3 ms·

I've been programming for a few decades. I love LLMs. They make tedious things quick. Help me resolve gnarly issues. Make short work of writing unit tests. Gene

I've been programming for a few decades. I love LLMs. They make tedious things quick. Help me resolve gnarly issues. Make short work of writing unit tests. Generate oodles of boilerplate at will. Etc. It makes me more productive and less reluctant to take on risky things. By risky I mean things that formerly would have likely derailed my busy schedule because I'd get side tracked for to long and would have to de-prioritize more important stuff. Anyway, resistance is futile. You will be assimilated ... or retired. The reality of our job is that new generations are going to come in and they'll be using all the latest tools and gadgets. That's nothing new. And I'm part of a generation that in a decade or two will be mostly on the sidelines enjoying retirement. So, I'm well aware that progress isn't going to stop over my whining and grumbling. It annoys me when I catch myself doing that. I want to be better than that. LLMs are part of the job now. They are tools. And tools are only as good as the people wielding them. So, skill up and learn. It's not like it's very hard. If you are getting poor results, you might be doing it wrong. Figure it out; part of the job. Your mileage may vary. But there are a lot of tools and chances are you just haven't found the right one yet. Also, if some tool/llm limitation is blocking getting good results for something, wait 3 months and try again. The pace of progress is ridiculous currently. Or better yet: become part of the solution and make your own tools. This stuff is stupidly easy. It's prompt engineering with some trivial plumbing around them mostly. And you can generate the plumbing (what, you were going to do that manually?). That's why there are so many AI tools popping up right now. Most of them won't survive very long. But there are some good ideas lurking there.

dingnuts 2y ago
I've been programming for a few decades. I hate LLMs. They generate oodles of buggy shite that I have to fix by hand. They frequently steal my time and make me less productive because people on this site say I have to learn them or retire, and then I waste time looking up the details the bot got wrong. They're a slot machine and the people who think they are good are justifying an addiction and sunk costs. So retire me, I guess. I'm probably younger than you, but I'm almost ready to retire because I'm cheap and I don't buy into expensive fads, so I'm almost ready to cash out of this nightmare except then you realize the valuations of anthropic etc are propping up the whole economy and doing so on the promise that LLMs are going to deliver AGI! LLMs are marginally useful in some contexts. But I have seen absolutely nothing -- nothing -- to justify the costs or the valuations of these companies. They are definitely not AGI and before you accuse me of moving the goalposts, the AI companies are the ones promising this. It's a bubble. It's easy to get started. Good luck building a real product with just AI though. Good luck with that. If you turn out to be right I will happily exit this God forsaken industry. Lord free me from silicon valley; I liked computers. Not this. Not these people.
- bluGill 2y ago
  The real answer is probably somewhere between the two. There is value in AI - and the versions that will come up in the future will be better. However it isn't nearly as valuable as the advocates say either. I've given up on the current rounds, but I'm still going to keep watching for when they get better. They might or might not get enough better before I retire (I'm likely older than you), but there are a lot of things they can do better. I have no idea how hard those things are.
  - parliament32 2y ago
    I'd like to agree with you and remain optimistic, but so much tech has promised the moon and stagnated into oblivion that I just don't have any optimism left to give. I don't know if you're old enough, but remember when speech-to-text was the next big thing? DragonSpeak was released in 1997, everyone was losing their minds about dictating letters/documents in MS Word, and we were promised that THIS would be the key interface for computing evermore. And.. 27 years later, talking to the latest Siri, it makes just as many mistakes as it did back then. In messenger applications people are sending literal voice notes -- audio clips -- back and forth because dictation is so unreliable. And audio clips are possibly the worst interface for communication ever (no searching, etc). Remember how blockchain was going to change the world? Web3? IoT? Etc etc. I've been through enough of these cycles to understand that, while the AI gimmick is cool and all, we're probably at the local maximum. The reliability won't improve much from here (hallucinations etc), while the costs to run it will stay high. The final tombstone will be when the AI companies stop running at a loss and actually charge for the massive costs associated with running these models.

dingnuts 2y ago

I've been programming for a few decades. I hate LLMs. They generate oodles of buggy shite that I have to fix by hand. They frequently steal my time and make me less productive because people on this site say I have to learn them or retire, and then I waste time looking up the details the bot got wrong. They're a slot machine and the people who think they are good are justifying an addiction and sunk costs. So retire me, I guess. I'm probably younger than you, but I'm almost ready to retire because I'm cheap and I don't buy into expensive fads, so I'm almost ready to cash out of this nightmare except then you realize the valuations of anthropic etc are propping up the whole economy and doing so on the promise that LLMs are going to deliver AGI! LLMs are marginally useful in some contexts. But I have seen absolutely nothing -- nothing -- to justify the costs or the valuations of these companies. They are definitely not AGI and before you accuse me of moving the goalposts, the AI companies are the ones promising this. It's a bubble. It's easy to get started. Good luck building a real product with just AI though. Good luck with that. If you turn out to be right I will happily exit this God forsaken industry. Lord free me from silicon valley; I liked computers. Not this. Not these people.

bluGill 2y ago
The real answer is probably somewhere between the two. There is value in AI - and the versions that will come up in the future will be better. However it isn't nearly as valuable as the advocates say either. I've given up on the current rounds, but I'm still going to keep watching for when they get better. They might or might not get enough better before I retire (I'm likely older than you), but there are a lot of things they can do better. I have no idea how hard those things are.
- parliament32 2y ago
  I'd like to agree with you and remain optimistic, but so much tech has promised the moon and stagnated into oblivion that I just don't have any optimism left to give. I don't know if you're old enough, but remember when speech-to-text was the next big thing? DragonSpeak was released in 1997, everyone was losing their minds about dictating letters/documents in MS Word, and we were promised that THIS would be the key interface for computing evermore. And.. 27 years later, talking to the latest Siri, it makes just as many mistakes as it did back then. In messenger applications people are sending literal voice notes -- audio clips -- back and forth because dictation is so unreliable. And audio clips are possibly the worst interface for communication ever (no searching, etc). Remember how blockchain was going to change the world? Web3? IoT? Etc etc. I've been through enough of these cycles to understand that, while the AI gimmick is cool and all, we're probably at the local maximum. The reliability won't improve much from here (hallucinations etc), while the costs to run it will stay high. The final tombstone will be when the AI companies stop running at a loss and actually charge for the massive costs associated with running these models.