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There's some whistling past the graveyard in these comments. "You still need humans for the social element...", "LLMs are bad at debugging", "LLMs lead you astr

There's some whistling past the graveyard in these comments. "You still need humans for the social element...", "LLMs are bad at debugging", "LLMs lead you astray". And yeah, there's lots of truth in those assertions, but since I started playing with LLMs to generate code a couple of years ago they've made huge strides. I suspect that over the next couple of years the improvements won't be quite as large (Pareto Principle), but I do expect we'll still see some improvement. Was on r/fpga recently and mentioned that I had had a lot of success recently in getting LLMs to code up first-cut testbenches that allow you to simulate your FPGA/HDL design a lot quicker than if you were to write those testbenches yourself and my comment was met with lots of derision. But they hadn't even given it a try to form their conclusion that it just couldn't work.

bgwalter 1y ago
Yet you are working on your own replacement, while your colleagues are taking the prudent approach.
- nialse 1y ago
  Ahh, the “don’t disturb the status quo” argument. See, we are all working on our replacement, newer versions, products, services and knowledge always make the older obsolete. It is wise to work on your replacement, and even wiser to be in charge of and operate the replacement.
  - bgwalter 1y ago
    No, nothing fundamentally new is created. Programmers have always been obsessed with "new" tooling and processes to distract from that fact. "AI" is the latest iteration of snake oil that is foisted upon us by management. The problem is not "AI" per se, but the amount of of friction and productivity loss that comes with it. Most of the productivity loss comes from being forced to engage with it and push back against that nonsense. One has to learn the hype language, debunk it, etc. Why do you think IT has gotten better? Amazon had a better and faster website with far better search and products 20 years ago. No amount of "AI" will fix that.
    - nialse 1y ago
      Maybe I would be useful to zoom out a bit. We're in a time of technological change, and change its gonna. Maybe it isn't your job that will change, maybe it is? Maybe it's not even about you or what you do. More likely it's the processes that will change around you. Maybe it's not change for better or worse. Maybe it's just change. But it's gonna change.
  - palmotea 1y ago
    > It is wise to work on your replacement... Depends on the context. You have to keep in mind: it is not a goal of our society or economic system to provide you with a stable, rewarding job. In fact, the incentives are to take that away from you ASAP. Before software engineers go celebrate this tech, they need realize they're going to end up like rust-belt factory workers the day after the plant closed. They're not special, and society won't be any kinder to them. > ...and even wiser to be in charge of and operate the replacement. You'll likely only get to do that if your boss doesn't know about it.
    - nialse 1y ago
      > You have to keep in mind: it is not a goal of our society or economic system to provide you with a stable, rewarding job. In fact, the incentives are to take that away from you ASAP. We seem to agree as this is more or less exactly the my point. Striving to keep the status quo is a futile path. Eventually things change. Be ready. The best advice I've ever got work (and maybe even life) wise is to always have alternatives. If you don't have alternatives, you literally have no choice.
      - palmotea 1y ago
        > We seem to agree as this is more or less exactly the my point. Striving to keep the status quo is a futile path. Eventually things change. Be ready. The best advice I've ever got work (and maybe even life) wise is to always have alternatives. If you don't have alternatives, you literally have no choice. Those alternatives are going to be worse for you, because if they weren't, why didn't you switch already? And if a flood of your peers are pursing alternatives at the same time, you'll probably experience an even poorer outcome than you expected (e.g. everyone getting laid off and trying to make ends meet driving for Uber at the same time). Then, AI is really properly understood as a "fuck the white-collar middle-class" tech, and it's probably going to fuck up your backup plans at about the same time as it fucks up your status quo. You're also describing a highly individualistic strategy, for someone acting on his own. At this point, the correct strategy is probably collective action, which can at least delay and control the change to something more manageable. But software engineers have been too "special snowflake" about themselves to have laid the groundwork for that, and are acutely vulnerable.
- Jolter 1y ago
  Here’s the deal: if you won’t write your replacement, a competitor will do it and outprice your employer. Either way you’re out of a job. May be more prudent to adapt to the new tools and master them rather than be left behind? Do you want to be a jobless weaver, or an engineer building mechanical looms for a higher pay than the weaver got?
  - allturtles 1y ago
    I think it's the wrong analogy. The prompt engineer who uses the AI to make code maps to the poorly-paid, low-skill power loom machine tender. The "engineer" is the person who created the model. But it's also not totally clear to me that we'll need humans for that either, in the near future.
    - 91bananas 1y ago
      Not all engineering is creating models though, sometimes there are simpler problems to solve.
    - ori_b 1y ago
      At some point, we'll probably have these things write their own prompts, too.
    - Jolter 1y ago
      Still, the loom tending engineer got paid better than the weaver. Well, my prejudice says he did, don’t actually have the historical facts.
  - bgwalter 1y ago
    I want to be neither. I either want to continue being a software engineer who doesn't need a tricycle for the mind, or move to law or medicine; two professions that have successfully defended themselves against extreme versions of the kind of anxiety, obedience and self hate that is so prevalent among software engineers.
    - empath75 1y ago
- npteljes 1y ago
  Carteling doesn't work bottom-up. When changes begin (like this one with AI), one of the things an individual can do is to change course as fast as they can. There are other strategies as well, not evolving is also one, but some strategies yield better results than others. Not keeping up just worsens the chances, I have found.
  - asdff 1y ago
    It does when it is called unionizing, however for some reason software developers have a mental block towards the concept.
    - BlackSwanMan 1y ago
      [dead]
    - twodave 1y ago
      I would be much more in favor of them as a software developer if I felt the qualifications of other software developers were reliable. But they never have been, and today it’s worse than ever. So I think it’s important to weed some of that out before we start talking about making it harder to fire people.
      - sumeno 1y ago
        You're doing your boss's job for them by making this an engineer vs engineer thing instead of an engineer vs management thing.
        twodave 1y ago
        No, today I can tell my manager when someone sucks at their job, and if enough other people are saying the same thing then that engineer will either be given help so they stop sucking or be fired so they don’t subtract from the team. Because this happens fairly often I wouldn’t want to add a lot of friction to that process. Idk, maybe you can protect people from being laid off without also complicating performance-based firings.
- JeremyNT 1y ago
  I don't think that this should be downvoted because it raises a really important issue. I hate AI code assistants, not because they suck, but because they work. The writing is on the wall. If we aren't working on our own replacements, we'll be the ones replaced by somebody else's vibe code, and we have no labor unions that could plausibly fight back against this. So become a Vibe Coder and keep working, or take the "prudent" approach you mention - and become unemployed.
  - realusername 1y ago
    Personally I used them for a while and then just stopped using them because actually no, unfortunately those assistants don't work. They appear to work at first glance but there's so much babysitting needed that it's just not worth it. This "vibe coding" seems just another way to say that people spend more time refining the output of these tools over and over again that what they would normally code.
    - JeremyNT 1y ago
      I'm in this camp... today. But there's going to be an inflection point - soon - as things continue to improve. The industry is going to change rapidly. Now is the time to either get ready for that - by being ahead of the curve, at least by being familiar with the tooling - or switch careers and cede your job to somebody who will play ball. I don't like any of this, but I see it as inevitable.
      - suddenlybananas 1y ago
        You just said they worked one comment ago and now you agree that they don't?
        JeremyNT 1y ago
        I'm in the same camp in that I don't use them because they don't work well enough for my own tastes. But I know what I'm doing, and I'm picky. Clearly they do work in a general sense. People who don't want to code are making things that work this way right now! This isn't yet replacing me, but I'm certain it will relatively soon be the standard for how software is developed.
- dughnut 1y ago
  Do you want to work with LLMs or H1Bs and interns… choose wisely. Personally I’m thrilled that I can get trivial, one-off programs developed for a few cents and the cost of a clear written description of the problem. Engaging internal developers or consulting developers to do anything at all is a horrible experience. I would waste weeks on politics, get no guarantees, and waste thousands of dollars and still hear nonsense like, “you want a form input added to a web page? Aw shucks, that’s going to take at least another month” or “we expect to spend a few days a month maintaining a completely static code base” from some clown billing me $200/hr.
  - rsyring 1y ago
    You can work with consulting oriented engineers who get shit done with relatively little stress and significant productivity. Productivity enhanced by AI but not replaced by it. If interested, reach out to me.
cushychicken 1y ago
ChatGPT-4o is scary good at writing VHDL. Using it to prototype some low level controllers today, as a matter of fact!
- roflyear 1y ago
  It's better-than-senior at a some things, but worse-than-junior at a lot of things.
  - quantadev 1y ago
    It's more like better-than-senior 99% of the time. Makes mistakes 1% of the time. Most of the 'bad results' I've seen people struggle with ended up being the fault of the human, in the form of horrible context given to the AI or else ambiguous or otherwise flawed prompts. Any skilled developer with a decade of experience can write prompts that return back precisely what we wanted almost every single time. I do it all day long. "Claude 4" rarely messes up.
    - cushychicken 1y ago
      Same!
- UncleOxidant 1y ago
  Claude and Gemini are decent at it as well. I was surprised when I asked claude (and this was several months back) to come up with a testbench for some very old, poorly documented verilog. It did a very decent job for a first-cut testbench. It even collected common, recurring code into verilog tasks (functions) which really surprised me at the time.
  - cushychicken 1y ago
    Yes! It’s much better at using functional logic than I am - which I appreciate!
- Panzer04 1y ago
deleted 1y ago
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ch4s3 1y ago
It seems like LLMs made really big strides for a while but don't seem to be getting better recently, and in some ways recent models feel a bit worse. I'm seeing some good results generating test code, and some really bad results when people go to far with LLM use on new feature work. Base on what I've seen it seems like spinning up new projects and very basic features for web apps works really well, but that doesn't seem to generalize to refactoring or adding new features to big/old code bases. I've seen Claude and ChatGPT happily hallucinate whole APIs for D3 on multiple occasions, which should be really well represented in the training sets.
- empath75 1y ago
  the LLM's themselves are making marginal gains, but the tools for using LLMs productively are getting so much better.
  - dinfinity 1y ago
    This. MCP/tool usage in agentic mode is insanely powerful. Let the agent ingest a Gitlab issue, tell it how it can run commands, tests etc. in the local environment and half of the time it can just iterate towards a solution all by itself (but watching and intervening when it starts going the wrong way is still advisable). Recently I converted all the (Google Docs) documentation of a project to markdown files and added those to the workspace. It now indexes it with RAG and can easily find relevant bits of documentation, especially in agent mode. It really stresses the importance of getting your documentation and processes in order as well as making sure the tasks at hand are well-specified. It soon might be the main thing that requires human input or action.
    - max_on_hn 1y ago
      I 100% agree that documenting requirements will be the main human input to software development in the near future. In fact, I built an entirely headless coding agent for that reason: you put tasks in, you get PRs out, and you get journals of each run for debugging but it discourages micro-management so you stay in planning/documenting/architecting.
xhevahir 1y ago
This attitude is depressingly common in lots of professional, white-collar industries I'm afraid. I just came from the /r/law subreddit and was amazed at the kneejerk dismissal there of Dario Amodei's recent comments about legal work, and of those commenters who took them seriously. It's probably as much a coping mechanism as it is complacency, but, either way, it bodes very poorly for our future efforts at mitigating whatever economic and social upheaval is coming.
- garciasn 1y ago
  This is the response to most new technologies; folks simply don't want to accept the future before the ramifications truly hit. If technology folk cannot see the INCREDIBLE LEAP FORWARD made by LLMs since ChatGPT came on the market, they're not seeing the forest through the trees because their heads are buried in the sand. LLMs for coding are not even close to imperfect, yet, but the saturation curves are not flattening out; not by a long shot. We are living in a moment and we need to come to terms with it as the work continues to develop; and, we need to adapt and quickly in order to better understand what our place will become as this nascent tech continues its meteoric trajectory toward an entirely new world.
  - bgwalter 1y ago
    Adapt to your manager at bigcorp who is hyping the tech because it gives him something to do? No open source project is using the useless LLM shackles.
    - xandrius 1y ago
      As if you'd know if they did.
      - jdiff 1y ago
        Why would we not? If they were so effective, their effectiveness would be apparent, inarguable, and those making use of it would advertise it as a demonstration of just that. Even if there were some sort of social stigma against it, AI has enough proponents to produce copious amounts of counterarguments through evidence all on their own. Instead, we have a tiny handful of one-off events that were laboriously tuned and tweaked and massaged over extended periods of time, and a flood of slop in the form of broken patches, bloated and misleading issues, and nonsense bug bounty attempts.
layer8 1y ago
Programmers derided programming languages (too inefficient, too inflexible, too dumbing-down) when assembly was still the default. That phenomenon is at the same time entirely to be expected but also says little about the actual qualities of the new technology.
- skydhash 1y ago
  If you have something that generated 20 lines of assembly that takes 100x times more than the 2 lines of clever instructions you know, you'd have the same stance even if the higher level was easier to use. Then those kind of performance tricks ceases to matter. But reliability still do. And the reasons we use higher and higher level of programming languages is because they increase reliability and simplicity (at the cost of performance, but we're happy to pay those). LLMs output are unreliable and productivity is still not proven for an end to end engineering cycle.
  - layer8 1y ago
    You are arguing based on the merits of the technology, which is fine, but wasn't my point. I was arguing that derision tends to happen no matter what, and thus doesn't indicate much about the merits of the technology one way or the other.
    - sandspar 1y ago
      If the idea has staying power, then derision tends to be followed by hatred or anger. We're already seeing quite a bit of hatred and anger toward AI. I think even the people who are ridiculing AI currently would agree with the statement, "There will be more anger toward AI in the near future." As in, they already know it's here to stay, whether they admit it to themselves or not.
parliament32 1y 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.
- some_random 1y ago
  How can you possibly look at what LLMs are doing and the progress made in the last ~3 years and equate it to crypto bullshit? Also it's super weird to include IoT in there, seeing as it has become all but ubiquitous.
  - r14c 1y ago
    I'm not as bearish on AI, but its hard to tell if you can really extrapolate future performance based on past improvements. Personally, I'm more interested in the political angle. I can see that AI will be disruptive because there's a ton of money and possibly other political outcomes depending on it doing exactly that.
- oconnor663 1y ago
  > 27 years later, talking to the latest Siri, it makes just as many mistakes as it did back then Have you tried talking to ChatGPT voice mode? It's mind blowing. You just have a conversation with it. In any language. About anything. The other day I wanted to know about the difference between cast iron and wrought iron, and it turned into a 10 or 15 minute conversation. That's maybe a good example of an "easy" topic for LLMs (lots of textbooks for it to memorize), but the world is full of easy topics that I know nothing about!
retetr 1y ago
Unrelated, but is this a case of the Pareto Principle? (Admittedly the first time I'm hearing of it) Wherein 80% of the effect is caused by 20% of the input. Or is this more a case of diminishing returns? Where the initial results were incredible, but each succeeding iteration seems to be more disappointing?
- klabb3 1y ago
  Pareto is about diminishing returns. > but each succeeding iteration seems to be more disappointing This is because the scaling hypothesis (more data and more compute = gains) is plateauing, because all text data is used and compute is reaching diminishing returns for some reason I’m not smart enough to say why, but it is. So now we're seeing incremental core model advancements, variations and tuning in pre- and post training stages and a ton of applications (agents). This is good imo. But obviously it’s not good for delusional valuations based exponential growth.
  - energy123 1y ago
    We're seeing diminishing returns in benchmark space, which is partly an artefact of construction, not an absolutely true commentary on how things are progressing.
    - klabb3 1y ago
      Well yes but there is no better way to measure without resorting to pure hearsay. How would you make an accurate assessment of something so inherently vague?
      - energy123 1y ago
        Alter the benchmark space that we care about, for example focus only on ARC-AGI-2 and then suddenly the gains are no longer diminishing but are accelerating.
energy123 1y ago
Their confusion is your competitive advantage in the labor market.

bgwalter 1y ago

Yet you are working on your own replacement, while your colleagues are taking the prudent approach.

nialse 1y ago
Ahh, the “don’t disturb the status quo” argument. See, we are all working on our replacement, newer versions, products, services and knowledge always make the older obsolete. It is wise to work on your replacement, and even wiser to be in charge of and operate the replacement.
- bgwalter 1y ago
  No, nothing fundamentally new is created. Programmers have always been obsessed with "new" tooling and processes to distract from that fact. "AI" is the latest iteration of snake oil that is foisted upon us by management. The problem is not "AI" per se, but the amount of of friction and productivity loss that comes with it. Most of the productivity loss comes from being forced to engage with it and push back against that nonsense. One has to learn the hype language, debunk it, etc. Why do you think IT has gotten better? Amazon had a better and faster website with far better search and products 20 years ago. No amount of "AI" will fix that.
  - nialse 1y ago
    Maybe I would be useful to zoom out a bit. We're in a time of technological change, and change its gonna. Maybe it isn't your job that will change, maybe it is? Maybe it's not even about you or what you do. More likely it's the processes that will change around you. Maybe it's not change for better or worse. Maybe it's just change. But it's gonna change.
- palmotea 1y ago
  > It is wise to work on your replacement... Depends on the context. You have to keep in mind: it is not a goal of our society or economic system to provide you with a stable, rewarding job. In fact, the incentives are to take that away from you ASAP. Before software engineers go celebrate this tech, they need realize they're going to end up like rust-belt factory workers the day after the plant closed. They're not special, and society won't be any kinder to them. > ...and even wiser to be in charge of and operate the replacement. You'll likely only get to do that if your boss doesn't know about it.
  - nialse 1y ago
    > You have to keep in mind: it is not a goal of our society or economic system to provide you with a stable, rewarding job. In fact, the incentives are to take that away from you ASAP. We seem to agree as this is more or less exactly the my point. Striving to keep the status quo is a futile path. Eventually things change. Be ready. The best advice I've ever got work (and maybe even life) wise is to always have alternatives. If you don't have alternatives, you literally have no choice.
    - palmotea 1y ago
      > We seem to agree as this is more or less exactly the my point. Striving to keep the status quo is a futile path. Eventually things change. Be ready. The best advice I've ever got work (and maybe even life) wise is to always have alternatives. If you don't have alternatives, you literally have no choice. Those alternatives are going to be worse for you, because if they weren't, why didn't you switch already? And if a flood of your peers are pursing alternatives at the same time, you'll probably experience an even poorer outcome than you expected (e.g. everyone getting laid off and trying to make ends meet driving for Uber at the same time). Then, AI is really properly understood as a "fuck the white-collar middle-class" tech, and it's probably going to fuck up your backup plans at about the same time as it fucks up your status quo. You're also describing a highly individualistic strategy, for someone acting on his own. At this point, the correct strategy is probably collective action, which can at least delay and control the change to something more manageable. But software engineers have been too "special snowflake" about themselves to have laid the groundwork for that, and are acutely vulnerable.
Jolter 1y ago
Here’s the deal: if you won’t write your replacement, a competitor will do it and outprice your employer. Either way you’re out of a job. May be more prudent to adapt to the new tools and master them rather than be left behind? Do you want to be a jobless weaver, or an engineer building mechanical looms for a higher pay than the weaver got?
- allturtles 1y ago
  I think it's the wrong analogy. The prompt engineer who uses the AI to make code maps to the poorly-paid, low-skill power loom machine tender. The "engineer" is the person who created the model. But it's also not totally clear to me that we'll need humans for that either, in the near future.
  - 91bananas 1y ago
    Not all engineering is creating models though, sometimes there are simpler problems to solve.
  - ori_b 1y ago
    At some point, we'll probably have these things write their own prompts, too.
  - Jolter 1y ago
    Still, the loom tending engineer got paid better than the weaver. Well, my prejudice says he did, don’t actually have the historical facts.
- bgwalter 1y ago
  I want to be neither. I either want to continue being a software engineer who doesn't need a tricycle for the mind, or move to law or medicine; two professions that have successfully defended themselves against extreme versions of the kind of anxiety, obedience and self hate that is so prevalent among software engineers.
  - empath75 1y ago
npteljes 1y ago
Carteling doesn't work bottom-up. When changes begin (like this one with AI), one of the things an individual can do is to change course as fast as they can. There are other strategies as well, not evolving is also one, but some strategies yield better results than others. Not keeping up just worsens the chances, I have found.
- asdff 1y ago
  It does when it is called unionizing, however for some reason software developers have a mental block towards the concept.
  - BlackSwanMan 1y ago
    [dead]
  - twodave 1y ago
    I would be much more in favor of them as a software developer if I felt the qualifications of other software developers were reliable. But they never have been, and today it’s worse than ever. So I think it’s important to weed some of that out before we start talking about making it harder to fire people.
    - sumeno 1y ago
      You're doing your boss's job for them by making this an engineer vs engineer thing instead of an engineer vs management thing.
      - twodave 1y ago
        No, today I can tell my manager when someone sucks at their job, and if enough other people are saying the same thing then that engineer will either be given help so they stop sucking or be fired so they don’t subtract from the team. Because this happens fairly often I wouldn’t want to add a lot of friction to that process. Idk, maybe you can protect people from being laid off without also complicating performance-based firings.
JeremyNT 1y ago
I don't think that this should be downvoted because it raises a really important issue. I hate AI code assistants, not because they suck, but because they work. The writing is on the wall. If we aren't working on our own replacements, we'll be the ones replaced by somebody else's vibe code, and we have no labor unions that could plausibly fight back against this. So become a Vibe Coder and keep working, or take the "prudent" approach you mention - and become unemployed.
- realusername 1y ago
  Personally I used them for a while and then just stopped using them because actually no, unfortunately those assistants don't work. They appear to work at first glance but there's so much babysitting needed that it's just not worth it. This "vibe coding" seems just another way to say that people spend more time refining the output of these tools over and over again that what they would normally code.
  - JeremyNT 1y ago
    I'm in this camp... today. But there's going to be an inflection point - soon - as things continue to improve. The industry is going to change rapidly. Now is the time to either get ready for that - by being ahead of the curve, at least by being familiar with the tooling - or switch careers and cede your job to somebody who will play ball. I don't like any of this, but I see it as inevitable.
    - suddenlybananas 1y ago
      You just said they worked one comment ago and now you agree that they don't?
      - JeremyNT 1y ago
        I'm in the same camp in that I don't use them because they don't work well enough for my own tastes. But I know what I'm doing, and I'm picky. Clearly they do work in a general sense. People who don't want to code are making things that work this way right now! This isn't yet replacing me, but I'm certain it will relatively soon be the standard for how software is developed.
dughnut 1y ago
Do you want to work with LLMs or H1Bs and interns… choose wisely. Personally I’m thrilled that I can get trivial, one-off programs developed for a few cents and the cost of a clear written description of the problem. Engaging internal developers or consulting developers to do anything at all is a horrible experience. I would waste weeks on politics, get no guarantees, and waste thousands of dollars and still hear nonsense like, “you want a form input added to a web page? Aw shucks, that’s going to take at least another month” or “we expect to spend a few days a month maintaining a completely static code base” from some clown billing me $200/hr.
- rsyring 1y ago
  You can work with consulting oriented engineers who get shit done with relatively little stress and significant productivity. Productivity enhanced by AI but not replaced by it. If interested, reach out to me.

cushychicken 1y ago

ChatGPT-4o is scary good at writing VHDL. Using it to prototype some low level controllers today, as a matter of fact!

roflyear 1y ago
It's better-than-senior at a some things, but worse-than-junior at a lot of things.
- quantadev 1y ago
  It's more like better-than-senior 99% of the time. Makes mistakes 1% of the time. Most of the 'bad results' I've seen people struggle with ended up being the fault of the human, in the form of horrible context given to the AI or else ambiguous or otherwise flawed prompts. Any skilled developer with a decade of experience can write prompts that return back precisely what we wanted almost every single time. I do it all day long. "Claude 4" rarely messes up.
  - cushychicken 1y ago
    Same!
UncleOxidant 1y ago
Claude and Gemini are decent at it as well. I was surprised when I asked claude (and this was several months back) to come up with a testbench for some very old, poorly documented verilog. It did a very decent job for a first-cut testbench. It even collected common, recurring code into verilog tasks (functions) which really surprised me at the time.
- cushychicken 1y ago
  Yes! It’s much better at using functional logic than I am - which I appreciate!
Panzer04 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

ch4s3 1y ago

It seems like LLMs made really big strides for a while but don't seem to be getting better recently, and in some ways recent models feel a bit worse. I'm seeing some good results generating test code, and some really bad results when people go to far with LLM use on new feature work. Base on what I've seen it seems like spinning up new projects and very basic features for web apps works really well, but that doesn't seem to generalize to refactoring or adding new features to big/old code bases. I've seen Claude and ChatGPT happily hallucinate whole APIs for D3 on multiple occasions, which should be really well represented in the training sets.

empath75 1y ago
the LLM's themselves are making marginal gains, but the tools for using LLMs productively are getting so much better.
- dinfinity 1y ago
  This. MCP/tool usage in agentic mode is insanely powerful. Let the agent ingest a Gitlab issue, tell it how it can run commands, tests etc. in the local environment and half of the time it can just iterate towards a solution all by itself (but watching and intervening when it starts going the wrong way is still advisable). Recently I converted all the (Google Docs) documentation of a project to markdown files and added those to the workspace. It now indexes it with RAG and can easily find relevant bits of documentation, especially in agent mode. It really stresses the importance of getting your documentation and processes in order as well as making sure the tasks at hand are well-specified. It soon might be the main thing that requires human input or action.
  - max_on_hn 1y ago
    I 100% agree that documenting requirements will be the main human input to software development in the near future. In fact, I built an entirely headless coding agent for that reason: you put tasks in, you get PRs out, and you get journals of each run for debugging but it discourages micro-management so you stay in planning/documenting/architecting.

xhevahir 1y ago

This attitude is depressingly common in lots of professional, white-collar industries I'm afraid. I just came from the /r/law subreddit and was amazed at the kneejerk dismissal there of Dario Amodei's recent comments about legal work, and of those commenters who took them seriously. It's probably as much a coping mechanism as it is complacency, but, either way, it bodes very poorly for our future efforts at mitigating whatever economic and social upheaval is coming.

garciasn 1y ago
This is the response to most new technologies; folks simply don't want to accept the future before the ramifications truly hit. If technology folk cannot see the INCREDIBLE LEAP FORWARD made by LLMs since ChatGPT came on the market, they're not seeing the forest through the trees because their heads are buried in the sand. LLMs for coding are not even close to imperfect, yet, but the saturation curves are not flattening out; not by a long shot. We are living in a moment and we need to come to terms with it as the work continues to develop; and, we need to adapt and quickly in order to better understand what our place will become as this nascent tech continues its meteoric trajectory toward an entirely new world.
- bgwalter 1y ago
  Adapt to your manager at bigcorp who is hyping the tech because it gives him something to do? No open source project is using the useless LLM shackles.
  - xandrius 1y ago
    As if you'd know if they did.
    - jdiff 1y ago
      Why would we not? If they were so effective, their effectiveness would be apparent, inarguable, and those making use of it would advertise it as a demonstration of just that. Even if there were some sort of social stigma against it, AI has enough proponents to produce copious amounts of counterarguments through evidence all on their own. Instead, we have a tiny handful of one-off events that were laboriously tuned and tweaked and massaged over extended periods of time, and a flood of slop in the form of broken patches, bloated and misleading issues, and nonsense bug bounty attempts.

layer8 1y ago

Programmers derided programming languages (too inefficient, too inflexible, too dumbing-down) when assembly was still the default. That phenomenon is at the same time entirely to be expected but also says little about the actual qualities of the new technology.

skydhash 1y ago
If you have something that generated 20 lines of assembly that takes 100x times more than the 2 lines of clever instructions you know, you'd have the same stance even if the higher level was easier to use. Then those kind of performance tricks ceases to matter. But reliability still do. And the reasons we use higher and higher level of programming languages is because they increase reliability and simplicity (at the cost of performance, but we're happy to pay those). LLMs output are unreliable and productivity is still not proven for an end to end engineering cycle.
- layer8 1y ago
  You are arguing based on the merits of the technology, which is fine, but wasn't my point. I was arguing that derision tends to happen no matter what, and thus doesn't indicate much about the merits of the technology one way or the other.
  - sandspar 1y ago
    If the idea has staying power, then derision tends to be followed by hatred or anger. We're already seeing quite a bit of hatred and anger toward AI. I think even the people who are ridiculing AI currently would agree with the statement, "There will be more anger toward AI in the near future." As in, they already know it's here to stay, whether they admit it to themselves or not.

parliament32 1y 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.

some_random 1y ago
How can you possibly look at what LLMs are doing and the progress made in the last ~3 years and equate it to crypto bullshit? Also it's super weird to include IoT in there, seeing as it has become all but ubiquitous.
- r14c 1y ago
  I'm not as bearish on AI, but its hard to tell if you can really extrapolate future performance based on past improvements. Personally, I'm more interested in the political angle. I can see that AI will be disruptive because there's a ton of money and possibly other political outcomes depending on it doing exactly that.
oconnor663 1y ago
> 27 years later, talking to the latest Siri, it makes just as many mistakes as it did back then Have you tried talking to ChatGPT voice mode? It's mind blowing. You just have a conversation with it. In any language. About anything. The other day I wanted to know about the difference between cast iron and wrought iron, and it turned into a 10 or 15 minute conversation. That's maybe a good example of an "easy" topic for LLMs (lots of textbooks for it to memorize), but the world is full of easy topics that I know nothing about!

retetr 1y ago

Unrelated, but is this a case of the Pareto Principle? (Admittedly the first time I'm hearing of it) Wherein 80% of the effect is caused by 20% of the input. Or is this more a case of diminishing returns? Where the initial results were incredible, but each succeeding iteration seems to be more disappointing?

klabb3 1y ago
Pareto is about diminishing returns. > but each succeeding iteration seems to be more disappointing This is because the scaling hypothesis (more data and more compute = gains) is plateauing, because all text data is used and compute is reaching diminishing returns for some reason I’m not smart enough to say why, but it is. So now we're seeing incremental core model advancements, variations and tuning in pre- and post training stages and a ton of applications (agents). This is good imo. But obviously it’s not good for delusional valuations based exponential growth.
- energy123 1y ago
  We're seeing diminishing returns in benchmark space, which is partly an artefact of construction, not an absolutely true commentary on how things are progressing.
  - klabb3 1y ago
    Well yes but there is no better way to measure without resorting to pure hearsay. How would you make an accurate assessment of something so inherently vague?
    - energy123 1y ago
      Alter the benchmark space that we care about, for example focus only on ARC-AGI-2 and then suddenly the gains are no longer diminishing but are accelerating.

energy123 1y ago

Their confusion is your competitive advantage in the labor market.