

I saw someone refer to it as future digital asbestos.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#36

Post by shermantanktop »

ymyms wrote: post #13

"I find LLMs useful as a sort of digital clerk - searching the web for me, finding documentation, looking up algorithms. I even find them useful1 in a limited coding capacity; with a small context and clear guidelines." I am curious why the author doesn't think this saves them time (i.e. makes them more productive). I never had terribly high output as a programmer. I certainly think LLMs have helped increased the amo…

> "get the ick"

> even though it may work?

The first of those is about taste, and it's real, and engineers with bad taste write unstable buggy systems.

The second of those is about priority. If all you want is functional code, any old thing will do. That's what I do for one-off scripts. But if you plan to support the code at 2am when exposed to production requests on the internet, you need to understand it, which is about legibility and coherence.

I hope you do have taste, and I hope you value more than simple "it works" tests. But it might be worth looking there for why some struggle with LLM output.

For what it's worth, I use coding agents all the time, but almost never accept their output verbatim outside of boilerplate code.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#37

Post by selfhoster11 »

WolfeReader wrote: post #32
reb wrote: post #10

How much longer until we get to just... let the results speak for themselves and stop relitigating an open question with no clear answer. We're well past ad nauseum now. Let's talk about anything else.

Given how much energy LLMs use, I'd greatly prefer not to let the results speak for themselves.

Far less than you'd think for local LLMs.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#38

Post by ymyms »

j2kun wrote: post #31
jraph wrote: post #14

This doesn't feel completely right. Simon Wilson (known for Django) has been doing a lot of LLM evangelism on his blog these days. Antirez (Redis) wrote a blog post recently with the same vibe. I doubt they are not good programmers. They are probably better than most of us, and I doubt they feel insecure because of the LLMs. Either I'm wrong, or there's something more to this. edit: to clarify, I'm not saying Simon a…

The author claims it's not just that one evangelizes it, but that they become hostile when someone claims to not have the same experience in response. I don't recall Either Willison or Antirez scaring people by saying they will be left behind or that they are just afraid of becoming irrelevant. Instead they just talk about their positive experiences using it. Willison and Antirez seem to be fine to live and let live…

My gut says that is not a property of LLM evangelists, but a property of current internet culture in general. People with strong, divisive, and engaging opinions seem to do well (by some definition of well) online.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#39

Post by duendefm »

Turskarama wrote: post #20
duendefm wrote: post #18

Until some days / weeks ago, LLM's for coding was more hype than actually real code producing. That is gone now. They clearly leveled up, things will not be the same anymore. And of course this is not just for coding, this is just the beginning. A month ago it really seemed that the models were hitting a complexity wall and that the architecture would need to be improved. Not anymore.

I have seen people say something along these lines what feels like every month for the past year.

It's different this time. You can see that at the same time, they are finally, definitely solving hard mathematical problems. They passed the phase of just being like good search engines to being actual generators of new data from their generalizations. I can give you a simple example. Any code they generated before brought frustration and they would loop with feedback. Now they actually produce "human level" code.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#40

Post by djaouen »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #26
rudedogg wrote: post #3

Hearing people on tech twitter say that LLMs always produce better code than they do by hand was pretty enlightening for me. LLMs can produce better code for languages and domains I’m not proficient in, at a much faster rate, but damn it’s rare I look at LLM output and don’t spot something I’d do measurably better. These things are average text generation machines. Yes you can improve the output quality by writing a…

As someone who: 1.) Has a brain that is not wired to think like a computer and write code. 2.) Falls asleep at the keyboard while writing code for more than an hour or two. 3.) Has a lot of passion for sticking with an idea and making it happen, even if that means writing code and knowing the code is crap. So, in short, LLMs write better code than I do. I'm not alone.

You are defective. But, fear not! So is the rest of humanity!
Post reply on HN