LLMs are like power tools. You still need to understand the architecture, do the right measurements, and apply the right screw to the right spot.
A look at Cloudflare's AI-coded OAuth library
71–80 of 170 posts
Re: A look at Cloudflare's AI-coded OAuth library
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But if you're willing to learn, this is rocket fuel. LLMs will tell you 1 or 2 lies for each 20 facts. Its a hard way to learn. They cant even get their urls right...
> LLMs will tell you 1 or 2 lies for each 20 facts. Its a hard way to learn. That was my experience when growing up with school also, except you got punished one way or another for speaking up/trying to correct the teacher. If I speak up with the LLM they either explain why what they said is true, or corrects themselves, 0 emotions involved. > They cant even get their urls right... Famously never happens with humans.
You are ignoring the fact that the types of mistakes or lies are of a different nature.
If you are in class, and you incorrectly argue, there is a mistake in an explanation of Derivatives or Physics, but you are the one in error, your Teacher hopefully, will not say: "Oh, I am sorry you are absolutely correct. Thank you for your advice.."
Re: A look at Cloudflare's AI-coded OAuth library
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLMs make learning new material easier than ever. I use them a lot and I am learning new things at an insane pace in different domains. The maximalists and skeptics both are confusing the debate by setting up this straw man that people will be delegating to LLMs blindly. The idea that someone clueless about OAuth should develop an OAuth lib with LLM support without learning a lot about the topic is... Just wrong. Don…
> But if you're willing to learn, this is rocket fuel. LLMs will tell you 1 or 2 lies for each 20 facts. Its a hard way to learn. They cant even get their urls right...
And you are saying human teachers or online materials won't lie to you once or twice for every 20 facts? no matter how small. Did you do any comparison?
Re: A look at Cloudflare's AI-coded OAuth library
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
how do you gain anything useful from a sycophantic tutor that agrees with everything you say, having being trained to behave as if the sun shines out of your rear end? making mistakes is how we learn, and if they are never pointed out...
It's a bit of a skill. Gaining an incorrect understanding of some topic is a risk anyway you learn, and I don't feel it's greater with LLMs than many of the alternatives. Sure, having access to legit experts who can tutor you privately on a range of topics would be better, but that's not realistic. What I find is that if I need to explore some new domain within a field I'm broadly familiar with, just thinking through…
this "logic" applied across society will lead to our ruin
Re: A look at Cloudflare's AI-coded OAuth library
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's going to be like the pre-internet dark ages, but worse. Back then you only didn't find the information. Now, you find unlimited information, but it is all wrong.
I don't know, this sounds a lot like in the late 90s when we heard a lot about how anyone could put information on the internet and that you shouldn't trust what you read online. Well it turns out you can manage just fine. You shouldn't blindly trust anything. Not what you read, not what people say. Using LLMs effectively is a skill too, and that does involve deciding when and how to verify information.
The difference is in scale. Back then, only humans were sometimes putting up false information, and other humans had a chance to correct it. Now, machines are writing infinitely more garbage than humans can ever read. Search engines like Google are already effectively unusable.
Re: A look at Cloudflare's AI-coded OAuth library
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But if you're willing to learn, this is rocket fuel. LLMs will tell you 1 or 2 lies for each 20 facts. Its a hard way to learn. They cant even get their urls right...
And you are saying human teachers or online materials won't lie to you once or twice for every 20 facts? no matter how small. Did you do any comparison?
You are missing the point. See my comment to @diggan in this thread. LLMs lie in a different way.
Re: A look at Cloudflare's AI-coded OAuth library
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> LLMs will tell you 1 or 2 lies for each 20 facts. Its a hard way to learn. That was my experience when growing up with school also, except you got punished one way or another for speaking up/trying to correct the teacher. If I speak up with the LLM they either explain why what they said is true, or corrects themselves, 0 emotions involved. > They cant even get their urls right... Famously never happens with humans.
You are ignoring the fact that the types of mistakes or lies are of a different nature. If you are in class, and you incorrectly argue, there is a mistake in an explanation of Derivatives or Physics, but you are the one in error, your Teacher hopefully, will not say: "Oh, I am sorry you are absolutely correct. Thank you for your advice.."
Yeah, no of course if I'm wrong I don't expect the teacher to agree with me, what kind of argument is that? I thought it was clear, but the base premise of my previous comment is that the teacher is incorrect and refuse corrections...
Re: A look at Cloudflare's AI-coded OAuth library
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a few years hopefully the AI reviewers will be far more reliable than even the best human experts. This is generally how competency progresses in AI... For example, at one point a human + computer would have been the strongest combo in chess, now you'd be insane to allow a human to critic a chess bot because they're so unlikely to add value, and statistically a human in the loop would be far more likely to introdu…
My prediction is that for that to happen we’ll need to figure out a way to measure software quality in the way we can measure a chess game, so that we can use synthetic data to continue improving the models. I don’t think we are anywhere close to doing that.
Not really... If you're an average company you're not concerned about producing perfect software, but optimising for some balance between cost and quality. At some point companies via capitalist forces will naturally realise that it's more productive to not have humans in the loop.
A good analogy might be how machines gradually replaced textile workers in the 19th century. Were the machines better? Or was there a was to quantitatively measure the quality of their output? No. But at the end of the day companies which embraced the technology were more productive than those who didn't, and the quality didn't decrease enough (if it did at all) that customers would no longer do business with them – so these companies won out.
The same will naturally happen in software over the next few years. You'd be an moron to hire a human expert for $200,000 to critic a cybersecurity optimised model which costs maybe a 100th of the cost of employing a human... And this would likely be true even if we assume the human will catch the odd thing the model wouldn't because there's no such thing as perfect security – it's always a trade off between cost and acceptable risk.
Bookmark this and come back in a few years. I made similar predictions when ChatGPT first came out that within a few years agents would be picking up tickets and raising PRs. Everyone said LLMs were just stochastic parrots and this would not happen, well now it has and increasingly companies are writing more and more code with AI. At my company it's a little over 50% at the mo, but this is increasing every month.
Re: A look at Cloudflare's AI-coded OAuth library
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
My question is kind of in this brave new world, where do the domain experts come from? Whose going to know this stuff?
LLMs make learning new material easier than ever. I use them a lot and I am learning new things at an insane pace in different domains. The maximalists and skeptics both are confusing the debate by setting up this straw man that people will be delegating to LLMs blindly. The idea that someone clueless about OAuth should develop an OAuth lib with LLM support without learning a lot about the topic is... Just wrong. Don…
>> LLMs make learning new material easier than ever.
feels like there's a logical flaw here, when the issue is that LLMs are presenting the wrong information or missing it all together. The person trying to learn from it will experience Donald Rumsfield's "unknown unknowns".
I would not be surprised if we experience an even more dramatic "Cobol Moment" a generation from now, but unlike that one thankfully I won't be around to experience it.
Re: A look at Cloudflare's AI-coded OAuth library
#80I just finished writing a Kafka consumer to migrate data with heavy AI help. This was basically best case a scenario for AI. It’s throw away greenfield code in a language I know pretty well (go) but haven’t used daily in a decade. For complicated reasons the whole database is coming through on 1 topic, so I’m doing some fairly complicated parallelization to squeeze out enough performance. I’d say overall the AI was c…
Yeah, the AI-generated bugs are really insidious. I also pushed a couple subtle bugs in some multi-threaded code I had AI write, because I didn't think it through enough. Reviews and tests don't replace the level of scrutiny something gets when it's hand-written. For now, you have to be really careful with what you let AI write, and make sure any bugs will be low impact since there will probably be more than usual.