Ah, another one of these. I'm eager to learn how a "social climber" talks to a chatbot. I'm sure it's full of novel insight, unlike thousands of other articles like this one.
Dudes not a social climber. You are making a lot of assumptions.
How I write software with LLMs
331–340 of 544 posts
Re: How I write software with LLMs
#332I've found that spending most of my time on design before any code gets written makes the biggest difference.
The way I think about it: the model has a probability distribution over all possible implementations, shaped by its training data. Given a vague prompt, that distribution is wide and you're likely to get something generic. As you iterate on a design with the model (really just refining the context), the distribution narrows towards a subset of implementations. By the time the model writes code, you've constrained the space enough that most of what it produces is actually what you want.
Re: How I write software with LLMs
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A compiler uses rigorous modeling and testing to ensure that generated code is semantically equivalent. Here are the reported miscompilation bugs in GCC so far in 2026. The ones labeled "wrong-code". https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?chfield=%5BBug%20cr... I count 121 of them.
Compilers are some of the largest, most complex pieces of software out there. It should be no surprise that they come with bugs as all other large, complex pieces of software do.
This seems to apply easily to LLMs as language coprocessors that can output code. How long was it before people trusted compilers?
Re: How I write software with LLMs
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
That depends on how fast that change happens. If 45% of jobs evaporate in a a 5 year period, a complete societal collapse is the likely outcome.
Sounds like influencer nonsense to me. Touch grass. If the people are fed and housed, there's no collapse. And if the billionaire class lets them starve, they will finally go through some things just like the aristocracy in France once did. And I think even Peter Thiel is smarter than that. You can feed yourself for OTOH if what you're really talking about is the long-term collapse in our ludicrous carbon footprint w…
>Sounds like influencer nonsense to me. Touch grass.
I don't even know what this means.
The worst unemployment during the Weimar Republic was 25-30%. Unemployment in the Great Depression peaked at 25%.
So yeah if we get to 45% unemployment and those are the highest paying jobs on average then yeah it's gonna be bad. Then you add in second order effects where none of those people have the money to pay the other 55% who are still employed.
We might get to a UBI relatively quickly and peacefully. But I'm not betting on it.
>finally go through some things just like the aristocracy in France once did.
Yeah that's probably the most likely scenario, but that quickly devolved into a death and imprisonment for far more than the aristocrats and eventually ended with Napoleon trying to take over Europe and millions of deaths overall.
The world didn't literally end, but it was 40 years of war, famine, disease, and death, and not a lot of time to think about starting businesses with your laptop.
Re: How I write software with LLMs
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is that expert humans (the GCC developers) writing code (C++) that generates code (ASM) does not appear to be as deterministic as you seem to think it is.
Classic HN-ism. To focus on the semantics of a statement while ignoring the greater point in order to argue why someone is wrong.
I argued the greater point? Software code-generation is not deterministic, whether it's done by expert humans or by LLMs.
Re: How I write software with LLMs
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
Compilers are some of the largest, most complex pieces of software out there. It should be no surprise that they come with bugs as all other large, complex pieces of software do.
This seems to apply easily to LLMs as language coprocessors that can output code. How long was it before people trusted compilers?
If you don't understand the difference between something that rigorously translates one formal language to another one and something that will spit out a completely different piece of software with 0 lines of overlap based on a one word prompt change, I don't know what to tell you.
Re: How I write software with LLMs
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
Classic HN-ism. To focus on the semantics of a statement while ignoring the greater point in order to argue why someone is wrong.
I argued the greater point? Software code-generation is not deterministic, whether it's done by expert humans or by LLMs.
It has nothing to do with determinism. It's the difference between nearly perfectly but not quite perfectly translating between rigorously specified formal languages and translating an ambiguous natural language specification into a formal one.
The first is a purely mechanical process, the second is not and requires thousands of decisions that can go either way.
Re: How I write software with LLMs
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never said therapists were only for those in crisis; that is a misreading of my argument entirely. An LLM cannot parse the complexity of your situation. Period. It is literally incapable of doing that, because it does not have any idea what it is like to be human. Therapy is not an objective science; it is, in many ways, subjective, and the therapeutic relationship is by far the most important part. I am not saying…
As you said earlier, therapists are (thoroughly) trained on how to best handle situations. Just 'being human' (and thus empathizing) may not be such a big part of the job as you seem to believe. Training LLMs we can do. Though it might be important for the patient to believe that the therapist is empathizing, so that may give AI therapy an inherent disadvantage (depending on the patient's view of AI).
Socialization with other humans has so many benefits for happiness, mental health, and longevity. Conversely, interaction with LLMs often leads to AI psychosis and harms mental health. IMO, this is pretty strong evidence that interaction with LLMs is not similar to socialization with real humans, and a pretty good indicator that LLM “therapy” is significantly less helpful or even harmful than human-driven therapy.
Re: How I write software with LLMs
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems to apply easily to LLMs as language coprocessors that can output code. How long was it before people trusted compilers?
If you don't understand the difference between something that rigorously translates one formal language to another one and something that will spit out a completely different piece of software with 0 lines of overlap based on a one word prompt change, I don't know what to tell you.
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Re: How I write software with LLMs
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
I argued the greater point? Software code-generation is not deterministic, whether it's done by expert humans or by LLMs.
It has nothing to do with determinism. It's the difference between nearly perfectly but not quite perfectly translating between rigorously specified formal languages and translating an ambiguous natural language specification into a formal one. The first is a purely mechanical process, the second is not and requires thousands of decisions that can go either way.
And that’s no different than human developers