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The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

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Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#91

Post by utopiah »

hwers wrote: post #84
utopiah wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to teach you things way faster than the old alternatives I'm not sure if you ever had a teacher or instructor that you didn't trust, because they were a compulsive liar or addiction or any other issue. I didn't (as least not that I can remember) but I know I would be VERY on guard about it. I imagine I would consequently be quite stressed learning with them, even if they were brilliant, kind, etc. It would feel a b…

I agree, it can be incredibly frustrating at times. My rule is that if it “compiles” in my brain as an understood idea then i accept it. I also push back a lot (sometimes it points out good errors in my thinking, sometimes it admits it hallucinated). Real humans hallucinate a lot as well or confidently state subtly wrong ideas, it’s a good habit anyway. It’s basically the same approach when presented with a “formula”…

> Real humans hallucinate a lot as well or confidently state subtly wrong ideas, it’s a good habit anyway.

I think that's actually deeply different. If a human keeps on apologizing because they are being caught in a lie, or just a mistake, you distrust them a LOT more. It's not normal to shrug off a problem then REPEAT it.

I imagine the cost of a mistake is exponential, not linear. So when somebody says "oops, you got me there!" I don't mistrust them just marginally more, I distrust them a LOT more and it will take a ton of effort, if even feasible, to get back to the initial level of trust.

I do not think it's at all equivalent to what "Real humans" do. Yes, we do mistake, but the humans you trust and want to partner with are precisely the one who are accountable when they make mistakes.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#92

Post by 3371 »

Jooror wrote: post #74
vntok wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An LLM has never saved me time. It has always produced something that doesn't quite work, has the rough shape of what I want, but somehow always gets all the details wrong. This reads like a skill issue on your end, in part at least in the prompting side. It does take time to reach a point where you can prompt an LLM sufficiently well to get a correct answer in one shot, developing an intuitive understanding of wha…

I’m curious about how you landed “git gud; prompt better” and not “maybe the domain I work in is a better fit for LLM code”. Or, to be a bit less generous, consider the possibility that the code you’re generating is boilerplate, marshaling, and/or API calls. A facade of perceived complexity over something that’s as complex as a filter-map or two.

Sharing my 2 cents.

In the past 2 months I've been using all the SOTA models to help me design a new DSL for narrative scripting (such as game story telling) and a c# runtime implementation o the script player engine.

The language spec and design is about 95% authored by me up to this point; I have the LLMs work on the 2nd layer: the implementation specs/guidelines and the 3rd layer: concrete c# implementation.

Since it's a new language, I consider it's somewhat new/novel tasks for LLMs (at least, not like boilerplate stuff like HTTP API or CRUD service). I'd say, these LLMs have been very helpful - you can tell they sometimes get confused and have trouble to comply to the foreign language spec and design - but they are mostly smart enough to carry out the objectives, and they get better and better after the project got on track and has plenty of files/resources to read and reference.

And I'd also say "prompt better" is a important factor, just much more nuanced/complicated. I started with 0 experience with LLM agents and have learned a lot about how to tame them, and developed a protocol to collaborate with agents, these all comes from countless trial and errors, but in the end get boiled down to "prompt better".

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#93

Post by raincole »

hwers wrote: post #75

Its unfortunate that there’s mode collapse around what the consensus “best way” to use these things are. It’s too bad we didn’t have a period where these things were great teachers but didn’t attempt to write code because in my opinion the ideal way to use them is not by agents mass producing sloppy buggy disorganized code, but to teach you things way faster than the old alternatives, rubber duck, and occasionally wr…

> It’s too bad we didn’t have a period where these things were great teachers but didn’t attempt to write code

The period is now. Just add "be a great teacher but don't attempt to write code" in the prompt.

(yes, it's a teacher who gets things wrong from time to time. You still need to refer to the source and ground truth just like when you're taught by a human teacher.)

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#94

Post by qsera »

simianwords wrote: post #29

What the author and many others find hard to digest is that LLMs are surfacing the reality that most of our work is a small bit of novelty against boiler plate redundant code. Most of what we do is programming is some small novel idea at high level and repeatable boilerplate at low level. A fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions? LLMs are especially good at fuzz…

> most of our work is a small bit of novelty against boiler plate redundant code...

Care to share some examples that prove your point?

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#95

Post by utopiah »

endymion-light wrote: post #90
utopiah wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to teach you things way faster than the old alternatives I'm not sure if you ever had a teacher or instructor that you didn't trust, because they were a compulsive liar or addiction or any other issue. I didn't (as least not that I can remember) but I know I would be VERY on guard about it. I imagine I would consequently be quite stressed learning with them, even if they were brilliant, kind, etc. It would feel a b…

I feel like this is partially a skill issue - You can get direct, cited information from LLMs. There's a level of personal responsibility for over-using the tools and letting them feed you bad/false information, but if you try researching specific abstractions, newer documentation, most LLMS now correctly call and research the tools available, directly citing them. I think you can build a very easy workflow that rein…

The analogy was about the unknown thinnest of the ice, not just the fastest way to get there. It's specifically about the lack of reliability of the process.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#96

Post by zimpenfish »

lxgr wrote: post #70
raincole wrote: post #34

> Video games stand out as one market where consumers have pushed back effectively No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written. If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well. It's specifically worded like this: > content such as artwork,…

> I don't know how one can spins this as a bad thing. People spin all kinds of things if they believe (accurately or not) that their livelihood is on the line. The knee-jerk "AI universally bad" movement seems just as absurd to me as the "AGI is already here" one. > Spore is well acclaimed. Minecraft is literally the most sold game ever. Counterpoint: Oblivion, one of the first high-profile games to use procedural te…

> Oblivion, one of the first high-profile games to use procedural terrain/landscape generation

I might be misremembering but wasn't the Oblivion proc-gen entirely in the development process, not "live" in the game, which means...

> "In the best case, a skilled artist uses automation to fill in mechanical rote work"

...is what Bethesda did, no?

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#97

Post by Sharlin »

raincole wrote: post #34

> Video games stand out as one market where consumers have pushed back effectively No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written. If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well. It's specifically worded like this: > content such as artwork,…

> Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times.

Before LLMs we did already have a way to "save developers time from writing the same thing that has been done by other developers for a thousand times", you know? A LLM doing the same thing the 1001st time is not code reuse. Code reuse is code reuse.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#98

Post by bdangubic »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #89
zorked wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this claim historical? As in, it was actually made at the time?

Which claim, exactly? That "coding will be made obsolete"? Yes, it is. Literally every programming innovation claims to "make coding obsolete". I've seen a half dozen in my own lifetime.

it is like knocking down the vending machine, you have to rock it back and forth a lot before it falls down

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#99

Post by Sharlin »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #83
simianwords wrote: post #29

What the author and many others find hard to digest is that LLMs are surfacing the reality that most of our work is a small bit of novelty against boiler plate redundant code. Most of what we do is programming is some small novel idea at high level and repeatable boilerplate at low level. A fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions? LLMs are especially good at fuzz…

Most of the people doing the most rote and monotonous work were and are doing so in some of the least productive circumstances, with clear ways of increasing speed and productivity. If development velocity was truly an important factor in these businesses, we'd migrated away from that gang of four ass Java 8 codebase, given these poor souls offices, or at least cubicles to reduce the noise, we wouldn't make them spen…

Yep. It's ridiculous to talk about 10x or 5x or 2x anything in any but the smallest companies. All this talk about programmer velocity is micro-optimizing something that's not a bottleneck.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#100

Post by endymion-light »

utopiah wrote: post #95
endymion-light wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this is partially a skill issue - You can get direct, cited information from LLMs. There's a level of personal responsibility for over-using the tools and letting them feed you bad/false information, but if you try researching specific abstractions, newer documentation, most LLMS now correctly call and research the tools available, directly citing them. I think you can build a very easy workflow that rein…

The analogy was about the unknown thinnest of the ice, not just the fastest way to get there. It's specifically about the lack of reliability of the process.

Yes, I was disagreeing with the premise of the analogy - what would the slow boat in this case be? As my experience, going through software engineering before AI, is that you'd get lost to the ice, with nobody to really help you get out.
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