30 ms·

"It’s very unsettling, then, to find myself feeling like I’m in danger of being left behind - like I’m missing something. As much as I don’t like it, so many pe

"It’s very unsettling, then, to find myself feeling like I’m in danger of being left behind - like I’m missing something. As much as I don’t like it, so many people have started going so hard on LLM-generated code in a way that I just can’t wrap my head around. ... ’ve been using Copilot - and more recently Claude - as a sort of “spicy autocomplete” and occasional debugging assistant for some time, but any time I try to get it to do anything remotely clever, it completely shits the bed. Don’t get me wrong, I know that a large part of this is me holding it wrong, but I find it hard to justify the value of investing so much of my time perfecting the art of asking a machine to write what I could do perfectly well in less time than it takes to hone the prompt. You’ve got to give it enough context - but not too much or it gets overloaded. You’re supposed to craft lengthy prompts that massage the AI assistant’s apparently fragile ego by telling it “you are an expert in distributed systems” as if it were an insecure, mediocre software developer. Or I could just write the damn code in less time than all of this takes to get working." Well there's your problem. Nobody does roll-based prompts anymore, and the entire point of coding agents is that they search your code base, do internet searches, and do web fetches, as well as launch sub agents and use todo lists, to fill and adjust their context exactly as needed themselves, without you having to do it manually. It's funny reading people planatively saying, "I just don't get how people could possibly be getting used out of these things. I don't understand it." And then they immediately reveal that it's not the baffling mystery or existential question there pretending it is for the purpose of this essay — the reason they don't understand it is that they literally don't understand the tech itself lol

skzizjj 8mo ago
[dead]
martin-t 8mo ago
This just shows that the models (not AI, statistical models of text used without consent) are not that smart, it's the tooling around them which allows using these models as a heuristic for brute force search of the solution space. Just last week, I prompted (not asked, it is not sentient) Claude to generate (not tell me or find out or any other anthropomorphization) whether I need to call Dispose on objects passed to me from 2 different libraries for industrial cameras. Being industrial, most people using them typically don't post their code publicly, which means the models have poor statistical coverage around these topics. The LLM generated a response which triggered the tooling around it to perform dozens of internet searches and based on my initial prompt, the search results and lots of intermediate tokens ("thinking"), generated a reply which said that yes, I need to call Dispose in both cases. It was phrased authoritatively and confidently. So I tried it, one library segfaulted, the other returned an exception on a later call. I performed my own internet search (a single one) and immediately found documentation from one of the libraries clearly stating I don't need to call Dispose. The other library being much more poorly documented didn't mention this explicitly but had examples which didn't call Dispose. I am sure if I used LLMs "properly" "agentically", then they would have triggered the tooling around them to build and execute the code, gotten the same results as me much faster, then equally authoritatively and confidently stated that I don't need to call Dispose. This is not thinking. It's a form of automation but not thinking and not intelligence.
- Isamu 8mo ago
  >brute force search of the solution space “Brute force” is mostly what makes it all work, and what is most disappointing to me currently. Including the brute force necessary to train an LLM, the vast quantity of text necessary to approach almost human quality, the massive scale of data centers necessary to deploy these models, etc. I am hoping this is a transitional period, where LLMs could be used to create better models that are more finesse and less brute force.
  - martin-t 8mo ago
    To be honest, these models being bad is what gives me some hope we can figure out how to approach a potential future AI as a society before it arrives. Because right now everything in the west is structured around rich people owning things they have not built while people who did the actual work with their hands and their minds are left in the dust. For a brief period of time (a couple decades), tech was a path for anyone from any background to get at least enough to not struggle. Not become truly rich as for that you need to own real estate or companies but having all your reasonable material needs taken care of and being able to save up for retirement (or in countries without free education, to pay for kids' college). And that might be coming to an end, with people who benefited from this opportunity cheering it on.
    - logicprog 8mo ago
      I make $1500/mo, working part time for a friend being vastly underpaid for technical work and part time as a meat packer in the back of a supermarket, because I had to drop out of university a year before finishing due to a disability and loss of financial resources, and thanks to being trans, disabled, and a dropout, as well as the job market that's fucked up due to AI and all the other reasons for layoffs, so I can't get a tech job, despite having been programming since I was seven and being very good at it. I don't think it's really fair to talk about "people who benefited from this opportunity cheering it on" in the comments on one of my posts. I'm an agentic AI coding enthusiast because I find it fascinating, it allows me to focus more on what I like most about programming (software architecture, systems thinking, etc), and the decreased cognitive load and increased productivity allows me to continue to do interesting projects in the time and energy I have left after my jobs and disability take.
raincole 8mo ago
Yeah, remind me of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46929505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46929505 > I have a source file of a few hundred lines implementing an algorithm that no LLM I've tried (and I've tried them all) is able to replicate, or even suggest, when prompted with the problem. Even with many follow up prompts and hints. People making this kind of claim will never post the question and prompts they tried. Because if they did, everyone will know it's just they don't know how to prompt.
- ares623 8mo ago
  At what point will the proper way to prompt just be "built-in"? Why aren't they built-in already if the "proper way to prompt" is so well understood?
- logicprog 8mo ago
  Eh, I think that one is fair. LLMs aren't great at super novel solutions
ares623 8mo ago
So I guess you could say, they're "holding it wrong"?
- logicprog 8mo ago
  Yeah, so?
bitwize 8mo ago
(Valley Girl voice) Role-based prompts are like, so September 2025. Everybody is just using agents now. You don't get to sit with us at the cool kids' table until you learn how to prompt, loser.
- logicprog 8mo ago
  Mocking me (a woman, as it happens) with a sexist stereotype and a strawman of my argument doesn't make me wrong. All that extra work is now very much unnecessary, and it's the extra work they are complaining about, so, they are complaining about a problem that no longer exists, thanks to intentionally not learning as things develop. This isn't an argument about fashion or the "cool kids table."

skzizjj 8mo ago

[dead]

martin-t 8mo ago

This just shows that the models (not AI, statistical models of text used without consent) are not that smart, it's the tooling around them which allows using these models as a heuristic for brute force search of the solution space. Just last week, I prompted (not asked, it is not sentient) Claude to generate (not tell me or find out or any other anthropomorphization) whether I need to call Dispose on objects passed to me from 2 different libraries for industrial cameras. Being industrial, most people using them typically don't post their code publicly, which means the models have poor statistical coverage around these topics. The LLM generated a response which triggered the tooling around it to perform dozens of internet searches and based on my initial prompt, the search results and lots of intermediate tokens ("thinking"), generated a reply which said that yes, I need to call Dispose in both cases. It was phrased authoritatively and confidently. So I tried it, one library segfaulted, the other returned an exception on a later call. I performed my own internet search (a single one) and immediately found documentation from one of the libraries clearly stating I don't need to call Dispose. The other library being much more poorly documented didn't mention this explicitly but had examples which didn't call Dispose. I am sure if I used LLMs "properly" "agentically", then they would have triggered the tooling around them to build and execute the code, gotten the same results as me much faster, then equally authoritatively and confidently stated that I don't need to call Dispose. This is not thinking. It's a form of automation but not thinking and not intelligence.

Isamu 8mo ago
>brute force search of the solution space “Brute force” is mostly what makes it all work, and what is most disappointing to me currently. Including the brute force necessary to train an LLM, the vast quantity of text necessary to approach almost human quality, the massive scale of data centers necessary to deploy these models, etc. I am hoping this is a transitional period, where LLMs could be used to create better models that are more finesse and less brute force.
- martin-t 8mo ago
  To be honest, these models being bad is what gives me some hope we can figure out how to approach a potential future AI as a society before it arrives. Because right now everything in the west is structured around rich people owning things they have not built while people who did the actual work with their hands and their minds are left in the dust. For a brief period of time (a couple decades), tech was a path for anyone from any background to get at least enough to not struggle. Not become truly rich as for that you need to own real estate or companies but having all your reasonable material needs taken care of and being able to save up for retirement (or in countries without free education, to pay for kids' college). And that might be coming to an end, with people who benefited from this opportunity cheering it on.
  - logicprog 8mo ago
    I make $1500/mo, working part time for a friend being vastly underpaid for technical work and part time as a meat packer in the back of a supermarket, because I had to drop out of university a year before finishing due to a disability and loss of financial resources, and thanks to being trans, disabled, and a dropout, as well as the job market that's fucked up due to AI and all the other reasons for layoffs, so I can't get a tech job, despite having been programming since I was seven and being very good at it. I don't think it's really fair to talk about "people who benefited from this opportunity cheering it on" in the comments on one of my posts. I'm an agentic AI coding enthusiast because I find it fascinating, it allows me to focus more on what I like most about programming (software architecture, systems thinking, etc), and the decreased cognitive load and increased productivity allows me to continue to do interesting projects in the time and energy I have left after my jobs and disability take.

raincole 8mo ago

Yeah, remind me of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46929505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46929505 > I have a source file of a few hundred lines implementing an algorithm that no LLM I've tried (and I've tried them all) is able to replicate, or even suggest, when prompted with the problem. Even with many follow up prompts and hints. People making this kind of claim will never post the question and prompts they tried. Because if they did, everyone will know it's just they don't know how to prompt.

ares623 8mo ago
At what point will the proper way to prompt just be "built-in"? Why aren't they built-in already if the "proper way to prompt" is so well understood?
logicprog 8mo ago
Eh, I think that one is fair. LLMs aren't great at super novel solutions

ares623 8mo ago

So I guess you could say, they're "holding it wrong"?

logicprog 8mo ago
Yeah, so?

bitwize 8mo ago

(Valley Girl voice) Role-based prompts are like, so September 2025. Everybody is just using agents now. You don't get to sit with us at the cool kids' table until you learn how to prompt, loser.

logicprog 8mo ago
Mocking me (a woman, as it happens) with a sexist stereotype and a strawman of my argument doesn't make me wrong. All that extra work is now very much unnecessary, and it's the extra work they are complaining about, so, they are complaining about a problem that no longer exists, thanks to intentionally not learning as things develop. This isn't an argument about fashion or the "cool kids table."