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My sheer productivity boost from these models is miraculous. It's like upgrading from a text editor to a powerful IDE. I've saved a mountain of hours just by re

My sheer productivity boost from these models is miraculous. It's like upgrading from a text editor to a powerful IDE. I've saved a mountain of hours just by removing tedious time sinks -- one-off language syntax, remembering patterns for some framework, migrating code, etc. And this boost applies to nearly all of my knowledge work. Then I see contrarians claiming that LLMs are literally never useful for anyone, and I get "don't believe your lying eyes" vibes. At this point, such sentiments feel either willfully ignorant, or said in bad faith. It's wild.

christofosho 2y ago
I think there may be a set of people that have figured out, 1) how to interact with LLMs; and 2) what in their lives is improved when interacting with LLMs. I am in the group that has not found the best use case for my own life, and have never needed it for improving anything I need to get done. Always looking for suggestions, though!
- ants_everywhere 2y ago
  > I think there may be a set of people that have figured out, 1) how to interact with LLMs.... 1) is all about experimenting, which is what Tao is doing. Having a playful and open minded attitude is like 80% of the game
llm_bro 2y ago
[dead]
bachmeier 2y ago
> I see contrarians claiming that LLMs are literally never useful for anyone While I don't doubt that there's at least one person that has said this, what you're saying doesn't conflict with the things I and many others in the "skeptic" camp have said. LLMs are useful for a very specific set of tasks. The tasks you've listed are a tiny sliver of all the tasks that AI could potentially be doing. Would it be a good idea to consult an LLM if your mother is passed out on the floor? Probably not. The problem I have is with extrapolating from the current successes to conclude that many more tasks will be done by AI in five years.
wizzwizz4 2y ago
I'm a contrarian who believes your anecdote, and could even imagine that 5% of LLM users feel the same way, but thinks (a) these systems are about half as good as they're ever going to get, (b) we're past the point of diminishing returns, and (c) what we do have isn't worth the energy costs of running it, let alone creating it in the first place.
perching_aix 2y ago
Thing is, I'm used to hearing a very similar sentiment on how e.g. using vim keybindings is so literally going to make me a 10x 100x whatever rockstar developer - and it's like what, enabling me to edit text a bit faster? And it's always anecdotes that yeah, from-qualia you feel so fast. But from-qualia I run like a marathon runner and sound like a radio host. I personally did find some use cases for it and it does a decent job of cutting out minor gruntwork for me. But the experience itself screams to me that whatever gains I'm feeling I'm getting are all in my head.
- raincole 2y ago
  > using vim keybindings is so literally going to make me a 10x 100x whatever rockstar developer - and it's like what, enabling me to edit text a bit faster? Yes, to me LLM is exactly like this: from nano to vim.
  - pxc 2y ago
    Nano is borderline unusable, so that's like... a lot?
    - perching_aix 2y ago
      holy hyperboly, clearly i picked the right example...
      - pxc 2y ago
        I don't think basic vim usage (which is all I know, really) makes anyone super efficient. I don't think typing/editing speed is generally an important factor in programmer productivity or 'coding speed'. It's just that every time I use nano it's (a) unintentional, as it's opened via EDITOR; (b) sort-of coerced, because most distros installing it by default also think it's somehow too much to install Vim or Emacs alongside it; and (c) extremely painfully awkward, because all other editors I use, I've invested at least as couple years of practice into. If I spent a year using nano every day, and if I evolved a config file and read the manual during that time, I might eventually reach a place where using nano didn't feel cumbersome and irritating, but why would I do that if I already use Emacs and Vim every day? If I learn a 'new' editor it's going to be something extensible that I could see myself programming in every day: Emacs without evil; or one of the newer modal editors with a reversed sentence order, like kakoune and Helix; or, hell, VSCode. So nano is likely doomed to remain forever cumbersome and irritating for me, somewhere on the level of typing on a touchscreen instead of a real keyboard.
__loam 2y ago
It's a system that is designed to convince you.
dartos 2y ago
> At this point, such sentiments feel either willfully ignorant, or said in bad faith. I feel exactly the same, but in the opposite direction. As someone who’s been programming for 17 years and working professionally for 10, I’m unable to get any huge productivity boosts from AI tools. They’re better than Google+stack overflow for asking random questions, but in a specific context and they’re good for repetitive, but not identical, syntax. That’s about where the gains end for me. Maybe at this point I’m just so fast about looking up documentation. Maybe the languages/problems I’m facing aren’t well represented in the training data, but I just don’t see this amazing advancement. I’d really love to see, live, someone programming who really gets these big productivity gains.
- mewpmewp2 2y ago
  Most gains are from using Copilot, do you use that?
  - acedTrex 2y ago
    I have it, tried it for a while. I have it turned mostly off new except for rare boilerplate heavy cases. It kept generating annoyingly wrong code. Things with subtly wrong misleading names, missing edge cases, ignoring immediate same file context etc. I found that it slowed me down so i turned it off.
    - mewpmewp2 2y ago
      Which language?
      - acedTrex 2y ago
        golang and python mainly. For rust it failed spectacularly. So bad that its not worth discussing lol
      - homebrewer 2y ago
        Same experience, but with TypeScript and Go. They gave me a 60-day trial (IIRC), I used it for two days, disabled it for the next 58 days, and after that removed it from the editor.

christofosho 2y ago

I think there may be a set of people that have figured out, 1) how to interact with LLMs; and 2) what in their lives is improved when interacting with LLMs. I am in the group that has not found the best use case for my own life, and have never needed it for improving anything I need to get done. Always looking for suggestions, though!

ants_everywhere 2y ago
> I think there may be a set of people that have figured out, 1) how to interact with LLMs.... 1) is all about experimenting, which is what Tao is doing. Having a playful and open minded attitude is like 80% of the game

llm_bro 2y ago

[dead]

bachmeier 2y ago

> I see contrarians claiming that LLMs are literally never useful for anyone While I don't doubt that there's at least one person that has said this, what you're saying doesn't conflict with the things I and many others in the "skeptic" camp have said. LLMs are useful for a very specific set of tasks. The tasks you've listed are a tiny sliver of all the tasks that AI could potentially be doing. Would it be a good idea to consult an LLM if your mother is passed out on the floor? Probably not. The problem I have is with extrapolating from the current successes to conclude that many more tasks will be done by AI in five years.

wizzwizz4 2y ago

I'm a contrarian who believes your anecdote, and could even imagine that 5% of LLM users feel the same way, but thinks (a) these systems are about half as good as they're ever going to get, (b) we're past the point of diminishing returns, and (c) what we do have isn't worth the energy costs of running it, let alone creating it in the first place.

perching_aix 2y ago

Thing is, I'm used to hearing a very similar sentiment on how e.g. using vim keybindings is so literally going to make me a 10x 100x whatever rockstar developer - and it's like what, enabling me to edit text a bit faster? And it's always anecdotes that yeah, from-qualia you feel so fast. But from-qualia I run like a marathon runner and sound like a radio host. I personally did find some use cases for it and it does a decent job of cutting out minor gruntwork for me. But the experience itself screams to me that whatever gains I'm feeling I'm getting are all in my head.

raincole 2y ago
> using vim keybindings is so literally going to make me a 10x 100x whatever rockstar developer - and it's like what, enabling me to edit text a bit faster? Yes, to me LLM is exactly like this: from nano to vim.
- pxc 2y ago
  Nano is borderline unusable, so that's like... a lot?
  - perching_aix 2y ago
    holy hyperboly, clearly i picked the right example...
    - pxc 2y ago
      I don't think basic vim usage (which is all I know, really) makes anyone super efficient. I don't think typing/editing speed is generally an important factor in programmer productivity or 'coding speed'. It's just that every time I use nano it's (a) unintentional, as it's opened via EDITOR; (b) sort-of coerced, because most distros installing it by default also think it's somehow too much to install Vim or Emacs alongside it; and (c) extremely painfully awkward, because all other editors I use, I've invested at least as couple years of practice into. If I spent a year using nano every day, and if I evolved a config file and read the manual during that time, I might eventually reach a place where using nano didn't feel cumbersome and irritating, but why would I do that if I already use Emacs and Vim every day? If I learn a 'new' editor it's going to be something extensible that I could see myself programming in every day: Emacs without evil; or one of the newer modal editors with a reversed sentence order, like kakoune and Helix; or, hell, VSCode. So nano is likely doomed to remain forever cumbersome and irritating for me, somewhere on the level of typing on a touchscreen instead of a real keyboard.

__loam 2y ago

It's a system that is designed to convince you.

dartos 2y ago

> At this point, such sentiments feel either willfully ignorant, or said in bad faith. I feel exactly the same, but in the opposite direction. As someone who’s been programming for 17 years and working professionally for 10, I’m unable to get any huge productivity boosts from AI tools. They’re better than Google+stack overflow for asking random questions, but in a specific context and they’re good for repetitive, but not identical, syntax. That’s about where the gains end for me. Maybe at this point I’m just so fast about looking up documentation. Maybe the languages/problems I’m facing aren’t well represented in the training data, but I just don’t see this amazing advancement. I’d really love to see, live, someone programming who really gets these big productivity gains.

mewpmewp2 2y ago
Most gains are from using Copilot, do you use that?
- acedTrex 2y ago
  I have it, tried it for a while. I have it turned mostly off new except for rare boilerplate heavy cases. It kept generating annoyingly wrong code. Things with subtly wrong misleading names, missing edge cases, ignoring immediate same file context etc. I found that it slowed me down so i turned it off.
  - mewpmewp2 2y ago
    Which language?
    - acedTrex 2y ago
      golang and python mainly. For rust it failed spectacularly. So bad that its not worth discussing lol
    - homebrewer 2y ago
      Same experience, but with TypeScript and Go. They gave me a 60-day trial (IIRC), I used it for two days, disabled it for the next 58 days, and after that removed it from the editor.