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> That he says LLMs make him more productive at all as a hands-on developer, especially around first drafts on a new idea, means a lot to me personally. There
by gopalv 2y ago
> That he says LLMs make him more productive at all as a hands-on developer, especially around first drafts on a new idea, means a lot to me personally.
There is likely to be a great rift in how very talented people look at sharper tools.
I've seen the same division pop up with CNC machines, 3d printers, IDEs and now LLMs.
If you are good at doing something, you might find the new tool's output to be sub-par over what you can achieve yourself, but often the lower quality output comes much faster than you can generate.
That causes the people who are deliberate & precise about their process to hate the new tool completely - expressing in the actual code (or paint, or marks on wood) is much better than trying to explain it in a less precise language in the middle of it. The only exception I've seen is that engineering folks often use a blueprint & refine it on paper.
There's a double translation overhead which is wasteful if you don't need it.
If you have dealt with a new hire while being the senior of the pair, there's that familiar feeling of wanting to grab their keyboard instead of explaining how to build that regex - being able to do more things than you can explain or just having a higher bandwidth pipe into the actual task is a common sign of mastery.
The incrementalists on the other hand, tend to love the new tool as they tend to build 6 different things before picking what works the best, slowly iterating towards what they had in mind in the first place.
I got into this profession simply because I could Ctrl-Z to the previous step much more easily than my then favourite chemical engineering goals. In Chemistry, if you get a step wrong, you go to the start & start over. Plus even when things work, yield is just a pain there (prove it first, then you scale up ingredients etc).
Just from the name of sketch.dev, it appears that this author is of the 'sketch first & refine' model where the new tool just speeds up that loop of infinite refinement.
- throwaway4aday 2y agoNot so sure about those examples and pairing with the idea of quick and dirty work.
- liotier 2y ago> If you are good at doing something, you might find the new tool's output to be sub-par over what you can achieve yourself, but often the lower quality output comes much faster than you can generate. That causes the people who are deliberate & precise about their process to hate the new tool completely Wow, I've been there ! Years ago we dragged a GIS system kicking and screaming from its nascent era of a dozen ultrasharp dudes with the whole national fiber optics network in their head full of clever optimizations, to three thousand mostly clueless users churning out industrial scale spaghetti... The old hands wanted a dumb fast tool that does their bidding - they hated the slower wizard-assisted handholding, that turned out to be essential to the new population's productivity. Command line vs. GUI again... Expressivity vs. discoverability, all the choices vs. don't make me think. Know your users !
- namaria 2y agoThis whole thing makes me think of that short story "The Machine Stops". As we keep burrowing deeper and deeper into an overly complex system that allows people to get into parts of it without understanding the whole, we are edging closer to a situation where no one is left who can actually reason about the system and it starts to deteriorate beyond repair until it suddenly collapses.
- IanKerr 2y agoWe are so, so far beyond that point already. The complexity of the world economy is beyond any one mind to fully comprehend. The microcosm of building black-box LLMs that perform feats we don't understand is yet another instance of us building systems which may forever be beyond human understanding. How is any human meant to understand a billion lines of code in a single codebase? How is any human meant to understand a world where there are potentially trillions of lines of code operating?
- namaria 2y agoWhen your house is on fire and someone says "get out", certainly grabbing a jerrycan of gasoline and dousing yourself in fuel is worst than just getting out?
- jprete 2y agoThis is a good characterization. I'm precision-driven and know what I need to do at any low level. It's the high-level definition that is uncertain. So it doesn't really help to produce a dozen prototypes of an idea and pick one, nor does it help to fill in function definitions.
- tikkun 2y agoIntersting. So engineers that like to iterate and explore are more likely to like LLMs. Whereas engineers that like have a more rigid specific process are more likely to dislike LLMs.
- blastfrompust 2y ago[dead]
- godelski 2y agoI frequently iterate and explore when writing code. Code gets written multiple times before being merged. Yet, I still haven't found LLMs to be helpful in that way. The author gives "autocomplete", "search", and "chat-driven programming" as 3 paradigms. I get the most out of search (though a lot of this is due to the decreasing value of Google), autocomplete is pretty weak to me especially as I macro or just use contextual complete, and I've failed miserably at chat-driven programming on every attempt. I spend more time debugging the AI than it would to debug myself. Albeit it __feels__ faster because I'm doing more typing + waiting rather than continuous thinking (but the latter has extra benefits).
- erosivesoul 2y agoFWIW I find LLMs almost useless for writing novel code. Like it can spit out a serviceable UUID generator when I need it, but try writing something with more than a layer or two of recursion and it gets confused. I turn copilot on for boilerplate and off for solving new problems.
- harrall 2y agoI believe it’s more that people hate trying new tools because they’ve already made their choice and made it their identity. However, there are also people who love everything new and jump onto the latest hype too. They try new things but then immediately advocate it without merit. Where are the sane people in the middle?
- dns_snek 2y agoAs an experienced software developer, I paid for ChatGPT for a couple of months, I trialed Gemini Pro for a couple of months, and I've used the current version of Claude. I'd be happy if LLMs could produce working code as often and as quickly as the evangelist claim, but whenever I try to use LLM to work on my day to day tasks, I almost always walk away frustrated and disappointed - and most of my work is boring on technical merits, I'm not writing novel comp-sci algorithms or cryptography libraries. Every time I say this, I'm painted as some luddite who just hates change when the reality is that no, current LLMs are just not fit for many of the purposes they're being evangelized for. I'd love nothing more than to be a 2x developer on my side projects, but it just hasn't happened and it's not for the lack of trying or open mindedness. edit: I've never actually seen any LLM-driven developers work in real time. Are there any live coding channels that could convince the skeptics what we're missing out on something revolutionary?
- alightsoul 2y agoI have, in person. Their code requires a lot of cleanup and then there's the AI pit of death they often are not able to crawl out of due to... Mostly language differences. They don't know enough English to look stuff up and figure out how to fix things. Programming resources in other languages are pretty much non-existent
- harrall 2y agoYou're the middle ground I was talking about. You tried it. You know where it works and where it doesn't. I've used LLM to generate code samples and my IDE (IntelliJ) uses an LLM for auto-suggestions. That's mostly about it for me.
- 2y ago
- travisporter 2y ago> I got into this profession simply because I could Ctrl-Z to the previous step much more easily than my then favourite chemical engineering goals. That is interesting. Asking as a complete ignoramus - is there not a way to do this now? Like start off with a 100 of reagent and at every step use a bit and discard if wrong
- ssivark 2y agoBut for every step that turns out to be "correct" you now have to go back and redo that in your held-out sample anyways. So it's not like you get to save on repeating the work -- IIUC you just changed it from depth-first execution order to breadth-first execution order.
- Vampiero 2y ago> International Islamic University Chittagong ??? What's up with native English speakers and random acronyms of stuff that isn't said that often? YMMV, IIUC, IANAL, YSK... Just say it and save everyone else a google search.
- HappMacDonald 2y agoSo just to make sure I'm on the same page: you're bemoaning how commonly people abbreviate uncommon sayings?
- Vampiero 2y agoI'm bemoaning the fact that I have to google random acronyms every time an American wants to say the most basic shit as if everyone on the internet knows their slang and weird four letter abbreviations And googling those acronyms usually returns unrelated shit unless you go specifically to urban dictionary And then it's "If I understand correctly". Oh. Of course. He couldn't be arsed to type that
- amenhotep 2y ago
- dboreham 2y agoCalculators vs slide rules.
- numpad0 2y agoI can't relate to this comment at all. Doesn't feel like what's said in GP either. IMO, LLMs are super fast predictive input and hallucinatory unzip; files to be decompressed don't have to exist yet, but input has to be extremely deliberate and precise. You have to have a valid formula that gives the resultant array that don't require no more than 100 IQ to comprehend, and then they unroll it for you into the whole code. They don't reward trial and error that much. They don't seem to help outsiders like 3D printers did, either. It is indeed a discriminatory tool as in it mistreats amateurs. And, by the way, it's also increasingly obvious to me that assuming pro-AI posture more than what you would from purely rational and utilitarian standpoint triggers a unique mode of insanity in humans. People seem to contract a lot of negativity doing it. Don't do that.