Earlier quoted context omitted.
ITT: People who think LLMs are AGI and can produce output that the LLM has come up with out of thin air or by doing research. Go speak with someone who is actually an expert in this field how LLMs work and why the training data is so important. Im amazed that people in the CS industry seem to talk like they know everything about a tech after using it but never even writing a line of code for an LLM. Our indsutry is d…
> LLM has come up with out of thin air People don't think that. Especially not the commentor you replied to. You're human-hallucinating. People think LLM are trained on raw documents and code besides StackOverflow. Which is very likely true.
Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me
351–360 of 464 posts
Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
ITT: People who think LLMs are AGI and can produce output that the LLM has come up with out of thin air or by doing research. Go speak with someone who is actually an expert in this field how LLMs work and why the training data is so important. Im amazed that people in the CS industry seem to talk like they know everything about a tech after using it but never even writing a line of code for an LLM. Our indsutry is d…
This isn't about being AGI or not, and it's not "out of thin air". Modern implementations of LLMs can "do research" by performing searches (whose results are fed into the context), or in many code editors/plugins, the editor will index the project codebase/docs and feed relevant parts into the context. My guess is they either were using the LLM from a code editor, or one of the many LLMs that do web searches automati…
Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me
#353> What I think happens is that these people save time because they only spot review the AI generated code, or skip the review phase altogether, which as I said above would be a deal breaker for me. In my experience it's that they dump the code into a pull request and expect me to review it. So GenAI is great if someone else is doing the real work.
I don't understand this, the buck stops with the PR submitter. If they get repeated feedback about their PRs that are just passed-through AI slop, then the team lead or whatever should give them a stern talking to.
One of the most bizarre experiences I have had over this past year was dealing with a developer who would screen share a ChatGPT session where they were trying to generate a test payload with a given schema, getting something that didn't pass schema validation, and then immediately telling me that there must be a bug in the validator (from Apache foundation). I was truly out of words.
Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me
#354> It takes me at least the same amount of time to review code not written by me than it would take me to write the code myself, if not more. As someone who uses Claude Code heavily, this is spot on. LLMs are great, but I find the more I cede control to them, the longer it takes to actually ship the code. I’ve found that the main benefit for me so far is the reduction of RSI symptoms, whereas the actual time savings a…
There's an implied assumption here that code you write yourself doesn't need to be reviewed from a context different from the author's. There's an old expression: "code as if your work will be read by a psychopath who knows where you live" followed by the joke "they know where you live because it is future you". Generative AI coding just forces the mindset you should have had all along: start with acceptance criteria…
Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is absolutely true, and AI cannot think, reason, comprehend anything it has not seen before. The amazing thing about LLMs is that we still don’t know how (or why) they work! Yes, they’re magic mirrors that regurgitate the corpus of human knowledge. But as it turns out, most human knowledge is already regurgitation (see: the patent system). Novelty is rare, and LLMs have an incredible ability to pattern match and…
> The amazing thing about LLMs is that we still don’t know how (or why) they work! You may want to take a course in machine learning and read a few papers.
LLMs are insanely complex systems and their emergent behavior is not explained by the algorithm alone.
Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me
#356Where I find it genuinely useful is in extremely low-value tasks, like localisation constants for the same thing in other languages, without having to tediously run that through an outside translator. I think that mostly goes in the "fancy inline search" category.
Otherwise, I went back from Cursor to normal VS Code, and mostly have Copilot autocompletions off these days because they're such a noisy distraction and break my thought process. Sometimes they add something of value, sometimes not, but I'd rather not have to confront that question with every keystroke. That's not "10x" at all.
Yes, I've tried the more "agentic" workflow and got down with Claude Code for a while. What I found is that its changes are so invasive and chaotic--and better prompts don't really prevent this--that it has the same implications for maintainability and ownership referred to above. For instance, I have a UIKit-based web application to which I recently asked Claude Code to add dark theme options, and it rather brainlessly injected custom styles into dozens of components and otherwise went to town, in a classic "optimise for maximum paperclip production" kind of way. I spent a lot more time un-F'ing what it did throughout the code base than I would have spent adding the functionality myself in an appropriately conservative fashion. Sure, a better prompt would probably have helped, but that would have required knowing what chaos it was going to wreak in advance, as to ask it to refrain from that as part of the prompt. The possibility of this happening with every prompt is not only daunting, but a rabbit hole of cognitive load that distracts from real work.
I will concede it does a lot better--occasionally, very impressively--with small and narrow tasks, but those tasks at which it most excels are so small that the efficiency benefit of formulating the prompt and reviewing the output is generally doubtful.
There are those who say these tools are just in their infancy, AGI is just around the corner, etc. As far as I can tell from observing the pace of progress in this area (which is undeniably impressive in strictly relative terms), this is hype and overextrapolation. There are some fairly obvious limits to their training and inference, and any programmer would be wise to keep their head down, ignore the hype, use these tools for what they're good at and studiously avoid venturing into "fundamentally new ways of working".
Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is absolutely true, and AI cannot think, reason, comprehend anything it has not seen before. The amazing thing about LLMs is that we still don’t know how (or why) they work! Yes, they’re magic mirrors that regurgitate the corpus of human knowledge. But as it turns out, most human knowledge is already regurgitation (see: the patent system). Novelty is rare, and LLMs have an incredible ability to pattern match and…
> The amazing thing about LLMs is that we still don’t know how (or why) they work! You may want to take a course in machine learning and read a few papers.
Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it a skill worth learning though? How much does the output quality improve? How transferable is it across models and tools of today, and of the future? From what I see of AI programming tools today, I highly doubt the skills developed are going to transfer to tools we'll see even a year from now.
Regarding using AI tools for programming it is not a one-for-all choice. You can pick a grunt work task such as "Tag every such and such terraform resource with a uuid" and let it do just that. Nothing to do with quality but everything to do with a simple task and not having to bother with the tedium.
Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me
#359> In recent times I had to learn Rust, Go, TypeScript, WASM, Java and C# for various projects, and I wouldn't delegate this learning effort to an AI, even if it saved me time. Either/or fallacy. There exist a varied set of ways to engage with the technology. You can read reference material and ask for summarization. You can use language models to challenge your own understanding. Are people really this clueless? (Yes…
Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
ChatGPT and Gemini literally only know the answer because they read StackOverflow. Stack Overflow only exists because they have visitors. What do you think will happen when everyone is using the AI tools to answer their questions? We'll be back in the world of Encyclopedias, in which central authorities spent large amounts of money manually collecting information and publishing it. And then they spent a good amount o…
The idea that LLMs can only spew out text they've been trained on is a fundamental miss-understanding of how modern backprop training algorithms work. A lot of work goes into refining training algorithms to preventing overfitting of the training data. Generalisation is something that neural nets are pretty damn good at, and given the complexity of modern LLMs the idea that they cannot generalise the fairly basic logi…
Models work across programming languages because it turned out programming languages and API are much more similar than one could have expected.