6 ms·

People are being very uncharitable in the comments for some reason This is a short and sweet article about a very cool real-world result in a very new area of

People are being very uncharitable in the comments for some reason This is a short and sweet article about a very cool real-world result in a very new area of tooling possibilities, with some honest and reasonable thoughts Maybe the "Senior vs Junior Developer" narrative is a little stretched, but the substance of the article is great Can't help but wonder if people are getting mad because they feel threatened

namanyayg 2y ago
Felt a bit more cynic than usual haha.
jryan49 2y ago
It seems llms are very useful for some people and not so much for others. Both sides believe it's all or nothing. If it's garbage for me it must be garbage. If it's doing my work it must be able to do everyone's work... Everyone is very emotionally about it too because of the hype around it. Almost all conversations about llms, especially on hn are full of this useless bickering.
epolanski 2y ago
I am more and more convinced that many engineers are very defensive about AI and would rather point out any flaw than think how to leverage the tools to get any benefit out of them. Just the other day I used cursor and iteratively implemented stories for 70 .vue files in few hours, while also writing documentation for the components and pages, and with the documentation being further fed to cursor, to write many E2Es, something that would've taken me at least few days if not a week. When I shared that with some coworkers they went into a hunt to find all the shortcomings (often petty duplication of mocks, sometimes missing a story scenario, nothing major). I found it striking as we really needed it and it provides tangible benefits: - domain and UI stakeholders can navigate stories and think of more cases/feedback with ease on a UX/UI pov without having to replicate the scenarios manually doing multiple time consuming repetitive operations in the actual applications - documentation proved to be very valuable to a junior that joined us this very january - E2Es caught multiple bugs in their own PRs in the weeks after And yet, instead of appreciating the cost/benefit ratio (something that should characterise a good engineer, after all, that's our job) of the solution, I was scolded because they (or I) would've done a more careful job missing that they never done that in the first place. I have many such examples, such as automatically providing all the translation keys and translations for a new locale, just to find cherry picked criticism that this or that could've been spelled differently. Of course it can, what's your job if not being responsible for the localisation? That shouldn't diminish that 95% of the content was correct and provided in few seconds rather than days. Why they do that? I genuinely feel some feel threatened, most of those reek insecurity. I can understand some criticism towards those who build and sell hype with cherry picked results, but I cannot but find some of the worst critics suffering of Luddism.
- krainboltgreene 2y ago
  Given how much damage it's done to our industry without any appreciable impact on the actual system's efficacy it makes sense to me that experts in a mechanism are critical of people telling them how effective this "tool" is for the mechanism. I suppose it's simply easier to think of them as scared and afraid of losing their lobs to robots, but the reality is most programmers already know someone who lost their job to a robot that doesn't even exist yet.
  - chchchangelog 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - jazzyjackson 2y ago
      You sound like a markov chain.
      - cutnpaste 2y ago
        [flagged]
        jazzyjackson 2y ago
        You can just cat the file, what does piping to echo give you? Edit: it gives you nothing, because echo echos its arguments, ignores stdin
    - __loam 2y ago
      Least insane hackernews commenter
- __loam 2y ago
  To me it sounds like you're rushing the work and making mistakes then dismissing people who point it out.
  - 2y ago
imoreno 2y ago
To me, articles like this are not so interesting for the results. I'm not reading them to find out just exactly what the performance of AIs is, exactly. Obviously it's not useful for that, it's not systematic, anecdotal, unscientific... I think LLMs today, for all their goods and bads, can do some useful work. The problem is that there is still mystery on how to use them effectively. I'm not talking about some pie in the sky singularity stuff, but just coming up with prompts to do basic, simple tasks effectively. Articles like that are great for learning new prompting tricks and I'm glad the authors are choosing to share their knowledge. Yes, OP isn't saying the last word on prompting, and there's a million ways it could be better. But the article is still useful to an average person trying to learn how to use LLMs more productively. >the "Senior vs Junior Developer" narrative It sounds to me like just another case of "telling the AI to explicitly reason through its answer improves the quality of results". The "senior developer" here is better able to triage aspects of the codebase to identify the important ones (and to the "junior" everything seems equally important) and I would say has better reasoning ability. Maybe it works because when you ask the LLM to code something, it's not really trying to "do a good job", besides whatever nebulous bias is instilled from alignment. It's just trying to act the part of a human who is solving the problem. If you tell it to act a more competent part, it does better - but it has to have some knowledge (aka training data) of what the more competent part looks like.
dang 2y ago
No doubt the overstated title is part of the reason, so we've adopted the subtitle above, which is presumably more accurate.
- namanyayg 2y ago
  Hey dang, nice to see you on my post. Thanks for making HN the best moderated community!
throw10920 2y ago
[flagged]
- infecto 2y ago
  Your post is far worse than anything the OP said. Instead of complaining about rules, downvote, it is a lot more productive.
  - throw10920 2y ago
    Incorrect. Pointing out that someone badly broke the site rules in addition to displaying intellectually dishonest behavior in general is objectively better than actually saying those things. There is no world in which it's worse to point out this kind of bad behavior than to commit it. The idea that it's more productive to silently downvote is also incorrect. You can't change your behavior if you don't know what you did wrong, and pointing out exactly why someone's behavior is egregious allows others who have their heads straight to downvote that person too.
    - infecto 2y ago
      They did not though, you are incorrect. I am only responding to suggest that perhaps your tone and misuse of phrases like intellectual dishonesty look quite negative compared to how the OP worded their comment. The comments in this submission were quite negative in what felt like a biased kind of way. I am already going to far in responding to your rant but though it might help in redirecting your incorrect assumptions.
      - throw10920 2y ago
        > They did not though, you are incorrect. They did not what? I am incorrect about what? I made specific points and comments, and you aren't responding to anything in particular. You saying "you are incorrect" without even naming a specific point, let alone providing an argument against it, is meaningless. > I am only responding to suggest that perhaps your tone and misuse of phrases like intellectual dishonesty My tone is fine - I'm not engaging in personal attacks or emotional manipulation. And my use of "intellectual dishonesty" is not a misuse - you're incorrect again - because that's exactly what's happening. > look quite negative compared to how the OP worded their comment. This isn't even an argument - it's a complaint based on feelings. You also missed the a significant part of the original comment I made, which is that the OP is emotionally manipulating their readers instead of actually offering constructive criticism or valid arguments. Ironically, that's exactly what you're doing here too. > The comments in this submission were quite negative in what felt like a biased kind of way. It doesn't matter - that does not justify a knee-jerk positive comment that breaks the guidelines and commits logical fallacies and emotionally manipulates the audience. > I am already going to far in responding to your rant but though it might help in redirecting your incorrect assumptions. Anyone capable of understanding basic logic understands that I'm making arguments and using reason. The ones ranting are the OP and you, given that you haven't made a single valid argument in either of your responses, and instead are "responding to tone" and "contradicting without argument" in the argument pyramid. Please don't respond unless you have an actual valid argument to make - you haven't made one yet.

namanyayg 2y ago

Felt a bit more cynic than usual haha.

jryan49 2y ago

It seems llms are very useful for some people and not so much for others. Both sides believe it's all or nothing. If it's garbage for me it must be garbage. If it's doing my work it must be able to do everyone's work... Everyone is very emotionally about it too because of the hype around it. Almost all conversations about llms, especially on hn are full of this useless bickering.

epolanski 2y ago

I am more and more convinced that many engineers are very defensive about AI and would rather point out any flaw than think how to leverage the tools to get any benefit out of them. Just the other day I used cursor and iteratively implemented stories for 70 .vue files in few hours, while also writing documentation for the components and pages, and with the documentation being further fed to cursor, to write many E2Es, something that would've taken me at least few days if not a week. When I shared that with some coworkers they went into a hunt to find all the shortcomings (often petty duplication of mocks, sometimes missing a story scenario, nothing major). I found it striking as we really needed it and it provides tangible benefits: - domain and UI stakeholders can navigate stories and think of more cases/feedback with ease on a UX/UI pov without having to replicate the scenarios manually doing multiple time consuming repetitive operations in the actual applications - documentation proved to be very valuable to a junior that joined us this very january - E2Es caught multiple bugs in their own PRs in the weeks after And yet, instead of appreciating the cost/benefit ratio (something that should characterise a good engineer, after all, that's our job) of the solution, I was scolded because they (or I) would've done a more careful job missing that they never done that in the first place. I have many such examples, such as automatically providing all the translation keys and translations for a new locale, just to find cherry picked criticism that this or that could've been spelled differently. Of course it can, what's your job if not being responsible for the localisation? That shouldn't diminish that 95% of the content was correct and provided in few seconds rather than days. Why they do that? I genuinely feel some feel threatened, most of those reek insecurity. I can understand some criticism towards those who build and sell hype with cherry picked results, but I cannot but find some of the worst critics suffering of Luddism.

krainboltgreene 2y ago
Given how much damage it's done to our industry without any appreciable impact on the actual system's efficacy it makes sense to me that experts in a mechanism are critical of people telling them how effective this "tool" is for the mechanism. I suppose it's simply easier to think of them as scared and afraid of losing their lobs to robots, but the reality is most programmers already know someone who lost their job to a robot that doesn't even exist yet.
- chchchangelog 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - jazzyjackson 2y ago
    You sound like a markov chain.
    - cutnpaste 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - jazzyjackson 2y ago
        You can just cat the file, what does piping to echo give you? Edit: it gives you nothing, because echo echos its arguments, ignores stdin
  - __loam 2y ago
    Least insane hackernews commenter
__loam 2y ago
To me it sounds like you're rushing the work and making mistakes then dismissing people who point it out.
- 2y ago

imoreno 2y ago

To me, articles like this are not so interesting for the results. I'm not reading them to find out just exactly what the performance of AIs is, exactly. Obviously it's not useful for that, it's not systematic, anecdotal, unscientific... I think LLMs today, for all their goods and bads, can do some useful work. The problem is that there is still mystery on how to use them effectively. I'm not talking about some pie in the sky singularity stuff, but just coming up with prompts to do basic, simple tasks effectively. Articles like that are great for learning new prompting tricks and I'm glad the authors are choosing to share their knowledge. Yes, OP isn't saying the last word on prompting, and there's a million ways it could be better. But the article is still useful to an average person trying to learn how to use LLMs more productively. >the "Senior vs Junior Developer" narrative It sounds to me like just another case of "telling the AI to explicitly reason through its answer improves the quality of results". The "senior developer" here is better able to triage aspects of the codebase to identify the important ones (and to the "junior" everything seems equally important) and I would say has better reasoning ability. Maybe it works because when you ask the LLM to code something, it's not really trying to "do a good job", besides whatever nebulous bias is instilled from alignment. It's just trying to act the part of a human who is solving the problem. If you tell it to act a more competent part, it does better - but it has to have some knowledge (aka training data) of what the more competent part looks like.

dang 2y ago

No doubt the overstated title is part of the reason, so we've adopted the subtitle above, which is presumably more accurate.

namanyayg 2y ago
Hey dang, nice to see you on my post. Thanks for making HN the best moderated community!

throw10920 2y ago

[flagged]

infecto 2y ago
Your post is far worse than anything the OP said. Instead of complaining about rules, downvote, it is a lot more productive.
- throw10920 2y ago
  Incorrect. Pointing out that someone badly broke the site rules in addition to displaying intellectually dishonest behavior in general is objectively better than actually saying those things. There is no world in which it's worse to point out this kind of bad behavior than to commit it. The idea that it's more productive to silently downvote is also incorrect. You can't change your behavior if you don't know what you did wrong, and pointing out exactly why someone's behavior is egregious allows others who have their heads straight to downvote that person too.
  - infecto 2y ago
    They did not though, you are incorrect. I am only responding to suggest that perhaps your tone and misuse of phrases like intellectual dishonesty look quite negative compared to how the OP worded their comment. The comments in this submission were quite negative in what felt like a biased kind of way. I am already going to far in responding to your rant but though it might help in redirecting your incorrect assumptions.
    - throw10920 2y ago
      > They did not though, you are incorrect. They did not what? I am incorrect about what? I made specific points and comments, and you aren't responding to anything in particular. You saying "you are incorrect" without even naming a specific point, let alone providing an argument against it, is meaningless. > I am only responding to suggest that perhaps your tone and misuse of phrases like intellectual dishonesty My tone is fine - I'm not engaging in personal attacks or emotional manipulation. And my use of "intellectual dishonesty" is not a misuse - you're incorrect again - because that's exactly what's happening. > look quite negative compared to how the OP worded their comment. This isn't even an argument - it's a complaint based on feelings. You also missed the a significant part of the original comment I made, which is that the OP is emotionally manipulating their readers instead of actually offering constructive criticism or valid arguments. Ironically, that's exactly what you're doing here too. > The comments in this submission were quite negative in what felt like a biased kind of way. It doesn't matter - that does not justify a knee-jerk positive comment that breaks the guidelines and commits logical fallacies and emotionally manipulates the audience. > I am already going to far in responding to your rant but though it might help in redirecting your incorrect assumptions. Anyone capable of understanding basic logic understands that I'm making arguments and using reason. The ones ranting are the OP and you, given that you haven't made a single valid argument in either of your responses, and instead are "responding to tone" and "contradicting without argument" in the argument pyramid. Please don't respond unless you have an actual valid argument to make - you haven't made one yet.