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The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

lewiscampbell.tech

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Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#51

Post by woah »

The anti-LLM side seems much more insecure. Pro-LLM influencers are sometimes corny, but it's sort of like any other influencer, they are incentivized to make everything sound exciting to get clicks. Nobody was complaining about 3d printer influencers raving about how printing replacement dishwasher parts was going to change everything.

LLMs have also become kind of a political issue, except only the "anti" side even really cares about it. Given that using and prompting them is very much a garbage in/garbage out scenario, people let their social and political biases cloud their usage, and instead of helping it succeed, they try to collect "gotcha" moments, which doesn't reflect the workflow of someone using an LLM productively.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#52

Post by j2kun »

lijok wrote: post #28

> You see a lot of accomplished, prominent developers claiming they are more productive without it. Demonstrably impossible if you’re actually properly trying to use them in non-esoteric domains. I challenge anyone to very honestly showcase a non-esoteric domain in which opus4.5 does not make even the most experienced developer more productive.

How would one set this sort of test up? I surely have example domains where LLMs routinely do poorly (for example, custom bazel rules and workspaces), but what would constitute a "showcase" here?

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#53

Post by arnabgho »

"LLM evangelists - are you willing to admit that you just might not be that good at programming computers?"

The people who were the best at something don't necessarily be the best at a new paradigm. Unlearning some principles and learning new ones might be painful exercise for some masters.

Military history has shown that the masters of the new wave are not necessarily the masters of the previous wave we see the rise and downfall of several civilizations from Roman to Greek for being too sure of their old methods and old military equipments and strategy.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#56

Post by sharkjacobs »

bashtoni wrote: post #27

The tech industry seems to attract people that feel personally attacked when someone else makes different choices that they do. "Why are you using Go? Rust is best! You should be using that!" "Don't use AWS CDK, use Terraform! Don't you know anything?"

It's not just the tech industry, this is a fundamental feature of humans as social animals.

https://knowyourmeme.com/videos/433740-just-coffee-black

> want to feel normal, to walk around and see that most other people made the same choice they made

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#57

Post by Arch-TK »

wild_egg wrote: post #41
rudedogg wrote: post #3

Hearing people on tech twitter say that LLMs always produce better code than they do by hand was pretty enlightening for me. LLMs can produce better code for languages and domains I’m not proficient in, at a much faster rate, but damn it’s rare I look at LLM output and don’t spot something I’d do measurably better. These things are average text generation machines. Yes you can improve the output quality by writing a…

After a certain experience level though, I think most of us get to the point of knowing what that difference in quality actually matters. Some seniors love to bikeshed PRs all day because they can do it better but generally that activity has zero actual value. Sometimes it matters, often it doesn't. Stop with the "I could do this better by hand" and ask "is it worth the extra 4 hours to do this by hand, or is this ac…

"actually good enough to meet the goals?"

There's "okay for now" and then there's "this is so crap that if we set our bar this low we'll be knee deep in tech debt in a month".

A lot of LLM output in the specific areas _I_ work in is firmly in that latter category and many times just doesn't work.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#58

Post by hu3 »

This is also bad evangelism, but on opposite side.

Just because LLMs don't work for you outside of vibe-coding, doesn't mean it's the same for everyone.

> LLM evangelists - are you willing to admit that you just might not be that good at programming computers?

Productive usage of LLMs in large scale projects become viable with excellent engineering (tests, patterns, documentation, clean code) so perhaps that question should also be asked to yourself.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#59

Post by lijok »

WolfeReader wrote: post #32
reb wrote: post #10

How much longer until we get to just... let the results speak for themselves and stop relitigating an open question with no clear answer. We're well past ad nauseum now. Let's talk about anything else.

Given how much energy LLMs use, I'd greatly prefer not to let the results speak for themselves.

How many lives would AI have to save for you to say the energy cost is worth it?

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#60

Post by chadcmulligan »

I have been through this before (wherever/whenever the money seems to flow) - databases are bad, you should use couchbase etc, I was a db expert, the people advocating weren't, but they were very loud. The many, many evangelistic web development alternatives that come and go, all very loud. Now the latest - LLM's, like couchbase et al they have their place but the evangelists are not having any of it.

I work a lot with doctors (writing software for them), I am very envious of their system of specialisation, eg this dude is such and such a specialist - he knows about it, listen to him. IT seems to be anyone who talks the loudest has a podium, separating the wheat from the chaff is difficult. One day we will have a system of qualifications I hope, but it seems a long way off.

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