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The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

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Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#31

Post by vladms »

> Whether something is a forgery is innate in the object and the methods used to produce it. It doesn't matter if nobody else ever sees the forged painting, or if it only hangs in a private home. It's a forgery because it's not authentic.

On a philosophical level I do not get the discussions about paintings. I love a painting for what it is not for being the first or the only one. An artist that paints something that I can't distinguish from a Van Gogh is a very skillful artist and the painting is very beautiful. Me labeling "authentic" it or not should not affect it's artistic value.

For a piece of code you might care about many things: correctness, maintainability, efficiency, etc. I don't care if someone wrote bad (or good) code by hand or uses LLM, it is still bad (or good code). Someone has to take the decision if the code fits the requirements, LLM, or software developer, and this will not go away.

> but also a specific geographic origin. There's a good reason for this.

Yes, but the "good reason" is more probably the desire of people to have monopolies and not change. Same as with the paintings, if the cheese is 99% the same I don't care if it was made in a region or not. Of course the region is happy because means more revenue for them, but not sure it is good.

> To stop the machines from lying, they have to cite their sources properly.

I would be curious how can this be applied to a human? Should we also cite all the courses, articles that we have read on a topic when we write code?

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#33

Post by xg15 »

vladms wrote: post #31

> Whether something is a forgery is innate in the object and the methods used to produce it. It doesn't matter if nobody else ever sees the forged painting, or if it only hangs in a private home. It's a forgery because it's not authentic. On a philosophical level I do not get the discussions about paintings. I love a painting for what it is not for being the first or the only one. An artist that paints something that…

> An artist that paints something that I can't distinguish from a Van Gogh is a very skillful artist and the painting is very beautiful.

There are a lot such artists who can do that after having seen Van Gogh's paintings before. Only Van Gogh (as far as we know) did paint those without having seen anything like it before - in other words, he had a new idea.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#34

Post by raincole »

> Video games stand out as one market where consumers have pushed back effectively

No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written.

If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well. It's specifically worded like this:

> content such as artwork, sound, narrative, localization, etc.

No 'code' or 'programming.'

If game players are the most anti-AI group then it's crystal clear that LLM coding is inevitable.

> This stands in stark contrast to code, which generally doesn't suffer from re-use at all, or may even benefit from it, if it's infrastructure.

Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times. I don't know how one can spins this as a bad thing.

> Classic procedural generation is noteworthy here as a precedent, which gamers were already familiar with, because by and large it has failed to deliver.

Spore is well acclaimed. Minecraft is literally the most sold game ever. The fact one developer fumbled it doesn't make the idea of procedural generation bad. This is a perfect example of that a tool isn't inherently good or bad. It's up to the tool's wielder.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#35

Post by silon42 »

simianwords wrote: post #29

What the author and many others find hard to digest is that LLMs are surfacing the reality that most of our work is a small bit of novelty against boiler plate redundant code. Most of what we do is programming is some small novel idea at high level and repeatable boilerplate at low level. A fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions? LLMs are especially good at fuzz…

Abstraction isn't free... even if you had the correct abstraction and the tools to remove the parts you don't need for deployment, there is still the cost of understanding and compiling.

There is also the cost reason, somebody trying to sell an abstraction will try to monetize it and this means not everyone will want/be able to use it (or it will take forever/be unfinished if it's open/free).

There's also the platform lockin/competition aspect...

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#36

Post by malka1986 »

emsign wrote: post #18
wilg wrote: post #13

LLMs are pretty cool technology and are useful for programming.

If you check the code afterwards. You do check the code yourself, don't you?

Hello, I am a single dev using an agent (Claude Code) on a solo project.

I have accepted that reading 100% of the generated code is not possible.

I am attempting to find methods to allow for clean code to be generated none the less.

I am using extremely strict DDD architecture. Yes it is totally overkill for a one man project.

Now i only have to be intimate with 2 parts of the code:

* the public facade of the modules, which also happens to be the place where authorization is checked.

* the orchestrators, where multiple modules are tied together.

If the inners of the module are a little sloppy (code duplication and al), it is not really an issue, as these do not have an effect at a distance with the rest of the code.

I have to be on the lookout though. It happens that the agent tries to break the boundaries between the modules, cheating its way with stuff like direct SQL queries.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#37

Post by gck1 »

GuestFAUniverse wrote: post #10

And "lazy". Claude makes me mad: even when I ask for small code snippets to be improved, it increasingly starts to comment "what I could improve" in the code I stead of generating the embarrassingly easy code with the improvement itself. If I point it to that by something like "include that yourself", it does a decent job. That's so _L_azy.

Enforce this with deterministic guardrails. Use strictest linting config you possibly can, and even have it write custom, domain specific linters of things that can't happen. Then you won't have to hand hold it that much

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#39

Post by [deleted] »

simianwords wrote: post #29

What the author and many others find hard to digest is that LLMs are surfacing the reality that most of our work is a small bit of novelty against boiler plate redundant code. Most of what we do is programming is some small novel idea at high level and repeatable boilerplate at low level. A fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions? LLMs are especially good at fuzz…

[deleted]

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#40

Post by trashymctrash »

raincole wrote: post #34

> Video games stand out as one market where consumers have pushed back effectively No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written. If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well. It's specifically worded like this: > content such as artwork,…

If you read the next couple of paragraphs, the author addresses this:

> That said, Steam's policy has been recently updated to exclude dev tools used for "efficiency gains", but which are not used to generate content presented to players.

I only quoted the first paragraph, but there is more.

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