61–70 of 201 posts
If you're interested in Fred Brooks's "No Silver Bullet," I also explored it in the context of LLMs: https://smartmic.bearblog.dev/no-ai-silver-bullet/
Let's actually not talk about LLMs. I honestly couldn't force myself to finish yet another blog post about how "we're not yet sure what impact LLMs will have on society" or whatever beleaguered point the author was attempting to make. "Some random person's take on LLMs" was maybe interesting in 2024. Today it is not even remotely interesting. There are a gazillion more interesting things happening today that ought to…
I'm confused. If you don't want to talk about LLMs then why didn't you just flag the post and move on? Submit something interesting, upvote and comment on interesting posts, instead of feeding the engagement on this thread. It sounds like you actually do want to talk about how much you don't want other people to talk about LLMs.
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Funny, I have the complete opposite impression after using claude code for a while. I would never trust it to design anything. Never again. But it can code pretty well given a very tight and limited scope.
To clarify, AI should not do the design itself. You develop the design in conversation with AI. I come in knowing what I need to build and at least one idea or more of how it should be done. I present the problem, constraints, potential solutions, and ask for criticisms and alternatives. I can keep it as broad as possible or I can get more granular like struct layouts, api endpoints, etc. I go back and forth until th…
Never understood that argument. Because there’s two steps in design. Finding a good solution (discussing prior art, tradeoffs,…) and then nailing the technical side of that solution (data structures, formula,…). Is it the former, the latter or both?
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I'm confused. If you don't want to talk about LLMs then why didn't you just flag the post and move on? Submit something interesting, upvote and comment on interesting posts, instead of feeding the engagement on this thread. It sounds like you actually do want to talk about how much you don't want other people to talk about LLMs.
You're not supposed to flag a post for something like that. Ideally you downvote and move on if you feel that strongly about it. Flagging is meant to be reserved for stuff that breaks the rules or guidelines.
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I'm excited to read the first cogent piece making this point that doesn't devolve to gatekeeping, a detached and vaguely hostile professional software developer telling people with a newfound capability to solve practical problems for themselves with new software that they don't or shouldn't want the thing that they want, because whatever it is they come up with won't be "fit for purpose" until blessed by the guild,…
The unfortunate reality is that a lot of software does have hard constraints. And a lot of these constraints are "gatekept" by regulators, compliance policies, insurance companies, etc. If someone slops together a medical record system, and leaks a bunch of PHI, there will be consequences, even in the US. Similarly, good luck getting insurance against cyber attacks without a SOC2 audit or equivalent. I've had this co…
I think you're misunderstanding the paradigm shift completely -- AI does not just generate code N(x) more quickly. It thinks N(x) faster, it researches N(x) faster, it tests N(x) faster. There are hundreds of tasks that you'll find engineers are offloading to AI every day. The major hurdle right now is actually pivoting LLMs from just generating code: integrating those tasks into workflows. This is why tool-use and a…
> , it tests N(x) faster. It does? You mean "it tests itself faster", which is not really a test now, is it?
Even without writing code LLMs are a huge help, analyzing code, doing code reviews, documenting code, etc... Even without writing a line of "code" LLM hugely speed up development and take away the annoying/boring work.
It's not terribly hard to check either. You can do some spot checks with cost dashboards in AWS, Datadog, etc and see if the numbers line up
Can also tell Claude "go right size the environment, pull p95 usage metrics for the last 3 months" and a couple hours later, a bunch of money is saved. Much easier than manually pulling trend data and also easier than installing/configuring/managing tools that do it for you.
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LLMs became much better at both reviewing and writing code over the last 12-18 months. Did you? The current state of the art is irrelevant. Only the first couple of time derivatives matter.
> Did you? I would say I got better at both of those over the last 12-18 months. Are your skills static?
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I didn't get the sense that the author is nervous. What I tend to see are people who are nervous that going all-in on LLM workflows might not have the payoff they are expecting, and are becoming increasingly fanatical as a result. Just one more harness bro. Just one more agentic swarm. Please bro, just one more Claude Max subscription. Please bro.
You say this as though performance has not followed a very clear and extremely rapid improvement in a startlingly short amount of time. You’re definitely right that people adopt agentic workflows and are disappointed or worse, but the point is the disappointment has already reduced substantially and will continue to do so. We know this because we know the scaling laws, and also because learning theory has been around…
I'll give you the coding harnesses themselves are better because that was a new product category with a lot of low-hanging fruit, but have the models actually improved in a way that isn't just benchmaxxing? I'd argue the models seem to be regressing. Even the most AI-pilled people at my company have all complained that Opus 4.7 is a dud. Anecdotally, GPT 5.5 seems decent, but it's rumored to be a 10T parameter model, isn't noticeably better than 5.4 or 5.3, is insanely expensive to use, and seems to be experiencing model collapse since the system prompt has to beg the thing to not talk about goblins and raccoons.
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I'm excited to read the first cogent piece making this point that doesn't devolve to gatekeeping, a detached and vaguely hostile professional software developer telling people with a newfound capability to solve practical problems for themselves with new software that they don't or shouldn't want the thing that they want, because whatever it is they come up with won't be "fit for purpose" until blessed by the guild,…
The unfortunate reality is that a lot of software does have hard constraints. And a lot of these constraints are "gatekept" by regulators, compliance policies, insurance companies, etc. If someone slops together a medical record system, and leaks a bunch of PHI, there will be consequences, even in the US. Similarly, good luck getting insurance against cyber attacks without a SOC2 audit or equivalent. I've had this co…
It feels like a dunk to write that. But I genuinely do think there's so much motivated reasoning on both sides of this issue, and one signal of that is when people tip their hands like this.