301–310 of 383 posts
These comments are a bit scary. It feels like LLMs managed to exploit some fault in the human psyche. I think the biggest danger of this technology is that people are not mentally equipped to handle it.
ChatGPT and Claude Code are industrial strength fans designed to blow smoke up your ass at rates once thought impossible
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> from people who believe the tools are useless, the output is always unusable, people who mock any idea that operator skill has an impact on LLM output You are attacking a strawman. Almost nobody claims that LLMs are useless or you can never use their output.
Those claims are all throughout this thread and in replies to my comments. It’s not a strawman. It’s everywhere on HN.
> LLMs have certainly become extremely useful for Software Engineers
> LLMs are useful for programming in 2025
> Do LLMs make bad code: yes all the time (at the moment zero clue about good architecture). Are they still useful: yes, extremely so.
If your comment is not a strawman, show me where people actually claim what you say they do.
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RLVR "reinforcement learning for verifiable rewards" refers to RL used to encourage reasoning towards achieving long-horizon goals in areas such as math and programming, where the correctness/desirability of a generated response (or perhaps an individual reasoning step) can be verified in some way. For example generated code can be verified by compiling and running it, or math results verified by comparing to known c…
> generated code can be verified by compiling and running it I think this gets to the crux of the issue with LLMs for coding (and indeed 'test orientated development'). For anything beyond a most basic level of complexity (i.e. anything actually useful), code cannot be verified by compiling and running it. It can only be verified - to a point - by skilled human inspection/comprehension. That is the essence of code re…
As far as using the trained model to generate code, then of course it's up to the developer to do code reviews, testing, etc as normal, although of course an LLM can be used to assist writing test cases etc as well.
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> It feeds the entire US (hundreds of millions of people), is used as animal feed (thus also feeding us), and is widely exported to feed other people. Not really. Most corn grown in the US isn’t even fit for consumption. It is primarily used for fermenting bioethanol.
Source?
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The issue you're overlooking is the scarcity of experts. You're comparing the current situation to an alternative universe where every person can ask a doctor their questions 10 times a day and instantly get an accurate response. That is not the reality we're living in. Doctors barely give you 5 minutes even if you get an appointment days or weeks in advance. There is just nobody to ask. The alternatives today are 1)…
Excellent way of putting it. Just a nitpick: People should look up in medical encyclopedias/research papers/libraries, not blogs. It requires the ability to find and summarize… which is exactly what AI is excellent at.
> For years, despite functional evidence and scientific hints accumulating, certain AI researchers continued to claim LLMs were stochastic parrots: probabilistic machines that would: 1. NOT have any representation about the meaning of the prompt. 2. NOT have any representation about what they were going to say. In 2025 finally almost everybody stopped saying so. It's interesting that Terrence Tao just released his ow…
(And, in some cases, a desire to deny the people and perspectives from which the phrase originated.)
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> They cite cherry picked announcements showing that LLM usage makes development slower or worse. They opened ChatGPT a couple times a few months ago, asked some questions, and then went “Aha! I knew it was bad!” when they encountered their first bad output instead of trying to work with the LLM to iterate like everyone who gets value out of them. "Ah-hah you stopped when this tool blew your whole leg off. If you'd s…
> "Ah-hah you stopped when this tool blew your whole leg off. Yes, because everyone who uses LLMs simply writes a prompt and then lets it write all of the code for them without thinkng! Vibecoding amirite!?
LLMs have certainly become extremely useful for Software Engineers, they're very convincing (and pleasers, too) and I'm still unsure about the future of our day-to-day job. But one thing that has scared me the most, is the trust of LLMs output to the general society. I believe that for software engineers it's really easy to see if it's being useful or not -- We can just run the code and see if the output is what we e…
The issue you're overlooking is the scarcity of experts. You're comparing the current situation to an alternative universe where every person can ask a doctor their questions 10 times a day and instantly get an accurate response. That is not the reality we're living in. Doctors barely give you 5 minutes even if you get an appointment days or weeks in advance. There is just nobody to ask. The alternatives today are 1)…
LLMs don't try to scam/fool you, LLM providers do.
Remember how Grok bragged that Musk had the “potential to drink piss better than any human in history” and was the “ultimate throat goat,” whose “blowjob prowess edges out” Donald Trump’s. Grok also posited that Musk was more physically fit than LeBron James, and that he would have been a better recipient of the 2016 porn industry award than porn star Riley Reid.
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"Skeptics" is also a loaded term; what does it actually mean? I find LLMs incredibly useful for various programming tasks (generating code, searching documentation, and yes with enough setup agents can accomplish some tasks), but I also don't believe they have actual intelligence, nor do I think they will eviscerate programming jobs, the same way that Python and JavaScript didn't eviscerate programming jobs despite l…
No, that doesn’t make you a skeptic in this context. The LLM skeptics claim LLM usefulness is an illusion. That the LLMs are a fad, and they produced more problems than they solve. They cite cherry picked announcements showing that LLM usage makes development slower or worse. They opened ChatGPT a couple times a few months ago, asked some questions, and then went “Aha! I knew it was bad!” when they encountered their…
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The issue you're overlooking is the scarcity of experts. You're comparing the current situation to an alternative universe where every person can ask a doctor their questions 10 times a day and instantly get an accurate response. That is not the reality we're living in. Doctors barely give you 5 minutes even if you get an appointment days or weeks in advance. There is just nobody to ask. The alternatives today are 1)…
Chronologically, our main sources of information have been: 1. People around us 2. TV and newspapers 3. Random people on the internet and their SEO-optimized web pages Books and experts have been less popular. LLMs are an improvement.
Unless somebody is using them to generate authoritative-sounding human-sounding text full of factoids and half-truths in support of a particular view.
Then it becomes about who can afford more LLMs and more IPs to look like individual users.