> assurance that the model will not use the document to train future iterations of itself.
believing this in 2025 is really fascinating. this is like believing Meta won’t use info they (i)legally collected about you to serve you ads
Using LLMs at Oxide
51–60 of 284 posts
Re: Using LLMs at Oxide
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That junior engineer possibly hasn't programmed without the tantalizing, even desperately tempting option to be assisted by an LLM. This gives me somewhat of a knee jerk reaction. When I started programming professionally in the 90s, the internet came of age and I remember being told "in my days, we had books and we remembered things" which of course is hilarious because today you can't possibly retain ALL the know…
It is not clear though, which tools enable and which tools inhibit your development at the beginning of your journey.
Agreed, although LLMs definitely qualify as enabling developers compared to of today.
The Internet itself is full of distractions. My younger self spent a crazy amount of time on IRC. So it's not different than spending time on say, Discord today.
LLMs have pretty much a direct relationship with Google. The quality of the response has much to do with the quality of the prompt. If anything, it's the overwhelming nature of LLMs that might be the problem. Back in the day, if you had, say a library access, the problem was knowing what to look for. Discoverability with LLMs is exponential.
As for LLM as auto-complete, there is an argument to be made that typing a lot reinforces knowledge in the human brain like writing. This is getting lost, but with productivity gains.
Re: Using LLMs at Oxide
#53As usual with Oxide's RFDs, I found myself vigorously head-nodding while reading. Somewhat rarely, I found a part that I found myself disagreeing with: > Unlike prose, however (which really should be handed in a polished form to an LLM to maximize the LLM’s efficacy), LLMs can be quite effective writing code de novo. Don't the same arguments against using LLMs to write one's prose also apply to code? Was this structu…
Writing is an expression of an individual, while code is a tool used to solve a problem or achieve a purpose. The more examples of different types of problems being solved in similar ways present in an LLM's dataset, the better it gets at solving problems. Generally speaking, if it's a solution that works well, it gets used a lot, so "good solutions" become well represented in the dataset. Human expression, however,…
I argue that the intent of an engineer is contained coherently across the code of a project. I have yet to get an LLM to pick up on the deeper idioms present in a codebase that help constrain the overall solution towards these more particular patterns. I’m not talking about syntax or style, either. I’m talking about e.g. semantic connections within an object graph, understanding what sort of things belong in the data layer based on how it is intended to be read/written, etc. Even when I point it at a file and say, “Use the patterns you see there, with these small differences and a different target type,” I find that LLMs struggle. Until they can clear that hurdle without requiring me to restructure my entire engineering org they will remain as fancy code completion suggestions, hobby project accelerators, and not much else.
Re: Using LLMs at Oxide
#54A measured, comprehensive, and sensible take. Not surprising from Bryan. This was a nice line: > it’s just embarrassing — it’s as if the writer is walking around with their intellectual fly open. I think Oxide didn't include this in the RFD because they exclusively hire senior engineers, but in an organization that contains junior engineers I'd add something specific to help junior engineers understand how they shoul…
I remember in the very first class I ever took on Web Design the teacher spent an entire semester teaching "first principles" of HTML, CSS and JavaScript by writing it in Notepad. It was only then did she introduce us to the glory that was Adobe Dreamweaver, which (obviously) increased our productivity tenfold.
I miss Dreamweaver. Combining it with Fireworks was a crazy productive combo for me back in the mid 00’s!
My first PHP scripts and games were written using nothing more than Notepad too funnily enough
Re: Using LLMs at Oxide
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is not clear though, which tools enable and which tools inhibit your development at the beginning of your journey.
Agreed, although LLMs definitely qualify as enabling developers compared to of today. The Internet itself is full of distractions. My younger self spent a crazy amount of time on IRC. So it's not different than spending time on say, Discord today. LLMs have pretty much a direct relationship with Google. The quality of the response has much to do with the quality of the prompt. If anything, it's the overwhelming natur…
Watching my juniors constantly fight the nonsense auto completion suggestions their LLM editor of choice put in front of them, or worse watching them accept it and proceed to get entirely lost in the sauce, I’m not entirely convinced that the autocompletion part of it is the best one.
Tools like Claude code with ask/plan mode seem to be better in my experience, though I absolutely do wonder about the lack of typing causing a lack of memory formation
A rule I set myself a long time ago was to never copy paste code from stack overflow or similar websites. I always typed it out again. Slower, but I swear it built the comprehension I have today.
Re: Using LLMs at Oxide
#56I wonder if they would be willing to publish the "LLMs at Oxide" advice, linked in the OP [1], but currently publicly inaccessible.
[1] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/meta/tree/master/engineerin...
Re: Using LLMs at Oxide
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on what your prose is for. If it's for documentation, then prose which matches the expected tone and form of other similar docs would be clichéd in this perspective. I think this is a really good use of LLMs - making docs consistent across a large library / codebase.
I have been testing agentic coding with Claude 4.5 Opus and the problem is that it's too good at documentation and test cases. It's thorough in a way that it goes out of scope, so I have to edit it down to increase the signal-to-noise.
The “change capture”/straight jacket style tests LLMs like to output drive me nuts. But humans write those all the time too so I shouldn’t be that surprised either!
Re: Using LLMs at Oxide
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the same quality and quantity output, if the cost of using LLMs + the cost of careful oversight is less than the cost of not using LLMs then the rational choice is to use them. Naturally this doesn’t factor in things like human obsolescence, motivation and self-worth.
It seems like this would be a really interesting field to research. Does AI assisted coding result in fewer bugs, or more bugs, vs an unassisted human? I've been thinking about this as I do AoC with Copilot enabled. It's been nice for those "hmm how do I do that in $LANGUAGE again?" moments, but it's also wrote some nice looking snippets that don't do quite what I want it to. And many cases of "hmmm... that would wor…
I'm not sure about research, but I've used LLMs for a few things here at Oxide with (what I hope is) appropriate judgment.
I'm currently trying out using Opus 4.5 to take care of a gnarly code reorganization that would take a human most of a week to do -- I spent a day writing a spec (by hand, with some editing advice from Claude Code), having it reviewed as a document for humans by humans, and feeding it into Opus 4.5 on some test cases. It seems to work well. The spec is, of course, in the form of an RFD, which I hope to make public soon.
I like to think of the spec is basically an extremely advanced sed script described in ~1000 English words.
Re: Using LLMs at Oxide
#59Nobody has yet to explain how an LLM can be better than a well paid human expert.
Re: Using LLMs at Oxide
#60Hmmm, I'm a bit confused of their conclusions (encouraging use) given some of the really damning caveats they point out. A tool they themselves determine to need such careful oversight probably just shouldn't be used near prod at all.
There’s a lot of code that doesn’t hit prod.