401–410 of 456 posts
Why was the title truncated and its casing changed? The original title is > Your intellectual fly is open which makes more sense. Your title made think that a software project was open sourced or something.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's just Claude working on the code, so the details matter less If you're not billed for usage, anyway. Otherwise, for the other 99% of folks, that attitude is of course a pit trap that captures code bases and makes them maintainable only through the providers -- presumably one or few -- with a rich enough model to keep up with the growing mess. Preserving a code base that's legible, organized, and fundamentally m…
It does not concern me. Prices are very competitive and today's SOTA is next to free in half a year. Whether code is maintainable without AI becomes less and less important.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What use is that? I'm not being facetious, I'd really rather like to know. People are terrible at writing. Near universally bad. Even good writers have drafts and editors. There is a constant refrain here that somehow short messages are more valuable than longer ones. But that assumes it's understandable. Lots of short content is, frankly, awful because the writer cannot put themselves in the position of the reader…
To turn bad short writing into good long writing you must necessarily change the content of the writing, not just the shape.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many programmers don't write long text; their way of getting a deep understanding of a problem domain is to build something, is to write code - in a process very similar to writing a long piece of text - it has the same reflection and externalization of thought. The widespread introduction of LLM code generation is very destructive to that. Perhaps LLMs can be brought to support human cognition in the same way writin…
Miss me with this. I write way more now than a year ago. Mainly because I have to explain myself to the LLM. I'm fairly certain I write 50x more than before simply because before my weekend was spent gaming and watching anime. Now I'm having fun building things.
I'm a bit skeptical of arguments of the form, "You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing." My reasoning is: If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK? Surely some people are willing to bite that bullet and say yes. But for most people, my guess is that the answer will remain no. Thus,…
That’s not the argument. The argument is “LLM’s tend to write the same way all the time regardless of who prompted it.” You can't call it “your writing” if you’re using the same tool millions of others are using that boils your idea down to the same reduction as everyone else’s.
Use an LLM to assist? Cool, go ahead. Prompt, ctrl-c, ctrl-v? Go fuck yourself. I can’t be expected to put more effort into figuring out your take than you out into communicating your take to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no subtext to bigstrat2003's argument, other than "I'm wrong, and I don't care." If you give persistent, repeatable instructions to a computer, you are programming it. If you disagree, you are gatekeeping. It's that simple. The most popular programming languages in 2030 will, in fact, be English and Mandarin. Deal with it and get over it. ---------------- Edit, to bcrosby95: Look up the etymology of the word…
LLMs do not produce repeatable results, by their nature. Two people can give the exact same prompt to the exact same LLM and get different results. It's not a straightforward 1 + 1 always equals 2 process. This is like telling someone else to code something for you. You relinquish control of all the details. Calling it gatekeeping is just laughable. That's like saying it's gatekeeping to say that the painter painted…
(I’ve heard about some GPU compute nuance meaning that even without randomness injected they still wouldn’t quite be deterministic, but that’s also not core to their nature)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
(I work at Anthropic) I agree. I use an LLM to write my code, but I do all of my writing by hand, since it helps me think. It reminds me of the transition over the last year from AI-assisted coding to AI doing all the coding. At first the code output wasn't good enough, and humans read and iterated on the code all day, so the details of the source code mattered. Now, the code is largely high quality and it meets a la…
> You and the AI agree on an outline or other high level representation, then the LLM expands it into a document. What a horrible, cold, inhumane world that would be.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
(I work at Anthropic) I agree. I use an LLM to write my code, but I do all of my writing by hand, since it helps me think. It reminds me of the transition over the last year from AI-assisted coding to AI doing all the coding. At first the code output wasn't good enough, and humans read and iterated on the code all day, so the details of the source code mattered. Now, the code is largely high quality and it meets a la…
>(I work at Anthropic) I agree. I use an LLM to write my code, but I do all of my writing by hand, since it helps me think. You get pushback for this? I saw an anthropic job post recently, and they wanted you specifically to have claude muck with your resume before applying.
These are all important points and I love the analogy. But there is an even bigger issue with having LLMs write for you: Writing is thinking. Thinking and deciding. There have been many times when I start out writing something substantial - could be an email, a blog post, a software design document, anything - when my own views substantially changed during the writing process. Writing forces you to serialize your tho…
(I work at Anthropic) I agree. I use an LLM to write my code, but I do all of my writing by hand, since it helps me think. It reminds me of the transition over the last year from AI-assisted coding to AI doing all the coding. At first the code output wasn't good enough, and humans read and iterated on the code all day, so the details of the source code mattered. Now, the code is largely high quality and it meets a la…
You can already do this. And you can build pipelines where AI performs fact checks on what it writes, with citations a human can reference as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Miss me with this. I write way more now than a year ago. Mainly because I have to explain myself to the LLM. I'm fairly certain I write 50x more than before simply because before my weekend was spent gaming and watching anime. Now I'm having fun building things.
LLM prompts definitely don’t feel like “writing” to me in the way that writing a blog post (or even an HN comment) does or writing code used to. There is nothing to work out, you don’t really need to think. You’re _typing_ sure, but I don’t think it counts as writing maybe because the text that you write is thrown away.