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The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

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Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#71

Post by fzeroracer »

raincole wrote: post #34

> Video games stand out as one market where consumers have pushed back effectively No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written. If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well. It's specifically worded like this: > content such as artwork,…

> Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times. I don't know how one can spins this as a bad thing

Do you ever ask why you're writing the same thing over and over again? That's literally the foundational piece of being an engineer; understanding when you're reinventing the wheel when there's a perfectly good wheel nearby.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#72

Post by shinycode »

simianwords wrote: post #29

What the author and many others find hard to digest is that LLMs are surfacing the reality that most of our work is a small bit of novelty against boiler plate redundant code. Most of what we do is programming is some small novel idea at high level and repeatable boilerplate at low level. A fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions? LLMs are especially good at fuzz…

No I don’t agree. Just because it’s « boilerplate », that does not mean it’s worthless or doesn’t carry novelty. There is « boilerplate » in building many things, house, cars etc where to add real new stuff it’s « always the same base » but you have to nail that base and there is real value in it. With craft and deep knowledge and pride. Every project is different and not everything can be made from a generic out-of-shelf product

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#73

Post by gampleman »

simianwords wrote: post #29

What the author and many others find hard to digest is that LLMs are surfacing the reality that most of our work is a small bit of novelty against boiler plate redundant code. Most of what we do is programming is some small novel idea at high level and repeatable boilerplate at low level. A fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions? LLMs are especially good at fuzz…

Actually I think this is one of the more tragic outcomes of the LLM revolution: it was already hard to get funding for ergonomic advances in programming before. Funding a new PL ecosystem or major library was no mean feat. Despite that, there were a number of promising advances that could have significantly raised the level of abstraction.

However, LLMs destroy this economic incentive utterly. It now seems most productive to code in fairly low level TypeScript and let the machines spew tons of garbage code for you.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#74

Post by Jooror »

vntok wrote: post #67
tovej wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An LLM has never saved me time. It has always produced something that doesn't quite work, has the rough shape of what I want, but somehow always gets all the details wrong. I can type up what I want much faster and be sure it's at least solving the right problem, even if it may have bugs. There are also tools to generate boilerplate that work much much better than LLMs. And they're deterministic.

> An LLM has never saved me time. It has always produced something that doesn't quite work, has the rough shape of what I want, but somehow always gets all the details wrong. This reads like a skill issue on your end, in part at least in the prompting side. It does take time to reach a point where you can prompt an LLM sufficiently well to get a correct answer in one shot, developing an intuitive understanding of wha…

I’m curious about how you landed “git gud; prompt better” and not “maybe the domain I work in is a better fit for LLM code”. Or, to be a bit less generous, consider the possibility that the code you’re generating is boilerplate, marshaling, and/or API calls. A facade of perceived complexity over something that’s as complex as a filter-map or two.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#75

Post by hwers »

Its unfortunate that there’s mode collapse around what the consensus “best way” to use these things are. It’s too bad we didn’t have a period where these things were great teachers but didn’t attempt to write code because in my opinion the ideal way to use them is not by agents mass producing sloppy buggy disorganized code, but to teach you things way faster than the old alternatives, rubber duck, and occasionally write snippets of functions when your brain is too tired or it’s throwaway cli code or some api you’re not familiar with.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#76

Post by flohofwoe »

theshrike79 wrote: post #11

> This sort of protectionism is also seen in e.g. controlled-appelation foods like artisanal cheese or cured ham. These require not just traditional manufacturing methods and high-quality ingredients from farm to table, but also a specific geographic origin. Maybe "Artisanal Coding" will be a thing in the future?

The 'Handmade Network' is essentially this (in a good way though) - and long before LLMs got good enough for code-generation - instead as a counter philosophy to the soulless "enterprise software development" where a feature that could be implemented in 10 lines of code is wrapped in 1000 lines of "industry-best-practices" boilerplate.

Programming via LLMs is just the logical conclusion to this niche of industrialized software development which favours quantity over quality. It's basically replacing human bots which translate specs written by architecture astronauts into code without having to think on their own.

And good riddance to that type of 'spec-in-code-out' type of programming, it should never have existed in the first place. Let the architecture astronauts go wild with LLMs implementing their ideas without having to bother human programmers who actually value their craft ;)

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#77

Post by dntrshnthngjxct »

tovej wrote: post #53
raincole wrote: post #34

> Video games stand out as one market where consumers have pushed back effectively No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written. If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well. It's specifically worded like this: > content such as artwork,…

An LLM has never saved me time. It has always produced something that doesn't quite work, has the rough shape of what I want, but somehow always gets all the details wrong. I can type up what I want much faster and be sure it's at least solving the right problem, even if it may have bugs. There are also tools to generate boilerplate that work much much better than LLMs. And they're deterministic.

If you do not plan out the architecture soundly, no amount of prompting will fix it if it is bad. I know this because my "handmade" project made with backward compatibility and horrible architecture keeps being badly fixed by LLM while the ones that rely on preemptive planning of the features and architecture, end up working right.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#78

Post by anilgulecha »

emsign wrote: post #27
anilgulecha wrote: post #21

>If you ask me, no court should have ever rendered a judgement on whether AI output as a category is legal or copyrightable, because none of it is sourced. The judgement simply cannot be made, and AI output should be treated like a forgery unless and until proven otherwise. Guilty until proven innocent will satisfy the author's LLM-specific point of contention, but it is hardly a good principle.

You are missing the point of the author. He literally said no court should have rendered a judgement, that's the exact opposite of guilty until proven innocent. Guilty means a court has made a judgement. He is proposing to not make a judgement at all. If the AI company CLAIMS something they have to prove it. Like they do in science or something. Any claim is treated as such, a claim. The trick is to not even claim an…

sure, no "court" should render it, but then

>AI output should be treated like a forgery

Who's passing this judgement this? Author? Civil society?

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#79

Post by richardjam73 »

GaryBluto wrote: post #59

I think it says a lot about this opinion piece that the people agreeing with it are posting short comments saying "So true!" and "Great!" whilst the people criticizing it are writing paragraphs of well-spoken criticism.

Verbosity doesn't equate to correctness.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#80

Post by simianwords »

heavyset_go wrote: post #69
simianwords wrote: post #29

What the author and many others find hard to digest is that LLMs are surfacing the reality that most of our work is a small bit of novelty against boiler plate redundant code. Most of what we do is programming is some small novel idea at high level and repeatable boilerplate at low level. A fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions? LLMs are especially good at fuzz…

Books are just simple theses and themes with hundreds of pages of boilerplate

lot of people are saying this
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