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Using LLMs at Oxide

rfd.shared.oxide.computer

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Re: Using LLMs at Oxide

#81

Post by aatd86 »

pests wrote: post #25
thundergolfer wrote: post #4

A measured, comprehensive, and sensible take. Not surprising from Bryan. This was a nice line: > it’s just embarrassing — it’s as if the writer is walking around with their intellectual fly open. I think Oxide didn't include this in the RFD because they exclusively hire senior engineers, but in an organization that contains junior engineers I'd add something specific to help junior engineers understand how they shoul…

> That junior engineer possibly hasn't programmed without the tantalizing, even desperately tempting option to be assisted by an LLM. Years ago I had to spend many months building nothing but Models (as in MVC) for a huge data import / ingest the company I worked on was rewriting. It was just messy enough that it couldn't be automated. I almost lost my mind from the dull monotony and started even having attendance is…

The issue is that it might look good but an LLM often inserts weird mistakes. Or ellipses. Or overindex on the training data. If someone is not careful it is easy to completely wreck the codebase by piling on seemingly innocuous commits. So far I have developed a good sense for when I need to push the llm to avoid sloppy code. It is all in the details.

But a junior engineer would never find/anticipate those issues.

I am a bit concerned. Because the kind of software I am making, a llm would never prompt on its own. A junior cannot make it, it requires research and programming experience that they do not have. But I know that if I were a junior today, I would probably try to use llms as much as possible and would probably know less programming over time.

So it seems to me that we are likely to have worse software over time. Perhaps a boon for senior engineers but how do we train junior devs in that environment? Force them to build slowly, without llms? Is it aligned with business incentives?

Do we create APIs expecting the code to be generated by LLMs or written by hand? Because the impact of verbosity is not necessarily the same. LLMs don't get tired as fast as humans.

Re: Using LLMs at Oxide

#83

Post by WhyOhWhyQ »

StarterPro wrote: post #59

Nobody has yet to explain how an LLM can be better than a well paid human expert.

A well paid human expert can find lots of uses of LLMs. I'm still not convinced that humans will ever be totally replaced, and what work will look like is human experts using LLMs as another tool in the toolbox, just like how an engineer would have used a slide rule or mechanical calculator back in the day. The kind of work they're good at doesn't cover the full range of necessary engineering tasks, but they do open up new avenues. For instance, yesterday I was able to get the basic gist of three solutions for a pretty complex task in about an hour. The result of that was me seeing that two of them were unlikely to work for what I'm doing, so that now I can invest actual effort in the third solution.

Re: Using LLMs at Oxide

#84

Post by christophilus »

frankest wrote: post #74
zackerydev wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember in the very first class I ever took on Web Design the teacher spent an entire semester teaching "first principles" of HTML, CSS and JavaScript by writing it in Notepad. It was only then did she introduce us to the glory that was Adobe Dreamweaver, which (obviously) increased our productivity tenfold.

DreamWeaver absolutely destroyed the code with all kinds of tags and unnecessary stuff. Especially if you used the visual editor. It was fun for brainstorming but plain notepad with clean understandable code was far far better (and with the browser compatibility issues the only option if you were going to production).

After 25 or so years doing this, I think there are two kinds of developers: craftsmen and practical “does it get the job done” types. I’m the former. The latter seem to be what makes the world go round.

Re: Using LLMs at Oxide

#85

Post by panzi »

girvo wrote: post #54
zackerydev wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember in the very first class I ever took on Web Design the teacher spent an entire semester teaching "first principles" of HTML, CSS and JavaScript by writing it in Notepad. It was only then did she introduce us to the glory that was Adobe Dreamweaver, which (obviously) increased our productivity tenfold.

I miss Dreamweaver. Combining it with Fireworks was a crazy productive combo for me back in the mid 00’s! My first PHP scripts and games were written using nothing more than Notepad too funnily enough

Back in the early 00s I brought gvim.exe on a floppy disk to school because I refused to write XSLT, HTML, CSS, etc without auto-indent or syntax highlighting.

Re: Using LLMs at Oxide

#86

Post by christophilus »

zx8080 wrote: post #72
girvo wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watching my juniors constantly fight the nonsense auto completion suggestions their LLM editor of choice put in front of them, or worse watching them accept it and proceed to get entirely lost in the sauce, I’m not entirely convinced that the autocompletion part of it is the best one. Tools like Claude code with ask/plan mode seem to be better in my experience, though I absolutely do wonder about the lack of typing c…

> but I swear it built the comprehension I have today. For interns/junior engineers, the choice is: comprehension VS career. And I won't be surprised if most of them will go with career now, and comprehension.. well thanks maybe tomorrow (or never).

I don’t think that’s the dichotomy. I’ve been in charge of hiring at a few companies, and comprehension is what I look for 10 times out of 10.

Re: Using LLMs at Oxide

#87

Post by forrestthewoods »

nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote: post #75
forrestthewoods wrote: post #43

> When debugging a vexing problem one has little to lose by using an LLM — but perhaps also little to gain. This probably doesn't give them enough credit. If you can feed an LLM a list of crash dumps it can do a remarkable job producing both analyses and fixes. And I don't mean just for super obvious crashes. I was most impressed with a deadlock where numerous engineers and tried and failed to understand exactly how…

LLMs are good where there is a lot of detail but the answer to be found is simple. This is sort of the opposite of vibe coding, but LLMs are OK at that too.

> LLMs are good where there is a lot of detail but the answer to be found is simple.

Oooo I like that. Will try and remember that one.

Amusingly, my experience is that the longer an issue takes me to debug the simpler and dumber the fix is. It's tragic really.

Re: Using LLMs at Oxide

#88

Post by Barrin92 »

keyle wrote: post #44
thundergolfer wrote: post #4

A measured, comprehensive, and sensible take. Not surprising from Bryan. This was a nice line: > it’s just embarrassing — it’s as if the writer is walking around with their intellectual fly open. I think Oxide didn't include this in the RFD because they exclusively hire senior engineers, but in an organization that contains junior engineers I'd add something specific to help junior engineers understand how they shoul…

> That junior engineer possibly hasn't programmed without the tantalizing, even desperately tempting option to be assisted by an LLM. This gives me somewhat of a knee jerk reaction. When I started programming professionally in the 90s, the internet came of age and I remember being told "in my days, we had books and we remembered things" which of course is hilarious because today you can't possibly retain ALL the know…

>"in my days, we had books and we remembered things" which of course is hilarious

it isn't hilarious, it's true. My father (now in his 60s) who came from a blue collar background with very little education taught himself programming by manually copying and editing software out of magazines, like a lot of people his age.

I teach students now who have access to all the information in the world but a lot of them are quite literally so scatterbrained and heedless anything that isn't catered to them they can't process. Not having working focus and memory is like having muscle atrophy of the mind, you just turn into a vegetable. Professors across disciplines have seen decline in student abilities, and for several decades now, not just due to LLMs.

Re: Using LLMs at Oxide

#89

Post by keyle »

girvo wrote: post #55
keyle wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, although LLMs definitely qualify as enabling developers compared to of today. The Internet itself is full of distractions. My younger self spent a crazy amount of time on IRC. So it's not different than spending time on say, Discord today. LLMs have pretty much a direct relationship with Google. The quality of the response has much to do with the quality of the prompt. If anything, it's the overwhelming natur…

Watching my juniors constantly fight the nonsense auto completion suggestions their LLM editor of choice put in front of them, or worse watching them accept it and proceed to get entirely lost in the sauce, I’m not entirely convinced that the autocompletion part of it is the best one. Tools like Claude code with ask/plan mode seem to be better in my experience, though I absolutely do wonder about the lack of typing c…

> Watching my juniors constantly fight the nonsense auto completion suggestions their LLM editor of choice put in front of them, or worse watching them accept it and proceed to get entirely lost in the sauce, I’m not entirely convinced that the autocompletion part of it is the best one.

That's not an LLM problem, they'd do the same thing 10 years ago with stack overflow: argue about which answer is best, or trust the answer blindly.

Re: Using LLMs at Oxide

#90

Post by fragmede »

christophilus wrote: post #84
frankest wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DreamWeaver absolutely destroyed the code with all kinds of tags and unnecessary stuff. Especially if you used the visual editor. It was fun for brainstorming but plain notepad with clean understandable code was far far better (and with the browser compatibility issues the only option if you were going to production).

After 25 or so years doing this, I think there are two kinds of developers: craftsmen and practical “does it get the job done” types. I’m the former. The latter seem to be what makes the world go round.

It takes both.
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