Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

lewiscampbell.tech

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 295 posts

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#61

Post by habinero »

iwontberude wrote: post #33
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…

The most prolific coders are also more competent than average. Their proliferations are what have trained these models. These models are trained on incredibly successful projects written by masters of their fields. This is usually where I find the most pushback is that the most competent SWEs see it as theft and also useless to them since they have already spend years honing skills to work relentlessly and efficientl…

> The most prolific coders are also more competent than average

This is absolutely not true lol, as anyone who's worked with a fabled 10X engineer will tell you. It's like saying the best civil engineer is the one that builds the most bridges.

The best code looks real boring.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#62

Post by j2kun »

ymyms wrote: post #24
budududuroiu wrote: post #2

I somewhat agree with this poster. However, I think the unfortunate reality of programming for money is that a mediocre programmer that pumps out millions of lines of slop that seems to drive the business forward and manages to hide disastrous bugs until after the contract / promotion cycle is over will get further ahead than the more competent programmer that delivers better, less buggy, less spaghetti code.

I mean, isn't driving the business forward really what matters (outside of academia, open source, and other such endeavors). We live in a hyper competitive market. All else being equal, if company A can produce "millions of lines of slop", constantly living on the knife-edge of disaster but not falling over it, they will beat company B that artificially slows themselves down. Up until the point company A implodes, bu…

Sounds like you should go bundle sub-prime mortgages into some complex securities, if you like intentionally living on the knife's edge of disaster.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#63

Post by frizlab »

lbrito wrote: post #47

I think it goes further than this. Some people - some developers, even - do not _like_ programming computers. In fact, many hate it. Those people welcome the LLM agent stuff because it delivers the end product without going through the necessary pain (from their pov) of programming.

I, for one, love programming (and passionately hate AI).

Note I also think AI is bad for philosophical/ethical reasons.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#64

Post by zephen »

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?"

Humans are tribal, which has both benefits and costs.

In technology, the historical benefits of evangelizing your favorite technology might just be that it becomes more popular and better supported.

Even though LLMs may or may not follow the same path, if you can get your fellow man on-board, then you'll have a shared frame of reference, and someone to talk through different usage scenarios.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#67

Post by lijok »

j2kun wrote: post #52
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?

To change my mind I’ll be satisfied with a thorough description of the domain and ideally a theory on why it does poorly in that domain. But we’re not talking LLMs here, we’re talking opus4.5 specifically.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#68

Post by frizlab »

lijok wrote: post #59
WolfeReader wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

How many lives have been saved by AI? How many lives have been lost because of it?

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#69

Post by morshu9001 »

wild_egg wrote: post #54
simonw wrote: post #16

"LLM evangelists - are you willing to admit that you just might not be that good at programming computers?" No.

I do wonder if C programmers ever asked that of Python devs back in the day.

This is still a thing today. There have been multiple times I oneshot some project that leadership had been waiting on some team forever to finish, and 90% of it was them refusing to touch a "noob" lang like Python or JS.
Post reply on HN