531–540 of 1001 posts
The problem with LLMs for code is that they are still way too slow and expensive to be generally practical for non-trivial software projects. I'm not saying that they aren't useful, they are excellent at filling out narrow code units that don't require a lot of context and can be quickly or automatically verified to be correct. You will save a lot of time using them this way. On the other hand, if you slip up and giv…
> Our jobs are just as much in tech’s line of fire as everybody else’s have been for the last 3 decades. We’re not East Coast dockworkers; we won’t stop progress on our own. If you really believe in the power of LLMs then it’s time to wake up. The writing is on the wall. Automation the workforce further into precarious jobs. The idea that tech workers can’t stop so-called “progress” is at best a dumb self-fulfilling…
I think you think this is going to help tech workers, but raising the cost of employing humans is only going to incentivize companies to adopt AI faster.
You should do the opposite, and tax AI use. Though that's probably rife with potential issues too. I think as umemployment increases we're going to have to make a bad decision somewhere... and I'm guessing taxing AI is the lesser evil.
To quote an excellent article from last week: > The AI has suggested a solution, but the added code is arguably useless or wrong. There is a huge decision space to consider, but the AI tool has picked one set of decisions, without any rationale for this decision. > [...] > Programming is about lots of decisions, large and small. Architecture decisions. Data validation decisions. Button color decisions. > Some decisio…
I work in finance, I have for almost 20 years now. There are things in finance you do once every 5 years, like setting up a data source like Bloomberg in a new programming language. Now you know from the last time you did it that it’s a pain, you need to use a very low level api, handling all the tiny messages yourself, building up the response as it comes from the source in unordered packets. It’s asynchronous, there is a message queue, and what I specialize in is maths.
Now I could spend hours reading documents, putting crap together, and finally come up with some half baked code that ignores most possible error points.
Or I could use ChatGPT and leverage the fact that hundreds of implementations of the same module exist out there. And make something that just works.
That is the first ever coding question I asked an LLM and it literally saved me days of trial and error for something where my added value is next to zero.
Similarly I use LLMs a lot for small tasks that are in fact fairly difficult, and that don’t add any value to the solution. Things like converting data structures in an efficient way using Python idioms, or JavaScript 2023 features, that there is no way I can keep up with.
I expected better from Thomas.
Fully agree with @tptacek here: > But AI is also incredibly — a word I use advisedly — important. It’s getting the same kind of attention that smart phones got in 2008, and not as much as the Internet got. That seems about right. However, I just don't think the AI coding part is that interesting or future-thinking. We're seeing so much more progress in semantic search, tool calling, general purpose uses, robotics, I…
Eh, I've worked on projects where because of un-revisited logging decisions made in the past, 1-10k error logs PER MINUTE were normal things to see. Finding the root cause of an issue often boiled down to multiple attempts at cleaning up logs to remove noise, cleaning up a tangentially related issues and waiting for it to happen again. More than one root cause was discovered by sheer happenstance of looking at the right subset of the logs at the right moment in time. I can absolutely buy that a system built for parsing large amounts of text and teasing patterns out of that found in minutes what humans could not track down over months.
> Some of the smartest people I know share a bone-deep belief that AI is a fad — the next iteration of NFT mania It's not that it's a fad. It's that the hype has gotten way ahead of the capability. CEOs laying off double digit percentages of their workforce because they believe that in 6 months AI will actually be able to do all those jobs and they want to get the message out to Wall St to juice the stock price today…
> Our jobs are just as much in tech’s line of fire as everybody else’s have been for the last 3 decades. We’re not East Coast dockworkers; we won’t stop progress on our own. If you really believe in the power of LLMs then it’s time to wake up. The writing is on the wall. Automation the workforce further into precarious jobs. The idea that tech workers can’t stop so-called “progress” is at best a dumb self-fulfilling…
I suspect a large proportion of claims made for productivity increases are skewed by the fact that the speed at which code is produced by AI makes you _feel_ productive, but these gains are largely replaced by the effort to understand, refactor, review and clean up the code. The high that you get when something "works" tends to stick more in your memory than the time when you had to spend a day cleaning up dead code,…
Seeing everything these days being about vibe coding, I feel a little old with my VIM setup and my LSP servers who I already thought were a nice productivity increase. The problems I have with the stuff relating to MCP is that the tech around it is developing so fast that it's hard for outsiders to catch up with what the best working setup is, for example. What would you do, for example, if you want to selfhost this?…
Everything about that is true but, and that's a big BUT, the code I write with LLM I can only iterate on it with an LLM. My mind doesn't develop a mental model of that code, I don't know where the relevant parts are, I can't quickly navigate through it and I have to reach the LLM for every small change. Which is why I like Copilot style editing more than agents as a working model but agents are just so much more powe…
If you use cursor, cursorrules can be a good way of doing this.