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I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

nemo.foo

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Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#51

Post by bigstrat2003 »

mordymoop wrote: post #41

I am frankly tired of seeing this kind of post on HN. I feel like the population of programmers is bifurcating into those who are committed to mastering these tools, learning to work around their limitations and working to leverage their strengths… and those who are committed to complaining about how they aren’t already perfect Culture Ship Minds. We get it. They’re not superintelligent at everything yet. They couldn…

Nobody is complaining that LLMs aren't perfect Culture minds. People disagree with the premise that they are useful tools given their current capabilities. Your portrayal of those with whom you disagree is such a strawman that it might as well be set to a soy-vs-wojak meme.

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#52

Post by cherry_tree »

powerset wrote: post #13

I've had a similar experience, shipping new features at incredible speed, then waste a ton of time going down the wrong track trying to debug something because the LLM gave me a confidently wrong solution.

Seems like LLMs would be well suited for test driven development. A human writes tests and the LLM can generate code passing all tests; ending with a solution that meets the humans expectations.

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#53

Post by jdietrich »

pieix wrote: post #7

> AI isn’t a co-pilot; it’s a junior dev faking competence. Trust it at your own risk. This is a good take that tracks with my (heavy) usage of LLMs for coding. Leveraging productive-but-often-misguided junior devs is a skill every dev should actively cultivate!

It is quite remarkable that we are already at the stage where saying "this AI is about as competent as an inexperienced college graduate" constitutes criticism. It is entirely proper for people to be engaging sceptically with LLMs at their current level of capability, but I think we should also keep in mind the astonishingly rapid growth rate in their performance. LLMs were a toy two years ago, they're now a useful if flawed colleague, but what can we expect two years from now?

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#54

Post by antigeox »

mordymoop wrote: post #46
antigeox wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am frankly tired of seeing this kind of post on HN. You've been here since 2016 and this is the kind of posting that finally gets to you? How in the world have you avoided all the shitposts in the last decade? What is your secret?

It’s the fact that it’s the same thing over and over. The 100th case of “Well I had a bad experience using LLM for coding!” is not interesting.

[dead]

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#55

Post by suddenlybananas »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #32
KronisLV wrote: post #16

In my experience LLMs will help you with things that have been solved thousands of times before and are just a matter of finding some easily researched solution. The very moment when you try to go off the beaten path and do something unconventional or stuff that most people won't have written a lot about, it gets more tricky. Just consider how many people will know how to configure some middleware in a Node.js projec…

> vs most things related to hardware or low level work. counter point: https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/pull/11453 > This PR provides a big jump in speed for WASM by leveraging SIMD instructions for qX_K_q8_K and qX_0_q8_0 dot product functions. > Surprisingly, 99% of the code in this PR is written by DeekSeek-R1. The only thing I do is to develop tests and write prompts (with some trials and errors)

at a certain point though, one wonders if you can trust people to accurately report how much is written by an LLM. (not even implying bad faith, but if you're constantly re-reading, selecting and re-combining snippets written by LLMs, it's not really "written" by LLMs in the same way that's implied).

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#56

Post by drpossum »

cherry_tree wrote: post #52
powerset wrote: post #13

I've had a similar experience, shipping new features at incredible speed, then waste a ton of time going down the wrong track trying to debug something because the LLM gave me a confidently wrong solution.

Seems like LLMs would be well suited for test driven development. A human writes tests and the LLM can generate code passing all tests; ending with a solution that meets the humans expectations.

I disagree because you're only considering the "get code to make the test pass". Refactoring, refining, and simplifying is critical and I've yet to see this applied well. (I've also yet to see the former applied usably well either despite "write tests generate code" being an early direction.)

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#57

Post by rglover »

> AI is great for generating ideas or drafting code, but it doesn’t understand. It’s like giving a junior developer a chainsaw instead of a scalpel—it might finish the job, but you’ll spend twice as long cleaning up the mess.

For anything remotely complex, this is dead on. I use various models daily to help with coding, and more often than not, I have to just DIY it or start brand new chats (because the original context got overwhelmed and started hallucinating).

This is why it's incredibly frustrating to see VCs and AI founders straight-up gaslighting people about what this stuff can (or will) do. They're trying to push this as a "work killer," but really, it's going to be some version of the opposite: a mess creator that necessitates human intervention.

Where we're at is amazing, but we've got a loooong way to go before we can be on hover crafts sipping sodas Wall-E style.

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#58

Post by pfannkuchen »

potsandpans wrote: post #10

Counterexample: Ive been able to complete more side projects in the last month leveraging llms than i have ever in my life. One of which I believe to have potential as a viable product, and another which involved complicated rust `no_std` and linker setup for compiling rust code onto bare metal RISCV from scratch. I think the key to being successful here is to realize that you're still at the wheel as an engineer. Th…

I’ve found LLMs to basically be a more fluent but also more lossy way of interfacing with stack overflow and tutorials.

If a topic is well represented in those places, then you will get your answer quicker and it can be to some extent shaped to your use case.

If the topic is not well represented there, then you will get circular nonsense.

You can say “obviously, that’s the training data”, and that’s true, and I do find it obvious personally, but the reaction to LLMs as some kind of second coming does not align with this reality.

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#59

Post by suddenlybananas »

mordymoop wrote: post #41

I am frankly tired of seeing this kind of post on HN. I feel like the population of programmers is bifurcating into those who are committed to mastering these tools, learning to work around their limitations and working to leverage their strengths… and those who are committed to complaining about how they aren’t already perfect Culture Ship Minds. We get it. They’re not superintelligent at everything yet. They couldn…

>The thing that pushes me over the line into ranting territory is that computer programmers, of all people, should know that computers do what you tell them to.

are you claiming LLMs function like computer program instructions? like they clearly don't operate like that at all.

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#60

Post by acedTrex »

jdietrich wrote: post #53
pieix wrote: post #7

> AI isn’t a co-pilot; it’s a junior dev faking competence. Trust it at your own risk. This is a good take that tracks with my (heavy) usage of LLMs for coding. Leveraging productive-but-often-misguided junior devs is a skill every dev should actively cultivate!

It is quite remarkable that we are already at the stage where saying "this AI is about as competent as an inexperienced college graduate" constitutes criticism . It is entirely proper for people to be engaging sceptically with LLMs at their current level of capability, but I think we should also keep in mind the astonishingly rapid growth rate in their performance. LLMs were a toy two years ago, they're now a useful…

I mean 2 years ago they were at about the same place, theres been very little practical gain from gpt4 in my opinion. No matter the model the fundamental failure cases have remained the same.
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