4 ms·

They'll never be fit for purpose. They're a technological dead-end for anything like what people are usually throwing them at, IMO.

zer00eyz 1y ago
I will give you an example of where you are dead wrong, and one where the article is spot on (without diving into historic artifacts). I run HomeAssistant, I don't get to play/use it every day. Here, LLM's excel at filling in the (legion) of blanks in both the manual and end user devices. There is a large body of work for it to summarize and work against. I also play with SBC's. Many of these are "fringe" at best. LLM's are as you say "not fit for purpose". What kind of development you are using LLM's for will determine your experience with them. The tool may or may not live up to the hype depending how "common", well documented and "frequent" your issue is. Once you start hitting these "walls" you realize that no, real reason, leaps of inference and intelligence are still far away.
- SecuredMarvin 1y ago
  I also made this experience. As long as the public level of knowledge is high, LLMs are massively helpful. Otherwise not so much and still hallucinating. It does not matter if you think highly of this public knowledge. QFT, QED and Gravity are fine, AD emulation on SAMBA, or Atari Basic not so much. If I would program Atari Basic, after finishing my Atari Emulator on my C64, I would learn the environment and test my assumptions. Single shot LLMs questions won't do it. A strong agent loop could probably. I believe that LLMs are yanking the needle to 80%. This level is easy achievable for professionals of the trade and this level is beyond the ability of beginners. LLMs are really powerful tools here. But if you are trying for 90% LLMs are always trying to keep you down. And if you are trying for 100%, new, fringe or exotic LLMs are a disaster because they do not learn and do not understand, even while being inside the token window. We learn that knowledge, (power) and language proficiency are an indicator for crystalline but not fluid intelligence
  - otabdeveloper4 1y ago
    > yanking the needle to 80% 80 percent of what, exactly? A software developer's job isn't to write code, it's understanding poorly-specified requirements. LLMs do nothing for that unless your requirements are already public on Stackoverflow and Github. (And in that case, do you really need an LLM to copy-paste for you?)
  - zer00eyz 1y ago
    > fluid intelligence How about basic intelligence. Kids logic puzzles. https://daydreampuzzles.com/logic-puzzles/ https://daydreampuzzles.com/logic-puzzles/ LLM's whiffing hard on these sorts of puzzles is just amusing. It gets even better if you change the clues from innocent things like "driving tests" or "day care pickup" to things that it doesn't really want to speak about. War crimes, suicide, dictators and so on. Or just flat out make up words whole cloth to use as "activates" in the puzzles.
motorest 1y ago
> They'll never be fit for purpose. They're a technological dead-end for anything like what people are usually throwing them at, IMO. This comment is detached from reality. LLMs in general have been proven to be effective at even creating complete, fully working and fully featured projects from scratch. You need to provide the necessary context and use popular technologies with enough corpus to allow the LLM to know what to do. If one-shot approaches fail, a few iterations are all it takes to bridge the gap. I know that to be a fact because I do it on a daily basis.
- otabdeveloper4 1y ago
  > because I do it on a daily basis Cool. How many "complete, fully working" products have you released? Must be in the hundreds now, right?
  - motorest 1y ago
    > Cool. How many "complete, fully working" products have you released? Fully featured? One, so far. I also worked on small backing services, and a GUI application to visualize the data provided by a backing service. I lost count of the number of API testing projects I vibe-coded. I have a few instruction files that help me vibecode API test suites from the OpenAPI specs. Postman collections work even better. And I'm far from an expert in the field. What point were you trying to make?
    - otabdeveloper4 1y ago
      > What point were you trying to make? The point is that software developers can't evaluate their own work. (Especially the kind of n00b developers that use LLMs.) You initially made wild claims about insane productivity gains that turned out to be just one small product and a lot of wasted time under scrutiny. (Asking LLMs to write tests is a waste of time. LLMs can't evaluate risks, which is the only reason to write tests in the first place.)
    - jeltz 1y ago
      If you are far from an expert in the field maybe you should refrain from commenting so strongly because some people here actually are experts. So you have built a few small PoCs, does not tell us much.

zer00eyz 1y ago

I will give you an example of where you are dead wrong, and one where the article is spot on (without diving into historic artifacts). I run HomeAssistant, I don't get to play/use it every day. Here, LLM's excel at filling in the (legion) of blanks in both the manual and end user devices. There is a large body of work for it to summarize and work against. I also play with SBC's. Many of these are "fringe" at best. LLM's are as you say "not fit for purpose". What kind of development you are using LLM's for will determine your experience with them. The tool may or may not live up to the hype depending how "common", well documented and "frequent" your issue is. Once you start hitting these "walls" you realize that no, real reason, leaps of inference and intelligence are still far away.

SecuredMarvin 1y ago
I also made this experience. As long as the public level of knowledge is high, LLMs are massively helpful. Otherwise not so much and still hallucinating. It does not matter if you think highly of this public knowledge. QFT, QED and Gravity are fine, AD emulation on SAMBA, or Atari Basic not so much. If I would program Atari Basic, after finishing my Atari Emulator on my C64, I would learn the environment and test my assumptions. Single shot LLMs questions won't do it. A strong agent loop could probably. I believe that LLMs are yanking the needle to 80%. This level is easy achievable for professionals of the trade and this level is beyond the ability of beginners. LLMs are really powerful tools here. But if you are trying for 90% LLMs are always trying to keep you down. And if you are trying for 100%, new, fringe or exotic LLMs are a disaster because they do not learn and do not understand, even while being inside the token window. We learn that knowledge, (power) and language proficiency are an indicator for crystalline but not fluid intelligence
- otabdeveloper4 1y ago
  > yanking the needle to 80% 80 percent of what, exactly? A software developer's job isn't to write code, it's understanding poorly-specified requirements. LLMs do nothing for that unless your requirements are already public on Stackoverflow and Github. (And in that case, do you really need an LLM to copy-paste for you?)
- zer00eyz 1y ago
  > fluid intelligence How about basic intelligence. Kids logic puzzles. https://daydreampuzzles.com/logic-puzzles/ https://daydreampuzzles.com/logic-puzzles/ LLM's whiffing hard on these sorts of puzzles is just amusing. It gets even better if you change the clues from innocent things like "driving tests" or "day care pickup" to things that it doesn't really want to speak about. War crimes, suicide, dictators and so on. Or just flat out make up words whole cloth to use as "activates" in the puzzles.

motorest 1y ago

> They'll never be fit for purpose. They're a technological dead-end for anything like what people are usually throwing them at, IMO. This comment is detached from reality. LLMs in general have been proven to be effective at even creating complete, fully working and fully featured projects from scratch. You need to provide the necessary context and use popular technologies with enough corpus to allow the LLM to know what to do. If one-shot approaches fail, a few iterations are all it takes to bridge the gap. I know that to be a fact because I do it on a daily basis.

otabdeveloper4 1y ago
> because I do it on a daily basis Cool. How many "complete, fully working" products have you released? Must be in the hundreds now, right?
- motorest 1y ago
  > Cool. How many "complete, fully working" products have you released? Fully featured? One, so far. I also worked on small backing services, and a GUI application to visualize the data provided by a backing service. I lost count of the number of API testing projects I vibe-coded. I have a few instruction files that help me vibecode API test suites from the OpenAPI specs. Postman collections work even better. And I'm far from an expert in the field. What point were you trying to make?
  - otabdeveloper4 1y ago
    > What point were you trying to make? The point is that software developers can't evaluate their own work. (Especially the kind of n00b developers that use LLMs.) You initially made wild claims about insane productivity gains that turned out to be just one small product and a lot of wasted time under scrutiny. (Asking LLMs to write tests is a waste of time. LLMs can't evaluate risks, which is the only reason to write tests in the first place.)
  - jeltz 1y ago
    If you are far from an expert in the field maybe you should refrain from commenting so strongly because some people here actually are experts. So you have built a few small PoCs, does not tell us much.