5 ms·
This is the exact same issue that I've had trying to use LLMs for anything that needs to be precise such as multi-step data pipelines. The code it produces will
by samtp 1y ago
This is the exact same issue that I've had trying to use LLMs for anything that needs to be precise such as multi-step data pipelines. The code it produces will look correct and produce a result that seems correct. But when you do quality checks on the end data, you'll notice that things are not adding up.
So then you have to dig into all this overly verbose code to identify the 3-4 subtle flaws with how it transformed/joined the data. And these flaws take as much time to identify and correct as just writing the whole pipeline yourself.
- nemomarx 1y agoI think it's basically equivalent to giving that prompt to a low paid contractor coder and hoping their solution works out. At least the turnaround time is faster? But normally you would want a more hands on back and forth to ensure the requirements actually capture everything, validation and etc that the results are good, layers of reviews right
- samtp 1y agoIt seems to be a mix between hiring an offshore/low level contractor and playing a slot machine. And by that I mean at least with the contractor you can pretty quickly understand their limitations and see a pattern in the mistakes they make. While an LLM is obviously faster, the mistakes are seemingly random so you have to examine the result much more than you would with a contractor (if you are working on something that needs to be exact).
- dingnuts 1y agothe slot machine is apt. insert tokens, pull lever, ALMOST get a reward. Think: I can start over, manually, or pull the lever again. Maybe I'll get a prize if I pull it again... and of course, you pay whether the slot machine gives a prize or not. Between the slot machine psychological effect and sunk cost fallacy I have a very hard time believing the anecdotes -- and my own experiences -- with paid LLMs. Often I say, I'd be way more willing to use and trust and pay for these things if I got my money back for output that is false.
- sethops1 1y agoIf the contractor is producing unusable code, they won't be my contractor anymore.
- torginus 1y agoI'll get into hot water with this, but I still think LLMs do not think like humans do - as in the code is not a result of a trying to recreate a correct thought process in a programming language, but some sort of statistically most likely string that matches the input requirements, I used to have a non-technical manager like this - he'd watch out for the words I (and other engineers) said and in what context, and would repeat them back mostly in accurate word contexts. He sounded remarkably like he knew what he was talking about, but would occasionally make a baffling mistake - like mixing up CDN and CSS. LLMs are like this, I often see Cursor with Claude making the same kind of strange mistake, only to catch itself in the act, and fix the code (but what happens when it doesn't)
- marcellus23 1y agoI don't think you'll get into hot water for that. Anthropomorphizing LLMs is an easy way to describe and think about them, but anyone serious about using LLMs for productivity is aware they don't actually think like people, and run into exactly the sort of things you're describing.
- vidarh 1y agoI think that if people say LLMs can never be made to think, that is bordering on a religious belief - it'd require humans to exceed the Turing computable (note also that saying they never can is very different from believing current architectures never will - it's entirely reasonable to believe it will take architectural advances to make it practically feasible). But saying they aren't thinking yet or like humans is entirely uncontroversial. Even most maximalists would agree at least with the latter, and the former largely depends on definitions. As someone who uses Claude extensively, I think of it almost as a slightly dumb alien intelligence - it can speak like a human adult, but makes mistakes a human adult generally wouldn't, and that combinstion breaks the heuristics we use to judge competency,and often lead people to overestimate these models. Claude writes about half of my code now, so I'm overall bullish on LLMs, but it saves me less than half of my time. The savings improve as I learn how to better judge what it is competent at, and where it merely sounds competent and needs serious guardrails and oversight, but there's certainly a long way to go before it'd make sense to argue they think like humans.
- stpedgwdgfhgdd 1y agoIn my experience using small steps and a lot of automated tests work very well with CC. Don’t go for these huge prompts that have a complete feature in it. Remember the title “attention is all you need”? Well you need to pay a lot of attention to CC during these small steps and have a solid mental model of what it is building.
- samtp 1y agoYeah but once you break things down into small enough steps you might as well just code it yourself.
- MattSayar 1y agoI just wrote a post on my site where the LLM had trouble with 1) clicking a button, 2) taking a screenshot, 3) repeat. The non-deterministic nature of LLMs is both a feature and a bug. That said, read/correct can sometimes be a preferable workflow to create/debug, especially if you don't know where to start with creating.
- casey2 1y agoIt's more likely that, because you didn't do the work, you haven't already justified the flaws to yourself.