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I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

nemo.foo

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Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#91

Post by tkgally »

jdietrich wrote: post #71
acedTrex wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean 2 years ago they were at about the same place, theres been very little practical gain from gpt4 in my opinion. No matter the model the fundamental failure cases have remained the same.

Reasoning models like o1 or QwQ absolutely destroy 4o in coding, let alone GPT-4 circa 2022.

Minor correction: GPT-4 was announced on March 14, 2023, less than two years ago. I don’t remember how much LLMs had been discussed as coding assistants before then, but it was Greg Brockman’s demonstration of using it to write code that first brought that capability to my attention:

https://www.youtube.com/live/outcGtbnMuQ?si=oTMA02ns_BJDRS4c...

Advances since then have indeed been remarkable.

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#92

Post by EarthMephit »

potsandpans wrote: post #10

Counterexample: Ive been able to complete more side projects in the last month leveraging llms than i have ever in my life. One of which I believe to have potential as a viable product, and another which involved complicated rust `no_std` and linker setup for compiling rust code onto bare metal RISCV from scratch. I think the key to being successful here is to realize that you're still at the wheel as an engineer. Th…

I find that LLMs are almost comically bad at projects that have a hardware component like RaspberryPi or Pico, or Ardunio.

I think that its because often the libraries you use are niche or have a a few similar versions, the LLM really commonly hallucinated solutions and would continually suggest that library X did have that capability. I think because often in hardware projects you often hit a point where you can't do something or you need to modify a library, but the LLM tries to be "helpful" and it makes up a solution.

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#94

Post by tippytippytango »

What I learned is you can’t outsource expertise to an LLM, after many similar experiences to OP. Don’t ask it for advice, ask it to teach you so you can make decisions like this on your own. Preferably ground questions with excerpts from human made documents. It seems to make less mistakes when explaining things, and those mistakes are more noticeable when they do happen.

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#95

Post by Fourier864 »

FWIW, I fed in the same problematic prompt to all the current ChatGPT models and even the legacy/mini models enumerated a bunch of pitfalls and considerations. I wonder why/how it managed to tell the author everything was perfect? A weird one-off occurrence?

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#96

Post by XenophileJKO »

maybesomaybenot wrote: post #82
potsandpans wrote: post #10

Counterexample: Ive been able to complete more side projects in the last month leveraging llms than i have ever in my life. One of which I believe to have potential as a viable product, and another which involved complicated rust `no_std` and linker setup for compiling rust code onto bare metal RISCV from scratch. I think the key to being successful here is to realize that you're still at the wheel as an engineer. Th…

Claude is like having my own college professor. I've learned more in the past month with Claude then I learned in the past year. I can ask questions repeatedly and get clarification as fine as a need it. Granted, Claude has limits, but its a game-changer. > I think the key to being successful here is to realize that you're still at the wheel as an engineer. The llm is there to rapidly synthesize the universe of infor…

I would add though, that they can be very good at combining known concepts. Which can create a non-trivial set of "new knowledge".

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#97

Post by maybesomaybenot »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #96
maybesomaybenot wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude is like having my own college professor. I've learned more in the past month with Claude then I learned in the past year. I can ask questions repeatedly and get clarification as fine as a need it. Granted, Claude has limits, but its a game-changer. > I think the key to being successful here is to realize that you're still at the wheel as an engineer. The llm is there to rapidly synthesize the universe of infor…

I would add though, that they can be very good at combining known concepts. Which can create a non-trivial set of "new knowledge".

Creating new knowledge from current knowledge is called "synthesis" (ancient term, nothing modern). I'm hoping you're right, it would be amazing.

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#99

Post by theodric »

> "From her perspective, I order doordash and turn into a degen who is unfit to father. From my perspective, I get to enjoy my favorite place and just tinker or play games or do whatever. These are the days I get to play mad scientist and feel most like myself."

Most demeaning and depressingly toxic thing I've read today...

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#100

Post by neilv »

> TLDR - AI isn’t a co-pilot; it’s a junior dev faking competence. Trust it at your own risk.

A junior dev faking competence while plagiarizing like crazy.

The plagiarizing part is why the junior dev from hell might not get fired: laundering open source copyrights can have beancounter alignment.

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