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Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

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Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#401

Post by AaronAPU »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #82
AaronAPU wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was forward when Newton discovered the beautiful simple determinism of physics. Was it going backwards when the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics emerged?

Two words: many-world interpretation. More seriously, this is not a fair comparison. Adding LLM output to your source code is not analogical to quantum physics; it is analogical to letting your 5 years old child transcribe the experimentally measured values without checking and accepting that many of them will be transcribed wrong.

The point is that determinism is an emergent phenomena and when you dig deeper it reduces to a ground which is nowhere near as stable. So as a heuristic, moving away from deterministic models isn’t necessarily the wrong direction.

Many worlds is, like you just said, an interpretation, and interestingly only one of many!

Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#402

Post by [deleted] »

dragonwriter wrote: post #265

> My former colleague Rebecca Parsons, has been saying for a long time that hallucinations aren’t a bug of LLMs, they are a feature. Indeed they are the feature. All an LLM does is produce hallucinations, it’s just that we find some of them useful. This is an example of my least favorite style of feigned insight: redefining a term into meaninglessness just so you can say something that sounds different while not actu…

[deleted]

Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#403

Post by sarchertech »

jama211 wrote: post #397
sarchertech wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you tracking that? Are you keeping a log, or are you just guessing? Do you have a mostly objective definition of intense work or are you just basing it on how you feel? Is your situation at work otherwise exactly the same, or have you gotten into a better groove with your manager? Are you working on exactly the same thing? Have you leveled up with some more experience? Have you learned the domain better? Is y…

_sigh_. Really dude? Just because people overestimate them on average doesn’t mean every person does. In fact, you should be well versed enough about the statistics to understand that it will be a spectrum that is highly dependent on both a persons role and how they use it. For any given new tool, a range of usefulness that depends on many factors will affect people differently as individuals. Just because a carpente…

> _sigh_. Really dude? Just because people overestimate them on average doesn’t mean every person does.

In the study, every single person overestimated time saved on nearly every single task they measured.

Some people saved time, some didn’t. Some saved more time, some less. But every single person overestimated time saved by a large margin.

I’m not saying you aren’t saving time, but it’s very unlikely that if you aren’t tracking things very carefully that you are overestimating.

Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#404

Post by computerex »

johnnienaked wrote: post #246
computerex wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company I work for uses LLM's for digital marketing, the company has over 100M ARR selling products build on top of LLM's with real life measurable impact as measured by KPIs.

Digital marketing is old. What about LLMs gives an advantage to digital marketing?

Review responses for example. Responding to reviews has shown to have positive impact on brands. Traditionally it’s been hard to respond to all the reviews for high volume locations. Not anymore.

That’s one example, there are dozens of processes that are now relatively easy to automate due to LLMs.

Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#405

Post by jama211 »

sarchertech wrote: post #403
jama211 wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

_sigh_. Really dude? Just because people overestimate them on average doesn’t mean every person does. In fact, you should be well versed enough about the statistics to understand that it will be a spectrum that is highly dependent on both a persons role and how they use it. For any given new tool, a range of usefulness that depends on many factors will affect people differently as individuals. Just because a carpente…

> _sigh_. Really dude? Just because people overestimate them on average doesn’t mean every person does. In the study, every single person overestimated time saved on nearly every single task they measured. Some people saved time, some didn’t. Some saved more time, some less. But every single person overestimated time saved by a large margin. I’m not saying you aren’t saving time, but it’s very unlikely that if you ar…

I’ll admit it’s possible my estimates are off a bit. What isn’t up for debate though is that it’s made a huge difference in my life and saved me a ton of time.

The fact that people overestimate its usefulness is somewhat of a “shrug” for me. So long as it _is_ making big differences, that’s still great whether people overestimate it or not.

Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#406

Post by scott_w »

aatd86 wrote: post #386
scott_w wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We absolutely do not "pick words that are statistically likely to get us what we want." We use words to try to articulate (to varying levels of success) a message that we want to communicate. The words, tone, speed, pitch, etc. all convey meaning. > And much of it is unconscious. That does not mean we're "picking words statistically likely to get us what we want," it means "our brains do a lot of work subconsciously.…

There is an objective. Solving an optimization problem. Or seen otherwise, given a matrix of predicates, it tries to compute some kind of final value that is as close to 1 as possible by applying the matrix to your input prompt. This is more or less what it does.

That’s not really an objective of the LLM otherwise we’d say Dijktra’s Algorithm has an objective. It doesn’t in the sense that a human has the objective to find the shortest path. The tools have a purpose but that’s imbued by humans, not intrinsic to them.

Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#407

Post by scott_w »

seunosewa wrote: post #394
scott_w wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We absolutely do not "pick words that are statistically likely to get us what we want." We use words to try to articulate (to varying levels of success) a message that we want to communicate. The words, tone, speed, pitch, etc. all convey meaning. > And much of it is unconscious. That does not mean we're "picking words statistically likely to get us what we want," it means "our brains do a lot of work subconsciously.…

The LLM objective is whatever they are trained to do, whether it's completing text, obeying instructions, coding, etc. In pre-training, we drop a lot of human-written text in them. This allows them to learn the rules of language and grammar and common language patterns. At this stage, the objective is to predict the next token that makes sense to human beings. Examples: The capital of US is ... Why did the chicken ..…

> The LLM objective is whatever they are trained to do, whether it's completing text, obeying instructions, coding, etc.

That’s not an objective of the LLM, it’s an objective of the human creating, training and using it. The LLM is a tool to achieve that objective.

Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#408

Post by FromTheFirstIn »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #249
FromTheFirstIn wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny how nothing seems to be AI’s fault.

That's because it's software / an application. I don't blame my editor for broken code either. You can't put blame on software itself, it just does what it's programmed to do. But also, blameless culture is IMO important in software development. If a bug ends up in production, whose fault is it? The developer that wrote the code? The LLM that generated it? The reviewer that approved it? The product owner that decided…

Blame is purely social and purely human. “Blaming” a tool or process and root causing are functionally identical. Misattributing an outage to a single failure is certainly one way to fail to fix a process. Failing to identify faulty tools/ faulty applications is another way.

I was being flippant to say it’s never AI’s fault, but due to board/C-Suite pressure it’s harder than ever to point out the ways that AI makes processes more complex, harder to reason about, stochastic, and expensive. So we end up with problems that have to be attributed to something not AI.

Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#409

Post by cess11 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #374
cess11 wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point, though awkwardly stated, is that there is no difference between 'hallucination' output and any other output from these compressed databases, just like there is no such difference between two queries on a typical RDBMS. It's a good point.

> The point, though awkwardly stated, is that there is no difference between 'hallucination' output and any other output from these compressed databases, But there is, except when you redefine "hallucination" so there isn't. And, when you retain the definition where there is a difference, you find there are techniques by which you can reduce hallucinations, which is important and useful. Changing the definition to el…

Unless you are willing to use the same term when you botch an SQL query and don't get the result you want, don't use it at all.

Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#410

Post by hnbad »

jama211 wrote: post #274
bko wrote: post #16

> Certainly if we ever ask a hallucination engine for a numeric answer, we should ask it at least three times, so we get some sense of the variation. This works on people as well! Cops do this when interrogating. You tell the same story three times, sometimes backwards. It's hard to keep track of everything if you're lying or you don't recall clearly so you can get a sense of confidence. Also works on interviews, ask…

It works to confuse people and make them sound like they’re lying when they’re not, too. Gotta be careful with this.

If you're trying to hit quotas rather than find out the truth, that sounds like a feature.
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