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I would argue that they are never led astray by chatting, but rather by accepting the projection of their own prompt passed through the model as some kind of tr
by klntsky 1y ago
I would argue that they are never led astray by chatting, but rather by accepting the projection of their own prompt passed through the model as some kind of truth.
When talking with reasonable people, they have an intuition of what you want even if you don't say it, because there is a lot of non-verbal context. LLMs lack the ability to understand the person, but behave as if they had it.
- marcosdumay 1y agoMost of the times, people are led astray by following average advice on exceptional circumstances. People with a minimum amount of expertise stop asking for advice for average circumstances very quickly.
- sho_hn 1y agoThis is right on the money. I use LLMs when I am reasonably confident the problem I am asking it is well-represented in the training data set and well within its capabilities (this has increased over time). This means I use it as a typing accelerator when I already know what I want most of the time, not for advice. As an exploratory tool sometimes, when I am sure others have solved a problem frequently, to have it regurgitate the average solution back at me and take a look. In those situations I never accept the diff as-is and do the integration manually though, to make sure my brain still learns along and I still add the solution to my own mental toolbox.
- lanstin 1y agoI mostly program in Python and Go, either services, API coordination (e.g. re-encrypt all the objects in an S3 bucket) or data analysis. But now I keep making little MPEGs or web sites without having to put in all that crap boiler plate from Javascript. My stuff outputs JSON files or CVS files and then I ask the LLM "Given a CVS file with this structure, please make a web site in python that makes a spread-sheet type UI with each column being sortable and a link to the raw data" and it just works.
- sigmoid10 1y agoIt's mostly a question of experience. I've been writing software long enough that when I give chat models some code and a problem, I can immediately tell if they understood it or if they got hooked on something unrelated. But junior devs will have a hell of a hard time, because the raw code quality that LLMs generate is usually top notch, even if the functionality is completely off.
- daveguy 1y ago> the raw code quality that LLMs generate is usually top notch, even if the functionality is completely off. I'm not even sure what this is supposed to mean. It doesn't make syntax errors? Code that doesn't have the correct functionality is obviously not "top notch".
- lillecarl 1y agoNo syntax errors, good error handling and such. Just because it implemented the wrong function doesn't mean the function is bad.
- shrewduser 1y agoi wish i could do that in an interview.
- sigmoid10 1y agoHigh quality code is not just correct syntax. In fact if the syntax is wrong, it wouldn't be low quality, it simply wouldn't work. Even interns could spot that by running it. But in professional software development environments, you have many additional code requirements like readability, maintainability, overall stability or general good practice patterns. I've seen good engineers deliver high quality code that was still wrong because of some design oversight or misunderstanding - the exact same thing you see from current LLMs. Often you don't even know what is wrong with an approach until you see it cause a problem. But you should still deliver high quality code in the meantime if you want to be good at your job.
- traceroute66 1y ago> When talking with reasonable people When talking with reasonable people, they will tell you if they don't understand what you're saying. When talking with reasonable people, they will tell you if they don't know the answer or if they are unsure about their answer. LLMs do none of that. They will very happily, and very confidently, spout complete bullshit at you. It is essentially a lotto draw as to whether the answer is hallucinated, completely wrong, subtly wrong, not ideal, sort of right or correct. An LLM is a bit like those spin the wheel game shows on TV really.
- bbarn 1y agoThey will also not be offended or harbor ill will when you completely reject their "pull request" and rephrase the requirements.
- the_af 1y agoThey will also keep going in circles when you rephrase the requirements, unless with every prompt you keep adding to it and mentioning everything they've already suggested that got rejected. While humans occasionally also do this (hey, short memories), LLMs are infuriatingly more prone to it. A typical interaction with an LLM: "Hey, how do I do X in Y?" "That's a great question! A good way to do X in Y is Z!" "No, Z doesn't work in Y. I get this error: 'Unsupported operation Z'." "I apologize for making this mistake. You're right to point out Z doesn't work in Y. Let's use W instead!" "Unfortunately, I cannot use W for company policy reasons. Any other option?" "Understood: you cannot use W due to company policy. Why not try to do Z?" "I just told you Z isn't available in Y." "In that case, I suggest you do W." "Like I told you, W is unacceptable due to company policy. Neither W nor Z work." ... "Let's do this. First, use Z [...]"