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Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
81–90 of 377 posts
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#82[flagged]
Amen. At my job right now there is an imminent threat from a team empowered to say "what if we asked an AI to just build X instead of having a team build and maintain it?" X is something where it's straightforward when N is below 50 but deeply complex when N is in the thousands, which for our team it is, and there is a huge risk that this team will get a demo with N=15 that attracts leadership attention and trying to…
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Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#83We've been visited by alien intelligence that is simultaneously fascinating and underwhelming.
The real issue isn't the technology itself, but our complete inability to predict its competence. Our intuition for what should be hard or easy simply shatters. It can display superhuman breadth of knowledge, yet fail with a confident absurdity that, in a person, we'd label as malicious or delusional.
The discourse is stuck because we're trying to map a familiar psychology onto a system that has none. We haven't just built a new tool; we've built a new kind of intellectual blindness for ourselves.
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#84I'm a retired programmer. I can't imagine trusting code generated by probablities for anything mission critical. If it were close and just needed minor tweaks I could understand that. But I don't have experience with it. My comment is mainly to say LLMs are amazing in areas that are not coding, like brainstorming, blue sky thinking, filling in research details, asking questions that make me reflect. I treat the LLM l…
There's one thing that I find LLM extremely good at: data science. Since the IO is well defined, you can easily verify that the output is correct. You can even ask it write tests for you given that you know certain properties of the data.
The problem is that the LLM needs context of what you are doing, contexts that you won't (or too lazy) to give in a chat with it ala ChatGPT. This is where Claude Code changes the game.
For example, you have PCAP file where each UDP packet contain multiple messages.
How do you filter the IP/port/protocol/time? Use LLM, check the output
How do you find the number of packets that have patterns A, AB, AAB, ABB.... Use LLM, check the output
How to create PCAPs that only contain those packets for testing? Use LLM, check the output
Etc etc
Since it can read your code, it is able to infer (because lets be honest, you work aint special) what you are trying to do at a much better rate. In any case, the fact that you can simply ask "Please write a unit test for all of the above functions" means that you can help it verify itself.
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#85I have to say I’m in the exact camp the author is complaining about. I’ve shipped non trivial greenfield products which I started back when it was only ChatGPT and it was shitty. I started using Claude with copying and pasting back and forth between the web chat and XCode. Then I discovered Cursor. It left me with a lot of annoying build errors, but my productivity was still at least 3x. Now that agents are better an…
Web dev CRUD in node?
Multi platform web+native consumer application with lots of moving parts and integration. I think to call it a CRUD app would be oversimplifying it.
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#86One thing I find frustrating is that management where I work has heard of 10x productivity gains. Some of those claims even come from early adopters at my work. But that sets expectation way too high. Partly it is due to Amdahl's law: I spend only a portion of my time coding, and far more time thinking and communicating with others that are customers of my code. Even if does make the coding 10x faster (and it doesn't…
The reports from analysis of open source projects are that its something in the range of 10%-15% productivity gains... so it sounds like you're spot on
That's about right for copilots. It's much higher for agentic coding.
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#87"It's crypto all over again" Crypto is a lifeline for me, as I cannot open a bank account in the country I live in, for reasons I can neither control nor fix. So I am happy if crypto is useless for you. For me and for millions like me, it is a matter of life and death. As for LLMs — once again, magic for some, reliable deterministic instrument for others (and also magic). Just classified and sorted a few hundreds of…
It's a valid use case in the sea of nonsensical hype where "you are a moron if you don't believe in some true meaning of crypto".
"You had to be there to believe it" https://x.com/0xbags/status/1940774543553146956
AI craze is currently going through a similar period: any criticism is brushed away as being presented by morons who know nothing
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#88I've developed the following methodology with LLM's and "agentic" (what a dumb fucking word...) workflows:
I will use an LLM/agent if
- I need to get a bunch of coding done and I keep getting booked into meetings. I'll give it a task on my todo list and see how it did when I get done with said meeting(s). Maybe 40% of the time it will have done something I'll keep or just need to do a few tweaks to. YMMV though.
- I need to write up a bunch of dumb boilerplatey code. I've got my rules tuned so that it generally gets this kind of thing right.
- I need a stupid one off script or a little application to help me with a specific problem and I don't care about code quality or maintainability.
- Stack overflow replacement.
- I need to do something annoying but well understood. An XML serializer in Java for example.
- Unit tests. I'm questioning if this ones a good idea though outside of maybe doing some of the setup work though. I find I generally come to understand my code better through the exercise of writing up tests. Sometimes you're in a hurry though so...
With any of the above, if it doesn't get me close to what I want within 2 or 3 tries, I just back off and do the work. I also avoid building things I don't fully understand. I'm not going to waste 3 hours to save 1 hour of coding.
I will not use an LLM if I need to do anything involving business logic and/or need to solve a novel problem. I also don't bother if I am working with novel tech. You'll get way more usable answers asking about Python then you will asking about Elm.
TL;DR - use your brain. Understand how this tech works, its limitations, AND its strengths.
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW the comment you are responding to was authored by AI.
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This is so chatGpt it hurts. Can we petition hn to ban ai generated comments? I see more Reddit communities actively putting a ban on ai, hn should follow if it can be done with the available resources.
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#90I'm a retired programmer. I can't imagine trusting code generated by probablities for anything mission critical. If it were close and just needed minor tweaks I could understand that. But I don't have experience with it. My comment is mainly to say LLMs are amazing in areas that are not coding, like brainstorming, blue sky thinking, filling in research details, asking questions that make me reflect. I treat the LLM l…
Well; I can't speak to your specific experience (current or past) but I'm telling you that while I'm skeptical as hell about EVERYTHING, it's blowing my expectations away in every conceivable way. I built something in less than 24h that I'm sure would have taken us MONTHS to just get off the ground, let alone to the polished version it's at right now. The most impressive thing is that it can do all of the things that…
See, your comment is a good example of what's going wrong. The OP specifically mentioned "mission critical things" - My interpretation of that would be things that are not allowed to break, because otherwise people might die, in the worst case - and you were talking about just SOMETHING that got "done" faster. No mention about anything critical.
Of course, I was playing around with claude code, too, and I was fascinated how fun it can be and yes, you can get stuff done. But I have absolutely no clue what the code is doing and if there are some nasty mistakes. So it kinda worked, but I would not use that for anything "mission critical" (whatever this means).