4 ms·

It would be willfully ignorant to pretend that there's not an explosion of a novel and specific kind of stupidity, and to not handle it with due specificity.

• deleted 1y ago
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• WalterSear 1y ago
  I contend that, by far and away the biggest difference between entirely human-generated slop and AI-assisted stupidity is the irrational reaction that some people have to AI-assisted stuff.
  • hatefulmoron 1y ago
    Calling things "slop" is just begging the question. The real differentiating factor is that, in the past, "human-generated slop" at least took effort to produce. Perhaps, in the process of producing it, the human notices what's happening and reconsiders (or even better, improves it such that it's no longer "slop".) Claude has no such inhibitions. So, when you look at a big bunch of code that you haven't read yet, are you more or less confident when you find out an LLM wrote it?
    • WalterSear 1y ago
      I have pretty much the same amount of confidence when I receive AI generated or non-AI generated code to review: my confidence is based on the person guiding the LLM, and their ability to that. Much more so than before, I'll comfortably reject a PR that is hard to follow, for any reason, including size. IMHO, the biggest change that LLMs have brought to the table is that clean code and refactoring are no longer expensive, and should no longer be bargained for, neglected or given the lip service that they have received throughout most of my career. Test suites and documentation, too. (Given the nature of working with LLMs, I also suspect that clean, idiomatic code is more important than ever, since LLMs have presumably been trained on that, but this is just a personal superstition, that is probably increasingly false, but also feels harmless) The only time I think it is appropriate to land a large amount of code at once is if it is a single act of entirely brain dead refactoring, doing nothing new, such as renaming a single variable across an entire codebase, or moving/breaking/consolidating a single module or file. And there better be tests. Otherwise, get an LLM to break things up and make things easier for me to understand, for crying out loud: there are precious few reasons left not to make reviewing PRs as easy as possible. So, I posit that the emotional reaction from certain audiences is still the largest, most exhausting difference.
      • grey-area 1y ago
        clean code and refactoring are no longer expensive Are you contending that LLMs produce clean code?
        • WalterSear 1y ago
          They do, for many people. Perhaps you need to change your approach.
          • dmurray 1y ago
            If you can produce a clean design, the LLM can write the code.
            • fragmede 1y ago
              Unless you're doing something fabulously unique (at which point I'm jealous you get to work on such a thing), they're pretty good at cribbing the design of things if it's something that's been well documented online (canonically, a CRUD SaaS app, with minor UI modification to support your chosen niche).
              • WalterSear 1y ago
                And if you are doing something fabulously unique, the LLM can still write all the code around it, likely help with many of the components, give you at least a first pass at tests, and enable rapid, meaningful refactors after each feature PR.
            • WalterSear 1y ago
              I think maybe there's another step too - breaking the design up into small enough peices that the LLM can follow it, and you can understand the output.
              • TexanFeller 1y ago
    • fragmede 1y ago
      If you try and one shot it, sure, but if you question Claude, point out the errors of its ways, tell it to refactor and ultrathink, point out that two things have similar functionality and could be merged. It can write unhinged code with duplicate unused variable definitions that don't work, and it'll fix it up if you call it out, or you can just do it yourself. (cue questions of if, in that case, it would just be faster to do it yourself.)
      • hatefulmoron 1y ago
        I have a Claude max subscription. When I think of bad Claude code, I'm not thinking about unused variable definitions. I'm thinking about the times you turn on ultrathink, allow it to access tools and negotiate it's solution, and it still churns out an over complicated yet partially correct solution that breaks. I totally trust Claude to fix linting errors.
        • WalterSear 1y ago
          If you are getting garbage out, you are asking it for too much at once. Don't ask for solutions - ask for implementations.
          • hatefulmoron 1y ago
            Distinction without a difference. I'm talking about its output being insufficient, whatever word you want to use for output.
            • WalterSear 1y ago
              And I'm arguing that if the output wasn't sufficient, neither was your input. You could also be asking for too much in one go, though that's becoming less and less of a problem as LLMs improve.
              • hatefulmoron 1y ago
                You're proposing a truism: if you don't get a good result, it's either because your query is bad or because the LLM isn't good enough to provide a good result. Yes, that is how this works. I'm talking about the case where you're providing a good query and getting poor results. Claiming that this can be solved by more LLM conversations and ultrathink is cope.
    • HelloNurse 1y ago
      > Perhaps, in the process of producing it, the human notices what's happening and reconsiders (or even better, improves it such that it's no longer "slop".) Given the same ridiculously large and complex change, if it is handwritten only a seriously insensitive and arrogant crackpot could, knowing what's inside, submit it with any expectation that you accept it without a long and painful process instead of improving it to the best of their ability; on the other hand using LLM assistance even a mildly incompetent but valuable colleague or contributor, someone you care about, might underestimate the complexity and cost of what they didn't actually write and believe that there is nothing to improve.
  • exe34 1y ago
    Are you quite sure that's the only difference you can think of? Let me give you a hint: is there any difference in the volume for the same cost at all?
  • JoshTriplett 1y ago
    Many of the people who submit 9000-line AI-generated PRs today would, for the most part, not have submitted PRs at all before, or would not have made something that passes CI, or would not have built something that looks sufficiently plausible to make people spend time reviewing it.
    • WalterSear 1y ago
      9000-line PRs were never a good idea, have only been sufficiently plausible because we were forced to accept bad PR review practices. Coding was expensive and management beat us into LGTMing them into the codebase to keep the features churning. Those days are gone. Coding is cheap. The same LLMs that enable people to submit 9000 line PRs of chaos can be used to quickly turn them into more sensible work. If they genuinely can't do a better job, rejecting the PR is still the right response. Just push back.
    • HelloNurse 1y ago
      Most of those people should still keep their ignorance to themselves, without bothering actual programmers, like they did before LLM hype convinced them that "sufficiently plausible" is good enough. A similar trend: the popularity of electric scooters among youngsters who would otherwise walk, use public transport, or use decent vehicles increases accidents in cities.
      • JoshTriplett 1y ago
        I think my comment may have been misparsed. I was observing that one of the problems with LLMs is making it possible for people to produce 9000-line PRs they don't understand where previously they might have been gated by making something even remotely plausible that compiles or passes CI.
• rablackburn 1y ago
  > It would be willfully ignorant to pretend that there's not an explosion of a novel and specific kind of stupidity I 100% know what you mean, and largely agree, but you should check out the guidelines, specifically: > Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative. And like, the problem _is_ *bad*. A fun, on-going issue at work is trying to coordinate with a QA team who believe chatgpt can write css selectors for HTML elements that are not yet written. That same QA team deeply care about the spirit of their work, and are motivated by, the _very_ relatable sentiment of, you DONT FUCKING BREAK USER SPACE. Yeah, in the unbridled, chaotic, raging plasma that is our zeitgeist at the moment, I'm lucky enough to have people dedicating a significant portion of their life to trying to do quality assurance in the idiomatic, industry best-standard way. Blame the FUD, not my team. I would put to you that the observation that they do not (yet) grok what, for lack of a more specific universally understood term we are calling, "AI" (or LLMs if you are Fancy. But of course none of these labels are quite right). People need time to observe, and learn. And people are busy with /* gestures around vaguely at everything /*. So yes, we should acknowledge that long-winded trash PRs from AI are a new emergent problem, and yes, if we study the specific problem more closely we will almost certainly find ever more optimal approaches. Writing off the issue as "stupidity" is mean. In both senses.
  • watwut 1y ago
    I do not think that is being curmudgeonly. Instead, OP is absolutely right. We collectively used the strategy of "we pretend we are naively stupid and dont talk directly about issues" in multiple areas ... and it failed every single time in all of them. It never solves the problem, it just invites to bad/lazy/whatever actors to play semantic manipulative games.