5 ms·
I'm getting very tired of the claim that LLMs are not useful. I hand-wrote perhaps 10 lines of code in this entire project: https://github.com/williamcotton/g
by williamcotton 2y ago
I'm getting very tired of the claim that LLMs are not useful.
I hand-wrote perhaps 10 lines of code in this entire project:
https://github.com/williamcotton/guish https://github.com/williamcotton/guish
I spent most of the weekend playing with my kids in the pool. Three years ago this would have taken more than a week of my time and I wouldn't have done much else.
- muglug 2y agoSo three years ago you'd spend less time with your kids in order to write a 2,000-line FOSS app for understanding Bash scripts? I'm not sure that's a good thing.
- aoeusnth1 2y agoExactly, you agree: the lack of LLMs is not good. LLMs turned a bad outcome into a good one.
- muglug 2y agoIt was a glib comment, but I fundamentally reject the premise that we'll have more personal time because of ChatGPT. It's like saying that buying a faster computer that compiles quicker means you can spend more time with your family. Theoretically true, but in practice people who are that way inclined can find myriad other ways to use the new technology to eat up time.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- williamcotton 2y agoLet's unravel what you've said here. You're saying that there is no way that I'm not a bad parent because I would have found a way to ignore my family regardless of some time saving device. Glib? That's not glib. That's just being a jerk. And fueled by what, your personal distaste for LLMs? People who are that way inclined?
- muglug 2y agoI don't think you're a bad parent, but I do think you were using hyperbole when describing how much time ChatGPT saved you. I also don't believe that you would spend a week away from your kids to make a 1,200-line app that just explains how simple bash commands work. https://explainshell.com/ https://explainshell.com/ already does a pretty great job of that. I don't have a personal distate for LLMs — I use ChatGPT weekly and I work for a company that ships LLM-powered functionality that I use daily. But your comment implied that LLMs can today provide a big productivity improvement for developers, and that’s not something I think there’s any concrete evidence for. I do find the hype immensely distateful, especially in response to an article pointing to the environmental downsides of that excitement.
- williamcotton 2y agoWhat I made is not like explainshell.com at all. It is a GUI for writing command pipelines. Updates to the prompt are parsed into an AST and used to update the GUI. Updates in the GUI are used to build an AST to update the prompt. I wrote it so I didn't have to keep writing things like this into the line editor: pg -d test_database -c 'SELECT * from test_table;' | tsvtocsv | ggplot 'ggplot(df, aes(as.Date(date), value)) + geom_col(fill = "red") + labs(x = "date") + theme_minimal()' | pngtohtml Instead, I could just type in the app: pg | tsvtocsv | ggplot | pngtohtml And then fill in the blanks with an instance of the Monaco code editor, looking like: https://github.com/williamcotton/guish/assets/13163/a5214e93-154b-4c5f-b727-e1d9c0e67c2a https://github.com/williamcotton/guish/assets/13163/a5214e93... It's a small program but it's not a trivial task to get the UX working in a productive manner. I took plenty of the same wrong turns that I would have if I was writing it by hand but was able to iterate much more quickly. It's more exploratory in nature, seeing how text input and GUI input can complement each other in a novel manner. Sure, I could do this by embedding a SQL query in an R script or something but there's just something that rubs me the wrong way about embedding one language in another instead of having them work side by side. It's not "just explaining how simple bash commands work". So thank you for calling me a shitty parent and devaluing my work. You seem awesome.
- 2y ago
- aoeusnth1 2y agoThe core of your attitude comes through here - that productivity is pointless, computers are worthless and coding is a waste of time. Anyone dismissing LLMs comes from a similar value system of hating technology, as far as I’m concerned.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y agoNot necessarily. Maybe he wrote 5 useless apps instead of one, and still didnt spend time with the kid.
- williamcotton 2y agoWow.
- JasonSage 2y agoParent did not claim that LLMs are not useful. Parent also acknowledges that AI is not a temporary phenomenon.
- aoeusnth1 2y agoOP does downplay them (“more dystopian and problematic than useful”). For one, it’s a nonsensical statement because dystopia and problems are not comparable to utility. A generous read of what they meant might be: LLMs are not very useful, and are dystopian and problematic in some vague way. Do you believe parent thinks LLMs are very useful? They clearly think the real value of AI comes from limited applications of ML to science, simulations, optimizations, etc instead of general-purpose automation and capabilities that LLMs provide.
- yencabulator 2y agoGreat example of LLM-produced code. I found the first bug after 20 seconds of reading. Enjoy!
- williamcotton 2y agoDo you mind sharing? I’ve been using it at work and it seems to work fine. Could you open an issue?
- AlexeyBelov 2y agoAsk an LLM.
- williamcotton 2y agoI suspect there is no bug, and much like yourself, that this person was just being a jerk.