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Various LLM Smells

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Re: Various LLM Smells

#91

Post by tptacek »

sofixa wrote: post #82
tptacek wrote: post #50

The LLM writing sameness is bad. Use LLMs to help your writing! But don't include a word they generate, even just a vocabulary adjustment, in your own output. Have them critique structure and flow, spot overused words and passive constructions and dumb picks for topic sentences. It's great for that, and those are all objective improvements in your writing that won't mess up your style. The LLM sameness in web design…

> The LLM sameness in web design is good. Most sites shouldn't try to be idiosyncratic. The best design for a site with real utility is legibility, and LLMs are better at that than the median developer. Always laying out the same buttons? Always using the same type scales? Good! If it looks good to you, you weren't going to do better on your own, and you were very likely to do worse. See, I disagree. Having seen plen…

This has been a bugbear of mine (and many other people) since long before the advent of LLMs. It is not an intrinsically virtuous thing for a web design to be "effortful". Some of the most well-regarded UX systems in the industry are defined by rigorous sameness. If the baseline is good, departing from it is as likely to reduce legibility as increase it.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#92

Post by pydry »

onion2k wrote: post #85
ryandrake wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A general pattern for LLMs is that they look really good at things you are bad at. This is true for coding, too, which I think, to a large degree, might explain the polarized differences in opinions on HN about the quality of LLM-produced code. You have the 1. "AI produces code better than I could possibly write, one shots things it would take me days to do, and has made me 10X more productive!" camp, and you have…

Well, I have bad news for camp 1.. It's bad if they work in a part of the industry where code quality or efficiency matters. That's maybe 10% of the total though.

Companies that don't care about code quality always care about the side effects of poor code quality. They just can't connect the dots.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#93

Post by kiba »

ryandrake wrote: post #66
Planktonne wrote: post #8

> The LLM generated writing obviously felt significantly better than my own writing. A general pattern for LLMs is that they look really good at things you are bad at. What that means is that if you find yourself thinking of its output as significantly better than yours in a particular domain, there's a high chance that you are not equipped to judge that quality effectively.

> A general pattern for LLMs is that they look really good at things you are bad at. This is true for coding, too, which I think, to a large degree, might explain the polarized differences in opinions on HN about the quality of LLM-produced code. You have the 1. "AI produces code better than I could possibly write, one shots things it would take me days to do, and has made me 10X more productive!" camp, and you have…

I used LLM to teach me how to code and get through obstacles that would have me spending a lot of time doing ???. Typically, I just write code that I know a lot of time is absolutely wrong but the LLM helpfully point out mistakes.

I am slowly doing more of my own code and cutting out the LLM out of the loop in the unfamiliar territory I am working in.

My main concern is not so much productivity but understanding the code I have written and feeling agency over it.

The LLM is a very good teacher.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#94

Post by adamdb »

sofixa wrote: post #82
tptacek wrote: post #50

The LLM writing sameness is bad. Use LLMs to help your writing! But don't include a word they generate, even just a vocabulary adjustment, in your own output. Have them critique structure and flow, spot overused words and passive constructions and dumb picks for topic sentences. It's great for that, and those are all objective improvements in your writing that won't mess up your style. The LLM sameness in web design…

> The LLM sameness in web design is good. Most sites shouldn't try to be idiosyncratic. The best design for a site with real utility is legibility, and LLMs are better at that than the median developer. Always laying out the same buttons? Always using the same type scales? Good! If it looks good to you, you weren't going to do better on your own, and you were very likely to do worse. See, I disagree. Having seen plen…

I'm going to play devil's advocate, who cares if it all looks generally the same? I grew up before everyone had dial-up, and I remember back then, when Web surfing on Netscape Navigator, all the websites also had a similar structure. Homogeneity in this context, to me, signals a design system that works best in the moment.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#95

Post by torginus »

ryandrake wrote: post #69
xienze wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't fathom thinking that LLM writing is even remotely passable. People that think this should honestly read more. This makes me think you're only exposing yourself to high quality writing online and from an intelligent circle of friends and coworkers. The average person's reading and writing abilities are _atrocious_ and only getting worse. We're almost at the point where kids are communicating through abbrevia…

...or read. At least in the USA: 21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024. 54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level [1]. 1: https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...

Hasn't this always been an intelligence thing? I think across all societies and eras we find that generally a a rather alarmingly large section of population is unable to grasp basic written instructions - and that section usually increases to the majority of people, when we start getting into things like an employment contract, or mortgage document.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#98

Post by torginus »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #83
viccis wrote: post #75

One Python one I hate is that it adds crazy amounts of newlines for no real readability gains. Instead of this: def add_three_ints(x: int, y: int, z: int) -> int: return x + y + z it will write: def add_three_ints( x: int, y: int, x: int, ): return x + y + z While it's always preferable to do this when you get either long or complex function signatures, Opus 4.7 and GPT 5.5 do this everywhere. When you combine it wit…

The second way produces more billable output tokens. Worse, when you feed that code back into the LLM service, the extra whitespace counts as input tokens.

an LF is 1 character, just like a space. Its just looks bigger to our puny human brains.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#100

Post by jedbrooke »

spdustin wrote: post #18

- “(The) honest caveat:” (or “genuine caveat:”, both with the colon) - “(The) honest answer:” (again, with colon) - “The thing to internalize:” - “The smoking gun:” (really, sentences that start with “The :” are a strong tell, but those four are the most prolific) - “load bearing” (when not talking about architecture) - “blast radius” (when not talking about actual explosives, but rather the effect of an event/action…

for me the most annoying one is “escape hatch”.

Everything is an escape hatch, try catch is an escape hatch, a cli flag is an escape hatch. It makes no sense, and quickly ended up in my “banned words and phrases” md file

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