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The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

lewiscampbell.tech

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Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#91

Post by LAC-Tech »

ymyms wrote: post #13

"I find LLMs useful as a sort of digital clerk - searching the web for me, finding documentation, looking up algorithms. I even find them useful1 in a limited coding capacity; with a small context and clear guidelines." I am curious why the author doesn't think this saves them time (i.e. makes them more productive). I never had terribly high output as a programmer. I certainly think LLMs have helped increased the amo…

I feel like it makes me more productive, but I am not even sure it does even with my light usage. How do we even measure it?

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#92

Post by paodealho »

rudedogg wrote: post #3

Hearing people on tech twitter say that LLMs always produce better code than they do by hand was pretty enlightening for me. LLMs can produce better code for languages and domains I’m not proficient in, at a much faster rate, but damn it’s rare I look at LLM output and don’t spot something I’d do measurably better. These things are average text generation machines. Yes you can improve the output quality by writing a…

I worked for a relatively large company (around 400 employees there are programmers). The people who embraced LLM-generated code clearly share one trait: they are feature pushers who love to say "yes!" to management. You see, management is always right, and these programmers are always so eager to put their requirements, however incomplete, into a Copilot session and open a pull request as fast as possible.

The worst case I remember happened a few months ago when a staff (!) engineer gave a presentation about benchmarks they had done between Java and Kotlin concurrency tools and how to write concurrent code. There was a very large and strange difference in performance favoring Kotlin that didn't make sense. When I dug into their code, it was clear everything had been generated by a LLM (lots of comments with emojis, for example) and the Java code was just wrong.

The competent programmers I've seen there use LLMs to generate some shell scripts, small python automations or to explore ideas. Most of the time they are unimpressed by these tools.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#93

Post by czhu12 »

To be fair to both sides, it really is hard to tell if we're in the world of

"you'll be left behind if you don't learn crypto" with crypto

or

"you'll be left behind if you don't learn how to drive" with cars

One of those statements is made in good faith, and the other is made out of insecurity. But we'll probably only really be able to tell looking backwards.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#94

Post by LAC-Tech »

ookblah wrote: post #29

"LLM evangelists - are you willing to admit that you just might not be that good at programming computers? Maybe you once were. Maybe you never were." lol. is this supposed to be like some sort of "gotcha"! yes? like maybe i am a really shitty programmer and always just wanted to hack things together. what it has allowed me to do is prevent burnout to some extent, outsource the "boring" parts and getting back to buil…

Not really.

I use LLMs for things I am not good at. But I also know I am not good at them.

No one is good at everything. 100% fine.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#95

Post by casey2 »

lbrito wrote: post #42
jraph wrote: post #14

This doesn't feel completely right. Simon Wilson (known for Django) has been doing a lot of LLM evangelism on his blog these days. Antirez (Redis) wrote a blog post recently with the same vibe. I doubt they are not good programmers. They are probably better than most of us, and I doubt they feel insecure because of the LLMs. Either I'm wrong, or there's something more to this. edit: to clarify, I'm not saying Simon a…

You seem to be mistaking set and members here. The piece's critique is against the set (LLM Evangelists), not against specific members of the set (the ones you mentioned). One can agree with the point of the piece while still acknowledging there are good programmers who are also LLM evangelists.

Look into the Motte-and-bailey fallacy. That set seriously doesn't exist. Even the people on youtube doing "vibe coding" benchmarks mostly say it's crap. (Well they probably exist on twitter/linkedin.)

This article just functions as flamebait for people who use LLMs to implement whole features to argue the semantics of "vibe coding". All while everyone is ignoring the writing on the wall. That we will soon have boxes going through billions of tokens every second. At that point slopcoding WILL be productive, but only if you build up the skill to differentiate yourself from the top 10% of prompters.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#96

Post by Havoc »

> It required an immense amount of baby sitting, for small code changes, made slowly, which were often wrong.

Can’t speak for others but that’s not what I’d understand (or do) as vibecoding. If you’re babysitting it every inch of the way then yeah sure I can see how it might not be productive relative to doing it yourself.

If you’re constantly fighting the LLM because you have a very specific notion of what each line should look like it won’t be a good time.

Better to spec out some assumptions, some desired outcomes, tech to be used, maybe the core data structure, ask the llm what else it needs to connect the dots, add that and then let it go

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#97

Post by minimaltom »

Slartie wrote: post #77
minimaltom wrote: post #17

I like OP's representation, but I feel like a lot of people arent saying 'LLMs are the bomb dot com _right now_' (though some are), but rather the trend is evident: these things will keep getting better, and the writing is on the wall. Personally I think the rate of improvement will plateau: in my experience software inevitably becomes less about tech and more about the interpersonal human soup of negotiating require…

It "becomes"? In a lot of areas, particularly enterprise, business stuff, it had been mostly about all of these things for decades.

"becomes" as in the locus of focus as my career progresses. Vibes-wise, i think we agree / are saying the same thing.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#99

Post by lijok »

j2kun wrote: post #88
lijok wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To change my mind I’ll be satisfied with a thorough description of the domain and ideally a theory on why it does poorly in that domain. But we’re not talking LLMs here, we’re talking opus4.5 specifically.

A theory besides... not enough training data? Is it even possible to formulate a coherent theory about this? I'm talking about customizing a widely-used build system, not exactly state-of-the-art cryptography. What could I possibly say that you wouldn't counter with "skill issue" (which goes back to the author's point)? If you say it's demonstrably impossible that someone can't be made more productive with opus4.5, t…

How could it possibly be a skill issue? Have you tried in earnest to use opus4.5 for the problem you’re trying to solve?

Not enough training data couldn’t be the problem - Bazel is not an esoteric domain. Unless you’re trying to do something esoteric.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#100

Post by throwawayffffas »

> But doing "prompt-driven development" or "vibe coding" with an Agentic LLM was an incredibly disapointing experience for me. It required an immense amount of baby sitting, for small code changes, made slowly, which were often wrong. All the while I sat there feeling dumber and dumber, as my tokens drained away.

Yeah I find they are useful for large sweeping changes, introducing new features and stuff, mostly because they write a lot of the boilerplate, granted with some errors. But for small fiddly changes they suck, you will have a much easier time doing these changes your self.

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