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LLMs can be exhausting

tomjohnell.com

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Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#31

Post by pessimizer »

senectus1 wrote: post #19
cglan wrote: post #3

I find LLMs so much more exhausting than manual coding. It’s interesting. I think you quickly bump into how much a single human can feasibly keep track of pretty fast with modern LLMs. I assume until LLMs are 100% better than humans in all cases, as long as I have to be in the loop there will be a pretty hard upper bound on what I can do and it seems like we’ve roughly hit that limit. Funny enough, I get this feeling…

I imagine code reviewing is a very different sort of skill than coding. When you vibe code (assuming you're reading teh code that is written for you) you become a coder reviewer... I suspect you're learning a new skill.

The way I've tried to deal with it is by forcing the LLM to write code that is clear, well-factored and easy to review i.e. continually forcing it to do the opposite of what it wants to do. I've had good outcomes but they're hard-won.

The result is that I could say that it was code that I myself approved of. I can't imagine a time when I wouldn't read all of it, when you just let them go the results are so awful. If you're letting them go and reviewing at the end, like a post-programming review phase, I don't even know if that's a skill that can be mastered while the LLMs are still this bad. Can you really master Where's Waldo? Everything's a mess, but you're just looking for the part of the mess that has the bug?

I'm not reviewing after I ask it to write some entire thing. I'm getting it to accomplish a minimal function, then layering features on top. If I don't understand where something is happening, or I see it's happening in too many places, I have to read the code in order to tell it how to refactor the code. I might have to write stubs in order to show it what I want to happen. The reading happens as the programming is happening.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#32

Post by razorbeamz »

jatora wrote: post #28
razorbeamz wrote: post #26

LLMs do not actually make anything better for anyone. You have to constantly correct them. It's like having a junior coder under your wing that never learns from its mistakes. I can't imagine anyone actually feeling productive using one to work.

You need to learn to use the tool better, clearly, if you have such an unhinged take as this.

The only people who use LLMs "as a tool" are those who are incapable of doing it without using it at all.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#33

Post by Sirental »

jatora wrote: post #28
razorbeamz wrote: post #26

LLMs do not actually make anything better for anyone. You have to constantly correct them. It's like having a junior coder under your wing that never learns from its mistakes. I can't imagine anyone actually feeling productive using one to work.

You need to learn to use the tool better, clearly, if you have such an unhinged take as this.

No to be fair I do see what he's saying. I see a major difference between the more expensive models and the cheaper ones. The cheaper (usually default) ones make mistakes all the damn time. You can be as clear as day with them and they simply don't have the context window or specs to make accurate, well reasoned desicions and it is a bit like having a terrible junior work alongside you, fresh out of university.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#34

Post by voxl »

jatora wrote: post #28
razorbeamz wrote: post #26

LLMs do not actually make anything better for anyone. You have to constantly correct them. It's like having a junior coder under your wing that never learns from its mistakes. I can't imagine anyone actually feeling productive using one to work.

You need to learn to use the tool better, clearly, if you have such an unhinged take as this.

It's not unhinged at all, it's a lack of imagination on both of your parts.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#35

Post by shiandow »

rednafi wrote: post #11

I have always enjoyed the feeling of aporia during coding. Learning to embrace the confusion and the eventual frustration is part of the job. So I don’t mind running in a loop alongside an agent. But I absolutely loathe reviewing these generated PRs - more so when I know the submitter themselves has barely looked at the code. Now corporate has mandated AI usage and is asking people to do 10k LOC PRs every day. Review…

The one thing I don't quite get is how running a loop alongside an agent is any different from reviewing those PRs.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#36

Post by sarchertech »

anonzzzies wrote: post #25
rednafi wrote: post #11

I have always enjoyed the feeling of aporia during coding. Learning to embrace the confusion and the eventual frustration is part of the job. So I don’t mind running in a loop alongside an agent. But I absolutely loathe reviewing these generated PRs - more so when I know the submitter themselves has barely looked at the code. Now corporate has mandated AI usage and is asking people to do 10k LOC PRs every day. Review…

I always wonder where HNers worked or work; we do ERP and troubleshooting on legacy systems for medium to large corps; PRs by humans were always pretty random and barely looked at as well, even though the human wrote it (copy/pasted from SO and changed it somewhat); if you ask what it does they cannot tell you. This is not an exception, this is the norm as far as I can see outside HN. People who talk a lot, don't und…

I currently work at one of the biggest tech companies. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years, and I’ve worked at scrappy startups, unicorns, and medium size companies.

I’ve certainly seen my share of what I call slot driven development where a developer just throws things at the wall until something mostly works. And plenty if cut and paste development.

But it’s far from the majority. It’s usually the same few developers at a company doing it, while the people who know what they’re doing furiously work to keep things from falling apart.

If the majority of devs were doing this nothing would work. My worry is that AI lets the bad devs produce this kind of work on a massive scale that overwhelms the good devs ability to fight back or to even comprehend the system.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#37

Post by nightpool »

anonzzzies wrote: post #25
rednafi wrote: post #11

I have always enjoyed the feeling of aporia during coding. Learning to embrace the confusion and the eventual frustration is part of the job. So I don’t mind running in a loop alongside an agent. But I absolutely loathe reviewing these generated PRs - more so when I know the submitter themselves has barely looked at the code. Now corporate has mandated AI usage and is asking people to do 10k LOC PRs every day. Review…

I always wonder where HNers worked or work; we do ERP and troubleshooting on legacy systems for medium to large corps; PRs by humans were always pretty random and barely looked at as well, even though the human wrote it (copy/pasted from SO and changed it somewhat); if you ask what it does they cannot tell you. This is not an exception, this is the norm as far as I can see outside HN. People who talk a lot, don't und…

I would hope that most people who are technically competent enough to be on HN are technically competent enough to quit orgs with coding standards that bad. Or, they're masochists who have taken on the chamllenge of working to fix them

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#38

Post by jplusequalt »

Apocryphon wrote: post #16
dinkumthinkum wrote: post #12

Does anyone else see this as dystopian? Someone is unironically writing about how exhausted they are and up at night thinking about how they can be a better good-boy at prompting the LLM and reminding us how we shouldn't cope by blaming the AI or its supposed limitations (context size, etc). This is not a dig at the author. It just seems crazy that this is an unironic post. It's like we are gleefully running to the "…

I mean, how often do we feel the same thing about the compiler?

I don't feel this? When my code breaks, I'm more likely to get frustrated with myself.

The only time I've felt something akin to this with a compiler is when I was learning Rust. But that went away after a week or two.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#39

Post by bmurphy1976 »

razorbeamz wrote: post #26

LLMs do not actually make anything better for anyone. You have to constantly correct them. It's like having a junior coder under your wing that never learns from its mistakes. I can't imagine anyone actually feeling productive using one to work.

I don't know what to think about comments like this. So many of them come from accounts that are days or at most weeks old. I don't know if this is astroturfing, or you really are just a new account and this is your experience.

As somebody who has been coding for just shy of 40 years and has gone through the actual pain on learning to run a high level and productive dev team, your experience does not match mine. Even great devs will forget some of the basics and make mistakes and I wish every junior (hell even seniors) were as effective as the LLMs are turning out to be. Put the LLM in the hands of a seasoned engineer who also has the skills to manage projects and mentor junior devs and you have a powerful accelerator. I'm seeing the outcome of that every day on my team. The velocity is up AND the quality is up.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#40

Post by qudat »

senectus1 wrote: post #19
cglan wrote: post #3

I find LLMs so much more exhausting than manual coding. It’s interesting. I think you quickly bump into how much a single human can feasibly keep track of pretty fast with modern LLMs. I assume until LLMs are 100% better than humans in all cases, as long as I have to be in the loop there will be a pretty hard upper bound on what I can do and it seems like we’ve roughly hit that limit. Funny enough, I get this feeling…

I imagine code reviewing is a very different sort of skill than coding. When you vibe code (assuming you're reading teh code that is written for you) you become a coder reviewer... I suspect you're learning a new skill.

It’s easier to write code than read it.
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