5 ms·
That lonely/downtime section at the end is a giant red flag for me. It looks like the sort of nonproductive yak-shaving you do when you're stuck or avoiding an
by bcoates 2y ago
That lonely/downtime section at the end is a giant red flag for me.
It looks like the sort of nonproductive yak-shaving you do when you're stuck or avoiding an unpleasant task--coasting, fooling around incrementally with your LLM because your project's fucked and you psychologically need some sense of progress.
The opposite of this is burnout--one of the things they don't tell you about successful projects with good tools is they induce much more burnout than doomed projects. There's a sort of Amdahl's Law in effect, where all the tooling just gives you more time to focus on the actual fundamentals of the product/project/problem you’re trying to address, which is stressful and mentally taxing even when it works.
Fucking around with LLM coding tools, otoh, is very fun, and like constantly clean-rebuilding your whole (doomed) project, gives you both some downtime and a sense of forward momentum--look how much the computer is chugging!
The reality testing to see if the tool is really helping is to sit down with a concrete goal and a (near) hard deadline. Every time I've tried to use an LLM under these conditions it just fails catastrophically--I don't just get stuck, I realize how basically every implicit decision embedded in the LLM output has an unacceptably high likelihood of being wrong, and I have an amount of debug cycles ahead of me exceeding the time to throw it all away and do it without the LLM by, like, an order of magnitude.
I'm not an LLM-coding hater and I've been doing AI stuff that's worked for decades, but current offerings I've tried aren't even close to productive compared to searching for code that already exists on the web.
- getnormality 2y agoIt sounds like LLMs are the new futzing with emacs configuration.
- wilkystyle 2y agoOld and busted: Futzing around with my Emacs configuration. New hotness: Having an LLM do it for me.
- krupan 2y agoSeriously!! Coding with LLM's is marketed as a huge time saver, but every time I've tried, it hasn't been. I'm told I just need to put in the time (ironic, no?) to learn to use the LLM properly. Why don't I just use that time to learn to write code better myself?
- anon7000 2y agoIt’s not really ironic. You could spend a couple hours making yourself twice as good as using AI tools, or a couple hours making yourself like .1% of a better programmer, assuming you’re not banging your head against the wall anyways. It’s one of those things where a little upskilling can make a big impact. So many things in life need a bit of practice before they’re useful to you. For starters, you need to change the default prompt in your editor to make it do what you want. If it does something annoying or weird, put it in the prompt to not take that approach. For me, that was absurdly long, useless explanations. And now it’s short and sweet.
- mdrzn 2y agoSeriously!! Cars are marketed as a huge time saver, but every time I’ve tried one, they haven’t been. I’m told I just need to put in the time (ironic, no?) to learn to drive properly. Why don’t I just use that time to train my legs and run faster instead?
- krupan 2y agoI think the difference here is it is not at all obvious to me that an LLM is a force multiplier on same the order as cars to legs. Cars are pretty easy to observe in action doing what they promise to do. Driving a car is a very straightforward, mechanical, repeatable, intuitive operation. Working with an LLM is not repeatable or straightforward. I'm short, your analogy is not helping me
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- triyambakam 2y agoIt's more like waiting for the code to compile (or node_modules to install before npm improved)
- flir 2y ago> constantly clean-rebuilding your whole (doomed) project, gives you both some downtime and a sense of forward momentum ouch. You've thought about this, haven't you? Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
- khqc 2y agoI guess you're not a big fan of rubber duck debugging then? Whenever I get stuck I like to ask myself a bunch of questions and thought experiments to get a better understanding of the problem/project, and with LLMs I'm forced to spell out each one of these questions/experiments coherently, which ends up being great documentation later on. I think LLMs are great if you're actually interested in the fundamentals of your problem/project, otherwise it just turns into a sinkhole that sucks you in.
- bcoates 2y agoSure, but I just use OneNote, the company wiki, or like physical sticky notes for that. I'm not seeing the value of having the LLM give feedback aside from entertainment