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Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

martinfowler.com

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Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#91

Post by anthem2025 »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #68

"Hallucinations aren’t a bug of LLMs, they are a feature. Indeed they are the feature". I used to avidly read all his stuff, and I remember 20ish years ago he decided to rename Inversion of Control to Dependency Injection. In doing so, and his accompany blog, he showed he didn't actually understand it at a deep level (and hence his poor renaming). This feels similar. I know what he's trying to say, but he's just wron…

No, it’s just an attempt to pretend wrong outputs are some special case when really they aren’t. They aren’t imagine something that doesn’t exist they are just running the same process they do for everything else and it just didn’t work.

If you disagree then I would ask what exactly is the “specific behaviour” you’re talking about?

Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#92

Post by sudhirb »

> One of the consequences of this is that we should always consider asking the LLM the same question more than once, perhaps with some variation in the wording. Then we can compare answers, indeed perhaps ask the LLM to compare answers for us. The difference in the answers can be as useful as the answers themselves.

There was once a coding agent which achieved SOTA performance on SWE Bench Verified by "just" running the agent 5 times on each instance, scoring each attempt and picking the attempt with the highest score: https://aide.dev/blog/sota-bitter-lesson

Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#93

Post by vkou »

nicwolff wrote: post #81

> I’ve often heard, with decent reason, an LLM compared to a junior colleague. No, they're like an extremely experienced and knowledgeable senior colleague – who drinks heavily on the job. Overconfident, forgetful, sloppy, easily distracted. But you can hire so many of them, so cheaply, and they don't get mad when you fire them!

Experienced and knowledgeable and they also believe in the technical equivalent of flat-Earthism in many, many non-trivial corners.

And if you push back on that insanity, they'll smile and nod and agree with you and in the next sentence, go right back to pushing that nonsense.

Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#94

Post by BlueTemplar »

xmprt wrote: post #43
ninetyninenine wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah I don't agree with this characterization. The problem is, the majority of those hallucinations are true. What was said would make more sense if the majority of the responses were, in fact, false, but this is not the case.

I think you're both correct but have different definitions of hallucinations. You're judging it as a hallucination based on the veracity of the output. Whereas Fowler is judging it based on the method by which the output is achieved. By that judgement, everything is a hallucination because the user cannot differentiate between when the LLM is telling the truth and isn't. This is different from human hallucinations wh…

LLMs don't hallucinate : they bullshit (which is not caring about truth).

Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#95

Post by anthem2025 »

senko wrote: post #85
anthem2025 wrote: post #83

It’s funny how people acknowledge the railroads and the similarity to AI, but then jump back to comparing it to the internet when it comes to drawing conclusions. The internet build out left massive amounts of useful infrastructure. The railroads left us with lots of railroads that fell into disuse and eventually left us with a complete joke of a railway system. Made a few people so rich we started calling them robbe…

> Are we going to continue to use the 60 billion dollar data centers in Louisiana when the bubble burst Why not? Tracks in the middle of nowhere are useless. Data centers in the middle of nowhere are useful, as long as energy, cooling and uplink are cost-effective. (Not saying Louisiana is in the middle of nowhere!)

I don’t disagree, but was Louisiana chosen because it offers cheap energy/cooling/infra or because the government doesn’t bother to ask questions about the impact to thinks like energy and water usage (which is why we are seeing more and more reports of residents upset about pollution, water usage, and energy costs).

Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#96

Post by bongodongobob »

sodapopcan wrote: post #37
ares623 wrote: post #25

> Other forms of engineering have to take into account the variability of the world. > Maybe LLMs mark the point where we join our engineering peers in a world on non-determinism. Those other forms of engineering have no choice due to the nature of what they are engineering. Software engineers already have a way to introduce determinism into the systems they build! We’re going backwards!

As pertaining to software development, I agree. I've been hearing accounting (online and from coworkers) of using LLMs to do deterministic stuff. And yet, instead of at least prompting once to "write a script to do X," they just keep prompting "do X" over and over again. Seems incredibly wasteful. It feels like there is this thought of "We are not making progress if we aren't getting the LLM to do everything. Having…

I am one of these people. For my scripting needs, it would probably take me longer to find the script I saved rather than just asking it again and getting an answer in 15 seconds. I haven't saved a smallish script in a year.

Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#97

Post by worik »

nicwolff wrote: post #81

> I’ve often heard, with decent reason, an LLM compared to a junior colleague. No, they're like an extremely experienced and knowledgeable senior colleague – who drinks heavily on the job. Overconfident, forgetful, sloppy, easily distracted. But you can hire so many of them, so cheaply, and they don't get mad when you fire them!

Yes. Funny

But it is nothing like a wetware colleague. It is a machine.

Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#98

Post by girvo »

didericis wrote: post #39
ares623 wrote: post #25

> Other forms of engineering have to take into account the variability of the world. > Maybe LLMs mark the point where we join our engineering peers in a world on non-determinism. Those other forms of engineering have no choice due to the nature of what they are engineering. Software engineers already have a way to introduce determinism into the systems they build! We’re going backwards!

Part of what got me into software was this: no matter how complex or impressive the operation, with enough time and determination, you could trace each step and learn how a tap on a joystick lead to the specific pixels on a screen changing. There’s a beautiful invitation to learn and contribute baked into a world where each command is fully deterministic and spec-ed out. Yes, there have always been poorly documented…

> People don’t understand how much is going to be lost if that goal is abandoned.

Ah but you see, imagine the shareholder value we can generate for a quarter or two in the meanwhile!

Editors note: please read that as absolutely dripping with disdain and sarcasm.

Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#99

Post by furyofantares »

nicwolff wrote: post #81

> I’ve often heard, with decent reason, an LLM compared to a junior colleague. No, they're like an extremely experienced and knowledgeable senior colleague – who drinks heavily on the job. Overconfident, forgetful, sloppy, easily distracted. But you can hire so many of them, so cheaply, and they don't get mad when you fire them!

These metaphors all suck. Well, ok, yours is funny. But anyway, LLMs are just very different from any human.

They are extremely shallow, even compared to a junior developer. But extremely broad, even compared to the most experienced developer. They type real fuckin fast compared to anyone on earth, but they need to be told what to do much more carefully than anyone on earth.

Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#100

Post by bathtub365 »

didericis wrote: post #80
pton_xd wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The beauty of programming is that you're creating a "mathematical artifact." You can always drill down and figure out exactly what is going on and what is going to happen with a given set of inputs. Now with things like concurrency that's not exactly true, but, I think the sentiment still holds. The more practical question is though, does that matter? Maybe not.

> The more practical question is though, does that matter? I think it matters quite a lot. Specifically for knowledge preservation and education.

Yep, LLM’s still run on hardware with the same fundamental architecture we’ve had for years, sitting under a standard operating system. The software is written in the same languages we’ve been using for a long time. Unless there’s some seismic shift where all of these layers go away we’ll be maintaining these systems for a while.
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