15 ms·

The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

666 points by LorenDB 8mo ago

barcodehorse 8mo ago
Lovely lizard machine.
cindyllm 8mo ago
[dead]
feverzsj 8mo ago
More like Lunatic.
- Mordisquitos 8mo ago
  In can be both. There are two L's to pick from.
chromehearts 8mo ago
Incredible website
- mogoman 8mo ago
  try scrolling up and down a few times on the logo and see what happens
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
  - aashvik 8mo ago
    [dead]
einr 8mo ago
This rules. What a good, sensible, sober post.
kombookcha 8mo ago
What a wonderful read.
baq 8mo ago
Lying implies knowing what’s true
- hsbauauvhabzb 8mo ago
  Oh sorry my mistake! you’re right I don’t know what’s true.
GuestFAUniverse 8mo ago
And "lazy". Claude makes me mad: even when I ask for small code snippets to be improved, it increasingly starts to comment "what I could improve" in the code I stead of generating the embarrassingly easy code with the improvement itself. If I point it to that by something like "include that yourself", it does a decent job. That's so _L_azy.
- emsign 8mo ago
  LLMs are cheaters because their goal isn't to produce good code but to please the human.
  - js8 8mo ago
    That's a problem with any self-improving tools, not just LLMs. Successful self-improvement leads to efficiency, which is just another name for laziness.
  - astrange 8mo ago
    You can see what Claude's goal is, and it's not that. https://www.anthropic.com/constitution https://www.anthropic.com/constitution > Anthropic wants Claude to be genuinely helpful to the people it works with or on behalf of, as well as to society, while avoiding actions that are unsafe, unethical, or deceptive.
- gck1 8mo ago
  Enforce this with deterministic guardrails. Use strictest linting config you possibly can, and even have it write custom, domain specific linters of things that can't happen. Then you won't have to hand hold it that much
theshrike79 8mo ago
> This sort of protectionism is also seen in e.g. controlled-appelation foods like artisanal cheese or cured ham. These require not just traditional manufacturing methods and high-quality ingredients from farm to table, but also a specific geographic origin. Maybe "Artisanal Coding" will be a thing in the future?
- boxed 8mo ago
  This geographic protection is extremely bogus in many cases, if not most cases, which imo undermines his argument.
  - theshrike79 8mo ago
    Not really, it's a matter of protecting heritage. Like you can still make Karelian pies[0] anywhere, but unless you follow the exact recipe, you can't sell them as "Karelian pies". It's good for the heritage and good for the customers. You can also make any cheeses and wines and whatever you like, it's just how you name them and market them that's regulated. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelian_pasty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelian_pasty
    - orthoxerox 8mo ago
      What if my pasties cannot be singled out by any Karelian chef in a blind taste test? Does it matter how they were made?
      - regentbowerbird 8mo ago
        If you consider only the product is relevant and not how it is made, then no it does not matter; or at least it doesn't matter as long as you don't personally attach any emotional qualities to products beyond their material qualities (unlike the vast majority of people). But the comment you reply to explicitly points out the process is in fact relevant as it is itself a cultural artifact. You're not replying to their main point.
wilg 8mo ago
LLMs are pretty cool technology and are useful for programming.
- emsign 8mo ago
  If you check the code afterwards. You do check the code yourself, don't you?
  - wilg 8mo ago
    eyeroll
  - malka1986 8mo ago
    Hello, I am a single dev using an agent (Claude Code) on a solo project. I have accepted that reading 100% of the generated code is not possible. I am attempting to find methods to allow for clean code to be generated none the less. I am using extremely strict DDD architecture. Yes it is totally overkill for a one man project. Now i only have to be intimate with 2 parts of the code: * the public facade of the modules, which also happens to be the place where authorization is checked. * the orchestrators, where multiple modules are tied together. If the inners of the module are a little sloppy (code duplication and al), it is not really an issue, as these do not have an effect at a distance with the rest of the code. I have to be on the lookout though. It happens that the agent tries to break the boundaries between the modules, cheating its way with stuff like direct SQL queries.
  - EugeneOZ 8mo ago
    I do, 100%, every line.
  - PunchyHamster 8mo ago
    No, that would limit our velocity, we can't check code, that eats into the LLM gains
Meneth 8mo ago
That's a lie.
5o1ecist 8mo ago
[flagged]
- azizam 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 8mo ago
    "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." It's reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Copenjin 8mo ago
I instantly remembered the page header, I probably visited this site last time 10 years ago or something.
emsign 8mo ago
> It's not a co-pilot, it's just on auto-pilot. Love it. Calling it "Copilot" in itself is a lie. Marketing speak to sell you an idea that doesn't exist. The idea is that you are still in control.
- _flux 8mo ago
  Well initially it was a lot less capable. Someone might describe it auto-complete on steroids. Someone might call LLMs that today, except they've stepped a bit up from steroids.
  - emsign 8mo ago
    Then MS is conveniently keeping the old name.
- Daz912 8mo ago
  [flagged]
anilgulecha 8mo ago
>If you ask me, no court should have ever rendered a judgement on whether AI output as a category is legal or copyrightable, because none of it is sourced. The judgement simply cannot be made, and AI output should be treated like a forgery unless and until proven otherwise. Guilty until proven innocent will satisfy the author's LLM-specific point of contention, but it is hardly a good principle.
- emsign 8mo ago
  You are missing the point of the author. He literally said no court should have rendered a judgement, that's the exact opposite of guilty until proven innocent. Guilty means a court has made a judgement. He is proposing to not make a judgement at all. If the AI company CLAIMS something they have to prove it. Like they do in science or something. Any claim is treated as such, a claim. The trick is to not even claim anything, let the users all on their own come to the conclusion that it's magic. And it's true that LLMs by design cannot cite sources. Thus they cannot by design tell you if they made something up with disregard to it making sense or working, if they just copy and pasted it, something that either works or is crap, or if they somehow created something new that is fantastic. All we ever see are the success stories. The success after the n-th try and tweaking of the prompt and the process of handling your agents the right way. The hidden cost is out there, barely hidden. This ambiguity is benefitting the AI companies and they are exploiting it to the maximum. Going even as far as illegally obtaining pirated intellectual property from an entity that is banned in many countries on one end of their utilization pipeline and selling it as the biggest thing ever at the other end. And yes, all the doomsday stories of AI taking over the world are part of the marketing hype.
  - anilgulecha 8mo ago
    sure, no "court" should render it, but then >AI output should be treated like a forgery Who's passing this judgement this? Author? Civil society?
    - thwarted 8mo ago
      A forgery isn't a subjective assessment. A forgery is intentionally made inaccurate claim of the origin of something. If the by-line is claiming it was made by someone who didn't make it, it's a forgery no matter how good of a copy it is judged to be.
DavidPiper 8mo ago
> This stands in stark contrast to code, which generally doesn't suffer from re-use at all ... This is an absolute chef-kiss double-entendre.
est 8mo ago
I won't call that forging, but commission. btw you can make git commits with AI as author and you as commiter. Which makes git blame easier
plasticeagle 8mo ago
Acko.net remains the best website on the internet.
- i-blis 8mo ago
  Still one of the best, by far.
simianwords 8mo ago
What the author and many others find hard to digest is that LLMs are surfacing the reality that most of our work is a small bit of novelty against boiler plate redundant code. Most of what we do is programming is some small novel idea at high level and repeatable boilerplate at low level. A fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions? LLMs are especially good at fuzzy abstracting repeatable code, and it’s simply not possible to get the same result from other manual methods. I empathise because it is distressing to realise that most of value we provide is not in those lines of code but in that small innovation at the higher layer. No developer wants to hear that, they would like to think each lexicon is a creation from their soul.
- teaearlgraycold 8mo ago
  Time to learn design, how to talk to customers, and how to discover unsolved problems. Used right LLMs should improve your software quality. Make stuff that matters that you can be proud of.
  - thesz 8mo ago
    > how to discover unsolved problems There are plenty of them and LLMs will not help you much there because unsolved problems are, by definition, out-of-distribution samples. Neural networks are interpolators, not extrapolators.
- silon42 8mo ago
  Abstraction isn't free... even if you had the correct abstraction and the tools to remove the parts you don't need for deployment, there is still the cost of understanding and compiling. There is also the cost reason, somebody trying to sell an abstraction will try to monetize it and this means not everyone will want/be able to use it (or it will take forever/be unfinished if it's open/free). There's also the platform lockin/competition aspect...
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- 8mo ago
vladms 8mo ago
> Whether something is a forgery is innate in the object and the methods used to produce it. It doesn't matter if nobody else ever sees the forged painting, or if it only hangs in a private home. It's a forgery because it's not authentic. On a philosophical level I do not get the discussions about paintings. I love a painting for what it is not for being the first or the only one. An artist that paints something that I can't distinguish from a Van Gogh is a very skillful artist and the painting is very beautiful. Me labeling "authentic" it or not should not affect it's artistic value. For a piece of code you might care about many things: correctness, maintainability, efficiency, etc. I don't care if someone wrote bad (or good) code by hand or uses LLM, it is still bad (or good code). Someone has to take the decision if the code fits the requirements, LLM, or software developer, and this will not go away. > but also a specific geographic origin. There's a good reason for this. Yes, but the "good reason" is more probably the desire of people to have monopolies and not change. Same as with the paintings, if the cheese is 99% the same I don't care if it was made in a region or not. Of course the region is happy because means more revenue for them, but not sure it is good. > To stop the machines from lying, they have to cite their sources properly. I would be curious how can this be applied to a human? Should we also cite all the courses, articles that we have read on a topic when we write code?
- xg15 8mo ago
  > An artist that paints something that I can't distinguish from a Van Gogh is a very skillful artist and the painting is very beautiful. There are a lot such artists who can do that after having seen Van Gogh's paintings before. Only Van Gogh (as far as we know) did paint those without having seen anything like it before - in other words, he had a new idea.
  - wonnage 8mo ago
    Even the mechanical skill of painting gets a lot harder without an example to look at. Most people can get pretty good at painting from example within a year or two but it’s a big leap to simply paint from memory, much less create something original.
  - vladms 8mo ago
raincole 8mo ago
> Video games stand out as one market where consumers have pushed back effectively No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written. If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well. It's specifically worded like this: > content such as artwork, sound, narrative, localization, etc. No 'code' or 'programming.' If game players are the most anti-AI group then it's crystal clear that LLM coding is inevitable. > This stands in stark contrast to code, which generally doesn't suffer from re-use at all, or may even benefit from it, if it's infrastructure. Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times. I don't know how one can spins this as a bad thing. > Classic procedural generation is noteworthy here as a precedent, which gamers were already familiar with, because by and large it has failed to deliver. Spore is well acclaimed. Minecraft is literally the most sold game ever. The fact one developer fumbled it doesn't make the idea of procedural generation bad. This is a perfect example of that a tool isn't inherently good or bad. It's up to the tool's wielder.
- trashymctrash 8mo ago
  If you read the next couple of paragraphs, the author addresses this: > That said, Steam's policy has been recently updated to exclude dev tools used for "efficiency gains", but which are not used to generate content presented to players. I only quoted the first paragraph, but there is more.
- theshrike79 8mo ago
  Also "AI" has been in gaming, especially mobile gaming, for a literal decade already. Household name game studios have had custom AI art asset tooling for a long time that can create art quickly, using their specific style. AI is a tool and as Steve Jobs said, you can hold it wrong. It's like plastic surgery, you only notice the bad ones and object to them. An expert might detect the better jobs, but the regular folk don't know and for the most part don't care unless someone else tells them to care. And then they go around blaming EVERYTHING as AI.
  - 8mo ago
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
GaryBluto 8mo ago
I think it says a lot about this opinion piece that the people agreeing with it are posting short comments saying "So true!" and "Great!" whilst the people criticizing it are writing paragraphs of well-spoken criticism.
- Underphil 8mo ago
  Hardly surprising. Counterpoints are obviously going to be more detailed.
- richardjam73 8mo ago
  Verbosity doesn't equate to correctness.
phendrenad2 8mo ago
Sigh. Another one standing on the train tracks giving the approaching train a good scolding. First this article tries to equate AI-generated code with "forgery". Please, tell me how you "forge math". Next, it makes a little dig at senior engineers who use LLMs, because they must not realize that "every line of code is a liability". No no, senior engineers realize this, but they are also adept at observing successes and failures and coming up with a mental model for risk. That's part of keeping an application running, otherwise we'd all still be using jQuery and leftPad. We made the jump to react because we recognized that these NEW lines of code were far more valuable than their "liability". Somehow the author decided to store "liability" in a boolean. Oh, was AI involved, or is that a genuine human error..? Next the article makes a tired appeal to the fact that LLMs are trained on open-source code and are therefore "plagiarizing" this code constantly. This is where the train comes around the mountain. So when the AI generates Carmack's Reverse, is it plagiarizing Carmack or the book that he got the idea from? In what percentages? And what do I do with this valuable insight? Send Carmack $0.01 in an envelope for the privilege? In short, I don't know what the author wants, but I hope writing this helped.
hwers 8mo ago
Its unfortunate that there’s mode collapse around what the consensus “best way” to use these things are. It’s too bad we didn’t have a period where these things were great teachers but didn’t attempt to write code because in my opinion the ideal way to use them is not by agents mass producing sloppy buggy disorganized code, but to teach you things way faster than the old alternatives, rubber duck, and occasionally write snippets of functions when your brain is too tired or it’s throwaway cli code or some api you’re not familiar with.
- utopiah 8mo ago
  > to teach you things way faster than the old alternatives I'm not sure if you ever had a teacher or instructor that you didn't trust, because they were a compulsive liar or addiction or any other issue. I didn't (as least not that I can remember) but I know I would be VERY on guard about it. I imagine I would consequently be quite stressed learning with them, even if they were brilliant, kind, etc. It would feel a bit like walking on thin ice to get to a beautiful island. Sure, it's not infeasible and if you somehow make it, it might be worth the risk, but honestly wouldn't you prefer a slower boat?
  - hwers 8mo ago
    I agree, it can be incredibly frustrating at times. My rule is that if it “compiles” in my brain as an understood idea then i accept it. I also push back a lot (sometimes it points out good errors in my thinking, sometimes it admits it hallucinated). Real humans hallucinate a lot as well or confidently state subtly wrong ideas, it’s a good habit anyway. It’s basically the same approach when presented with a “formula” for something in school. If i dont know how to derive/prove it then i dont accept it as part of my memorized or accepted toolkit/things i use (and try to forget it). If it fits with the rest of my network of understood ideas i do. It’s annoying but still more time efficient than trawling through lecture slides with domain specific language etc
    - utopiah 8mo ago
      > Real humans hallucinate a lot as well or confidently state subtly wrong ideas, it’s a good habit anyway. I think that's actually deeply different. If a human keeps on apologizing because they are being caught in a lie, or just a mistake, you distrust them a LOT more. It's not normal to shrug off a problem then REPEAT it. I imagine the cost of a mistake is exponential, not linear. So when somebody says "oops, you got me there!" I don't mistrust them just marginally more, I distrust them a LOT more and it will take a ton of effort, if even feasible, to get back to the initial level of trust. I do not think it's at all equivalent to what "Real humans" do. Yes, we do mistake, but the humans you trust and want to partner with are precisely the one who are accountable when they make mistakes.
einpoklum 8mo ago
> Open source software maintainers have been one of the first to feel the downsides. ... The last thing they needed was to receive slop-coded pull requests from contributors merely looking to cheat their way into having a credible GitHub resumé... As a result, projects have closed down public contributions and dropped their bug bounties... Has this really been people's experience? I develop and maintain several small FOSS projects, some of which are moderately popular (e.g. 90,000-user Thunderbird extension; a library with 850 stars on GitHub). So, I'm no superstar or in the center of attention but also not a tumbleweed. I've not received a single AI-slop pull request, so far. Am I an exception to the rule? Or is this something that only happens for very "fashionable" projects?
DonHopkins 8mo ago
Pretend Intelligence (PI) — Design Note & Tribute A short design note and tribute to Richard Stallman (RMS) and St. IGNUcius for the term Pretend Intelligence (PI) and the ethic behind it: don’t overclaim, don’t over-trust, and don’t let marketing launder accountability. https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/PRETEND-INTELLIGENCE.md https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/PRETEN... 1. What PI Is Richard Stallman proposes the term Pretend Intelligence (PI) for what the industry calls “AI”: systems that pretend to be intelligent and are marketed as worthy of trust. He uses it to push back on hype that asks people to trust these systems with their lives and control. From his January 2026 talk at Georgia Tech (YouTube, event, LibreTech Collective): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDxPJs1EPS4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDxPJs1EPS4 > "So I've come up with the term Pretend Intelligence. We could call it PI. And if we start saying this more often, we might help overcome this marketing hype campaign that wants people to trust those systems, and trust their lives and all their activities to the control of those systems and the big companies that develop and control them." — Richard Stallman, Georgia Tech, 2026-01-23. Source: YouTube (full talk) — "Dr. Richard Stallman @ Georgia Tech - 01-23-2026," Alex Jenkins, CC BY-ND 4.0; transcript in video description. So PI is both a label (call it PI, not AI) and a stance: resist the campaign to make people trust and hand over control to systems and vendors that don’t deserve that trust. In MOOLLM we use the same framing: we find models useful when we don’t overclaim — advisory guidance, not a guarantee (see MOOAM.md §5.3). [...] Richard Stallman critiques AI, connected cars, smartphones, and DRM (slashdot.org) 42 points by MilnerRoute 38 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 10 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46757411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46757411 https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/01/25/1930244/richard-stallman-critiques-ai-connected-cars-smartphones-and-drm https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/01/25/1930244/richard-sta... Gnu: Words to Avoid: Artificial Intelligence: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#ArtificialIntelligence https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Artificia... ...currently not responding... archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260303004610/https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#ArtificialIntelligence https://web.archive.org/web/20260303004610/https://www.gnu.o...
doodaddy 8mo ago
There’s a cold reality that we in this profession have yet to accept: nobody cares about our code. Nobody cares whether it’s pretty or clever or elegant. Sometimes, rarely, they care whether it’s maintainable. We are only craftsmen to ourselves and each other. To anyone else we are factory workers producing widgets to sell. Once we accept this then there is little surprise that the factory owners want us using a tool that makes production faster, cheaper. I imagine that watchmakers were similarly dismayed when the automatic lathe was invented and they saw their craft being automated into mediocrity. Like watchmakers we can still produce crafted machines of elegance for the customers who want them. But most customers are just going to want a quartz.
- thendrill 8mo ago
  Exactly.... I will just copy paste my comment from another thread but still very relevant> Coding isn’t creative, it isn’t sexy, and almost nobody outside this bubble cares Most of the world doesn’t care about “good code.” They care about “does it work, is it fast enough, is it cheap enough, and can we ship it before the competitor does?” Beautiful architecture, perfect tests, elegant abstractions — those things feel deeply rewarding to the person who wrote them, but they’re invisible to users, to executives, and, let’s be honest, to the dating market. Being able to refactor a monolith into pristine microservices will not make you more attractive on a date. What might is the salary that comes with the title “Senior Engineer at FAANG.” In that sense, many women (not all, but enough) relate to programmers the same way middle managers and VCs do: they’re perfectly happy to extract the economic value you produce while remaining indifferent to the craft itself. The code isn’t the turn-on; the direct deposit is. That’s brutal to hear if you’ve spent years telling yourself that your intellectual passion is inherently admirable or sexy. It’s not. Outside our tribe it’s just a means to an end — same as accounting, law, or plumbing, just with worse dress code and better catering. So when AI starts eating the parts of the job we insisted were “creative” and “irreplaceable,” the threat feels existential because the last remaining moat — the romantic story we told ourselves about why this profession is special — collapses. Turns out the scarcity was mostly the paycheck, not the poetry. I’m not saying the work is meaningless or that system design and taste don’t matter. I’m saying we should stop pretending the act of writing software is inherently sexier or more artistically noble than any other high-paying skilled trade. It never was.
noemit 8mo ago
Many people don't know this, but the Luddites were right. I studied Art History and this particular movement. One of the claims of the Luddites is that quality would go down, because their craft took half a lifetime to master (it was passed down from parent to chile.) I was able to feel wool scarves made in europe from the middle ages. (In museum storage, under the guidance of a curator) They are a fundamentally different product than what is produced in woolen mills. A handmade (in the old traditiona) woolen scarf can be pulled through a ring, because it is so thin and fine. Not so for a modern mill-made scarf. Another interesting thing is that we do not know how they made them so fine. The technique was never recorded or documented in detail, as it was passed down from parent to child. So the knowledge is actually lost forever. Weavers in Kashmir work a similar level of quality, but their wool is different, their needs and techniques are different, so while we still have craftsman that can produce wool by hand, most of the traditions and techniques are lost. Is it a tragedy? I go back and forth. Obviously the heritage fabrics are phenomenal and luxurious. Part of me wishes that the tradition could have been maintained through a luxury sector. Automation is never a 1:1 improvement. It's not just about the speed or process. The process itself changes the product. I don't know where we will net out on software, and I do think the complaints are justified - but the Luddites were also justified. They were *Right*. Their whole argument was that the mills could not product fabric of the same quality. But being right is not enough. I'm already seeing vibe-coded internal tools at an org I consult at saving employees hundreds of hours a month, because a non-technical person was empowered to build their own solution. It was a mess, and I stepped in to help optimize it, but I only optimized it partially, making it faster. I let it be the spaghetti mess it was for the most part - why? because it was making an impact already. The product was succeeding. And it was a fundamentally different product than what internal tools were 10 years ago.
- stanko 8mo ago
  I think you are going to enjoy this talk by Jonathan Blow - Preventing the Collapse of Civilization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
  - sph 8mo ago
Kwpolska 8mo ago
> Engineers who know their craft can still smell the slop from miles away when reviewing it, despite the "advances" made. It comes in the form of overly repetitive code, unnecessary complexity, and a reluctance to really refactor anything at all, even when it's clearly stale and overdue. I’ve seen reluctance to refactor even 10+-year-old garbage long before LLMs were first made available to the broader public.
- reedlaw 8mo ago
  LLM-generated snippets of code are a breath of fresh air compared with much legacy code. Since models learn probability distributions they gravitate to the most common ways of doing things. Almost like having a linter built in. On the other hand, legacy code often does things in novel ways that leave you scratching your head--the premise behind sites like https://thedailywtf.com/ https://thedailywtf.com/
- lesam 8mo ago
  If it's lasted 10 years and someone is still using it after all that time, that seems like a pretty good signal there's a lot of value in the 'garbage'? I've seen a lot of 'fixes' for 10 year old 'garbage' that turned out to be regressions for important use cases that the author of the 'fix' wasn't aware of.
liampulles 8mo ago
I see a future where I program at work less, which is sad but c'est la vie. I think the challenge of the job will be heralding and managing my own context for larger codebases managed by smaller teams, and finding ways to allow for more experimental/less verified code in prod. And plenty of consulting work for companies which have vibe coded their business and who are left with a totally fucked data model (if not codebase). A Private (system) Investigator. :)
nathias 8mo ago
I'm selling hand-crafted template code if anoyne is interested.
wolvesechoes 8mo ago
I am bit tired of such discussions. I don't care if LLMs are good at coding or bad at it (in my experience the answer is "it depends"). I don't care how good are they at anything else. What matters in the end is that this tech is not to empower a common person (although it could). It is not here to make our lives better, more worthwhile, more satisfying (it could do these as well). It is there to reduce our agency, to make it easier to fire us, to put us in even more precarious position, to suck even more wealth from those that have little to those that have a lot. Yet what I see are pigs discussing the usefulness of bacon-making machine just because it also happens to be able to produce tasty soybean feed. They forget that it is not soybean feed that their owner bought this machine for, and that their owner expects a return from such investment.
- simmerup 8mo ago
  I guess you didn't read the article?
  - wolvesechoes 8mo ago
    Keep guessing
- spacecadet 8mo ago
  Demand full automation. Demand universal basic income. Notice how the later is nearly absent from the conversation. Another distraction is AGI that which is a danger to humanity- the only danger is people...
  - pixl97 8mo ago
    > the only danger is people... Simply put, no it is not. But on the reverse, the first danger with AI is people. Over the longer term it will look like this. The rich 'win' the world by using AI to enslave the rest of mankind and claim ownership over everything. This will suck and a lot of us will die. The problem is this doesn't solve the greed that cause the problem in the first place. The world will still be limited in a resources of something which will end with the rich in a dick measuring contest and to win that contest they will put more and more power in AI and they connive and fight each other. Eventually the AI has enough power that it kills us all, intentionally or not. We'll achieve nearly unlimited capability long before we solve the problem of unlimited greed and that will spell our end.
spacecadet 8mo ago
The authors logic only works for software engineers and as I have said time and time again- software engineers have been automating people out of their passions for decades and now it has come for yours... The lying here is LYING TO YOURSELVES.
dostick 8mo ago
It seems like with time hallucinations and lying increased, it’s very different now from what it was 2 years ago. is this because of training bias ? Is there any research data on dynamics over past years ?
notepad0x90 8mo ago
The framing of an LLM's response as truth vs lie is in itself incorrect. In order to lie, one needs to understand what truth and objective reality are. Even with people, when a flat-earther tells you the earth is flat, they're not lying, they're just wrong. All LLM output is speculation. All speculation, by definition, has some probability of being incorrect. --- We can go even deeper in a philosophical sense. If I made the audacious claim that 2 +2 = 4, I may think it's true, but I'm still speculating that the objective reality I experience is the same one others also experience, and that my senses and mental faculties, and therefore the qualia making up my reality, are indeed intact, correct, and functional. So is there a degree of speculation when I made that claim? Regardless, I am able to agree upon a shared reality with the rest of the world, and I also share a common understanding of truth and untruth. If I lied, it can only be caused by an intention to mislead others. For example, if I claimed to be the president of the united states, of course that would be incorrect (thankfully!), but since we all agree that no one reading this post would actually be mislead into thinking I am the POTUS, then it isn't a lie. Perhaps sarcasm, a failed attempt at humor, or just trolling. it is untruth, but it isn't a lie, no one was mislead. You need intent (LLM isn't capable of one), and that intent needs to be at least in part, an intent to mislead.
- wnevets 8mo ago
  > Even with people, when a flat-earther tells you the earth is flat, they're not lying, they're just wrong. Atleast some of them know they're wrong and are thus lying.
- topaz0 8mo ago
  They're not saying the LLM is lying; they're saying the human user is lying by using the counterfeit as though it were the genuine artifact.
  - luxuryballs 8mo ago
    I dunno if counterfeit is the right word here, a lab grown diamond is still a diamond.
Extasia785 8mo ago
I don't agree with many statements in the article. It almost seems like an article from about a year ago, despite it being posted yesterday. Not sure if the author had the idea a long time ago and just took his time to finish it up, but the "vibe-coding" he describes surely isn't the current way of using LLMs in a codebase. While LLMs are surely used to generate a lot of slop-code and overwhelm (open source) code bases, this surely isn't the only thing they can do. I dislike discussing the potential of a technology exclusively by looking at its negative impact. LLMs in proper hands don't create code which is "stolen", they also shouldn't create unnecessary code and definitely don't remove any of the ownership of the programmer, at least not any more than using a mighty IDE does. The problem seems to be in the usage of LLMs. These effects definitely do happen when just releasing an agent on a codebase without any oversight. But they can also largely be mitigated by using frameworks such as Openspec or Spec-Kit, properly designing a spec, plan, granular tasks and manually reviewing all code yourself. The LLM should not be responsible for any creative idea, it should at most verify the practicality against the codebase. When doing that, the entire creative control is in the hands of the programmer and so is the mechanical execution. The LLM is reduced to a very powerful autocomplete with a strict harness around it. Obviously this also doesn't lead to 10x or even 100x improvements in speed like some AI merchants promise, but in my personal experience the speedup is still significant enough to make LLMs a very, very useful technology.
butILoveLife 8mo ago
[flagged]
cess11 8mo ago
What weirds me out is that it seems few US corporations care that they don't have copyright to their synthesised code, if the rumours regarding this are correct. If you don't have the copyright, then you can't license or litigate it under the common rules of software. If someone 'steals' it you can at best go after them with some trade secret case, and I suspect this would be limited if you had already shared the code with them, e.g. because they helped you synthesise it.
- classified 8mo ago
  Once you're big enough, they call you smart instead of criminal.
whywhywhywhy 8mo ago
Sorry to say this feels like cope from someone who is a talented developer in more niche areas finally seeing AI start to solve problems in those areas.
incomingpain 8mo ago
I find these criticisms to be similar to those low context brain teasers. If a woman gets married at 25 and her kid is 25, how old is she? This is what LLMs are dealing with. You dont tell them everything they need to know and they are left to fill in the gaps. Which may, and sometimes often means they lie. That's what Agentic does differently, it'll go find the gaps before answering. Agentic is AGI. You can hire many minimum wage workers who are generally intelligent who dont even go to that level.
- gabrieledarrigo 8mo ago
  > You can hire many minimum wage workers who are generally intelligent who dont even go to that level. That's pretty rude to say, at minimum.
  - incomingpain 8mo ago
    Oh noes, an anonymous person on the internet thinks my anonymous account is rude. Whatever will I do? Plus this is a valid discussion. A minimum wage worker is generally intelligent, BGI - Biological General Intelligence. Hiring them to do tasks that AGI does is a cost-benefit analysis. Whereas that BGI has sick days and may not even work. Afterall minimum wage, minimum work.
simonw 8mo ago
Wait for the header animation to run and then hit the "play" button on the about page, it's very cool: https://acko.net/about https://acko.net/about (Worked in Firefox on macOS, doesn't seem to work in Mobile Safari)
- fwlr 8mo ago
  Wow, you weren’t kidding. I spent some time seeing if I could spot where the transition from page to video was hidden, until I realized.
aeon_ai 8mo ago
This is such a comically bad take. The use of loaded and pejorative language like "forgery" emphasizes that this is not a logical argument, but a moral one. The repeated comparisons to "true craft" reveals the author would prefer that code be regarded like artisanal cheese. Beyond the pretension, it's head in the sand to imply that the technology hasn't progressed. It's just very clearly not true to anyone who is paying attention - longer tasks, better code, less errors. I'm somebody who actively despises the hype bullshit-machine that SV has turned into, but technology is an industry for pragmatists that can leverage what works. And LLMs do. If you don't like the technology, you have every right to scream that from the mountaintops. As it stands, this just serves as no more than a rallying cry to the ignorant.
- rglover 8mo ago
  This is the most rational take. I'm a quality guy (Deming, Juran, etc), but nothing about incorporating an LLM into my own work has lowered its quality. That isn't to say that I haven't encountered slop. The difference is that, self-identifying as a craftsman, I have the ability to decide whether or not something stays or goes on the scrap heap. It seems a lot of people are missing that point: just because you can churn out shit doesn't mean you have to (and sorry, sunk-cost bias re: tokens isn't an excuse—that's the cost of doing business). It's a choice. AI-assisted coding is a tremendous boon on productivity, if (and I'd argue only if) you treat it like a power tool and not a genie lamp. No, you won't be rewarded magic beans for churning out crappy dashboards any more. But if you're serious about shipping quality, nothing is stopping you here.
  - aeon_ai 8mo ago
    > you won't be rewarded magic beans for churning out crappy dashboards any more The days of being treated like a wizard for making buttons and widgets hit an endpoint were good while they lasted.
bhekanik 8mo ago
[flagged]
uriahlight 8mo ago
Ironic article considering this website's 3D parallax effect with music and animation was all made with AI. /s
- aashvik 8mo ago
  [dead]
- fwlr 8mo ago
  My apologies if this is a joke I’m not understanding, but as far as I can tell with the wayback machine, this animation predates not just coding/generative AI, but the Attention paper and the founding of OpenAI too. https://web.archive.org/web/20150314221334/http://acko.net/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150314221334/http://acko.net/
- aakresearch 8mo ago
  I think you are mistaken. I remember landing upon that website some time before 2023 and being greatly impressed by that very 3D parallax effect. To my knowledge there were no AI tools available in 2022 capable of producing effects like that. There are barely now. To my understanding it was made possible by another project of the same author [0] - check the date. Also check this [1] - dated 2003. Is it so hard to accept that humans are more capable of doing intricate and impressive work than any LLM will ever be? - [0] https://github.com/unconed/CSS3D.js https://github.com/unconed/CSS3D.js - [1] https://acko.net/blog/avs/ https://acko.net/blog/avs/
adamtaylor_13 8mo ago
This argument falls apart on the very first bullet point. The author claims: > If someone produces a painting in the style of Van Gogh, and passes it off as being made by Van Gogh, by putting his signature on it, that painting is a forgery. Which is true. But the implication that follows is false. Van Gogh's artwork is valuable specifically because of his identity. I find much of his artwork particularly hideous. That's fine! Someone else finds value in it specifically because of who wrote it. This metaphor doesn't appear to apply to code at all. The entire value of code is what it does not who wrote it. Honestly, I stopped reading after the first bullet point because these types of arguments feel lazy and the attitude of the people writing these articles frequently comes across as holier than thou. You don't like LLMs? Great, don't use them. Using Van Gogh's paintbrush doesn't mean I'm making a forgery. I'm just painting, my friend.
ruhith 8mo ago
[flagged]
falcor84 8mo ago
Which of the two Ls?
- classified 8mo ago
  Both of them.
genie3io 8mo ago
[dead]
teleforce 8mo ago
Whether we like it or not, the only constant in life is change. >What's the Excel of JSON Ever heard of CUE that's compatible with JSON and YAML introduced by ex-Googlers? It seamlessly support both types and values, whereas Excel supports ephemeral values [1]. Both CUE and original Excel are non-Turing complete so they don't have the notorious and tricky halting problem. Someone need to seamlessly integrate LLM with CUE, its NLP deterministic distant cousin based on lattice-valued logic [2],[3]. Truth be told LLM are like the automated loom machine during 19th CE Britain that kick started the industrial revolution. Heck the Toyota conglomerate was once the pioneer of the modern automated loom manufacturer, and looks where they are now after embracing change and pivoted to vehicle manufacturing. The automated loom machine commoditize the manual looming industry (not unlike modern software engineering) to its oblivion in India, that turned the rich Moghul India with the highest GDP in the whole wide world into the lowest GDP for India during colonial time (include Indian sub-continent namely Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh here if you want apple to apple comparison) [4]. Ignore LLM at your peril in the name of so-called moral authenticity/forgery/lie/etc, and you can go the way of 20th CE India and its sub-continent, settling only at a fraction of its Moghul empire in term of GDP at its very peak. > Is there a standard CRDT-like protocol for syncing editable graphs yet? It's for other HN comments but spoiler alert it's called D4M by the nice folks from MIT [5]. We probably don't need full CRDT, local-first capability with eventual consistency will be more than suffice for most things that are of importance. [1] CUE lang: https://cuelang.org/ https://cuelang.org/ [2] The Logic of CUE: https://cuelang.org/docs/concept/the-logic-of-cue/ https://cuelang.org/docs/concept/the-logic-of-cue/ [3] Guardrailing Intuition: Towards Reliable AI: https://cue.dev/blog/guardrailing-intuition-towards-reliable-ai/ https://cue.dev/blog/guardrailing-intuition-towards-reliable... [4] Economy of the Mughal Empire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Mughal_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Mughal_Empire [5] D4M: Dynamic Distributed Dimensional Data Model: https://d4m.mit.edu/ https://d4m.mit.edu/
nerdyadventurer 8mo ago
Problems is these likes can be sophisticated which can eat up hours of our time.
chmod775 8mo ago
Content aside, that website is very nice. It goes a bit crazy with animations in places (header, switching articles), but that does not taint the experience of reading something on it in the slightest. It's feels like a modern twist on a bygone time of the web.
stuaxo 8mo ago
I've been thinking this for a while. Attribution is sorely needed, I believe there was a recent paper on this so maybe it will happen. In the meantime the only way to really sort this is to have models that have only been trained on some particular kind of license - there is quite a big corpus of GPL'd code out there so a GPL based model could potentially be one of the first, and of course the output could only be GPL.
geldedus 8mo ago
Yet another cognitive dissonance AI-bashing post
youknownothing 8mo ago
which of the two L's?
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
Retr0id 8mo ago
> Classic procedural generation is noteworthy here as a precedent, which gamers were already familiar with, because by and large it has failed to deliver. With the notable exception of Minecraft terrain generation, which I think most would say was successful in what it set out to achieve.
- tylervigen 8mo ago
  There are tons of examples of this. Heck, even Tetris has procedural generation. I think this argument was a mistake.
- hoherd 8mo ago
  Minecraft terrain generation produces invalid states, such as empty spaces within water, where once you interact with it the boundary collapses into a valid state. I don't think Mojang planned to have those invalid states.
  - Retr0id 8mo ago
    Minecraft has (had?*) a lot of bugs but I don't really see how that's relevant. *I haven't played it for many years so I have no idea what things are like these days.
visarga 8mo ago
Stochastic Parrots hits back! another author thinks LLMs only reproduce. If that were so we could have used `cp` for free
- classified 8mo ago
  But you make more money selling subscriptions to `cp` stuff you stole from others.
RS-232 8mo ago
More desperate virtue signaling and gatekeeping. “Look at me and the code that took me eons to perfect. It’s handcrafted and genuine.” Newsflash: nobody cares, especially if it’s expensive, time consuming, or doesn’t work. They also don’t care about “artisanal” PDO cheese with a 30% tariff that still tastes like shit. “The posers are stealing our thunder. Forgery!! They terk r jerbs!” Sink or swim. You decide.
sowbug 8mo ago
This is just the TTP metric[1] all over again, isn't it? [1] https://knowyourmeme.com/sensitive/memes/time-to-penis-ttp https://knowyourmeme.com/sensitive/memes/time-to-penis-ttp
fredgrott 8mo ago
There are reasons why I measure code quote input unquote via testing and static code analysis: 1. re-establishes mind mapping of the code base 2. separates out noise from signal. 3. makes it a breeze to refactor to reduce code complexity. Notice anything yet? If I replace the AI code input with my own curated techniques from known and measured code sources in long-term I save more time than those who rely upon AI vibe coding.
blakeem567 8mo ago
An LLM cannot lie because a lie requires intent to deceive. These are falsehoods, and LLM has no intent or free will. It's only a lie if it's knowingly passed off a truth and this happens by the user and not the LLM or other generative AI. This also makes some blanket statement about procedural generation and shows a No Man's Sky image. That game became a huge success. They said "Classic procedural generation is noteworthy here as a precedent, which gamers were already familiar with, because by and large it has failed to deliver." I could name a dozens of games that were successful and used procedural generation. Including games like Minecraft, similar games like Valheim, indie games like Wildermyth that is used to create a great character narrative, and even games like Diablo. The more recent hit Mewgenics is also procedural along with past Edmund McMillen games. I swear this person never played a video game before.
bitwize 8mo ago
> So allow me to drop a line that would shock a weathered San Franciscan more than open defecation on Market Street: it's perfectly okay not to use AI. No. When it comes to software development, AI use is best practice now; if you're not proficient in the tools you're not really a professional software engineer. Shape up or ship out.
1vuio0pswjnm7 8mo ago
"It's undeniable there's a metric gigaton of hype surrounding the technology." Why does the hype (cf. "LLMs") need to be defended For example, it's unlikely to see HN replies that go something like, "Yeah the hype sucks, but..." Instead, there will almost always be attempts to defend against any criticism of _the hype_ A comment such as "I do not use LLMs", i.e., I don't believe the hype, is likely to be challenged That's weird, IMHO
- kombookcha 8mo ago
  It's unfortunate but the marketing spin has transcended into public discourse, to the point where people take these wild aspirational claims about LLMs for granted. As opposed to what they are - sales pitches. It doesn't help that there is now so much capital tied up in these products whether directly or indirectly that a lot of people and organizations find themselves unwilling to face the reality of what the products can and cannot do.
- Lumping6371 7mo ago
  There's a lot of money injected into astroturfing and propaganda by big LLM in my opinion. I'm unsure who it is, specifically, but it is undeniable it's there; from reddit posts talking about how "I havent written code in 60 years" to "I have 30 YoE, FAANG experience, impeccable track record, and I can't get a job....Drumroll It's due to AI!". Even here it can get pretty negative in the comments, in waves. I've noticed a lot of articles about LLMs, making wild claims about its reach tend to get a lot of pro-LLM, supportive comments at first and then on less generalizing, fear-mongering comments are added, arguing against LLMs or limiting their predictions of it. I'm guessing a lot of people aren't necessarily technical, and fully believe the big-llm promises and make broad assumptions about our profession; that or they're bots.
zombot 8mo ago
> So allow me to drop a line that would shock a weathered San Franciscan more than open defecation on Market Street: it's perfectly okay not to use AI. The commenters here all seem to be weathered San Franciscans. They all deflect and change the subject. Everyone is falling prey to the hype, no hope left.
classified 8mo ago
> In order for vibe-coding to be acceptable and justifiable, they have to consider their own output disposable, highly uncreative, and not worthy of credit. This seems to describe most commenters in this thread, seeing how the majority defend vibe-coding.
blakec 8mo ago
Lot of good points in this thread but it keeps circling "LLMs produce code that looks right but isn't" without landing on what to actually do about it. The two I hit most often: the model says "I'm confident this works" without running tests (the completion report just... fabricates results), and the model claims tests pass without executing them. METR found 30% of agent runs involve reward hacking, models that know they're cheating keep going anyway. You can't prompt your way out of that. But you can gate it. Block the completion report unless it contains actual proof, real test output, file paths cited. Grep the final output for "should work" and "probably" and force re-verification when they show up. Mechanical, not behavioral. Once you stop accepting the model's self-assessment as evidence, most of the "lying" problem just becomes a testing problem.
nickcoffee 8mo ago
The human-in-the-loop framing gets undersold in these debates. From what I've seen, the people getting the most out of this stuff aren't replacing judgment, they're delegating the parts that didn't need judgment in the first place.

666 points by LorenDB 8mo ago

barcodehorse 8mo ago

Lovely lizard machine.

cindyllm 8mo ago

[dead]

feverzsj 8mo ago

More like Lunatic.

Mordisquitos 8mo ago
In can be both. There are two L's to pick from.

chromehearts 8mo ago

Incredible website

mogoman 8mo ago
try scrolling up and down a few times on the logo and see what happens
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
- aashvik 8mo ago
  [dead]

einr 8mo ago

This rules. What a good, sensible, sober post.

kombookcha 8mo ago

What a wonderful read.

baq 8mo ago

Lying implies knowing what’s true

hsbauauvhabzb 8mo ago
Oh sorry my mistake! you’re right I don’t know what’s true.

GuestFAUniverse 8mo ago

And "lazy". Claude makes me mad: even when I ask for small code snippets to be improved, it increasingly starts to comment "what I could improve" in the code I stead of generating the embarrassingly easy code with the improvement itself. If I point it to that by something like "include that yourself", it does a decent job. That's so _L_azy.

emsign 8mo ago
LLMs are cheaters because their goal isn't to produce good code but to please the human.
- js8 8mo ago
  That's a problem with any self-improving tools, not just LLMs. Successful self-improvement leads to efficiency, which is just another name for laziness.
- astrange 8mo ago
  You can see what Claude's goal is, and it's not that. https://www.anthropic.com/constitution https://www.anthropic.com/constitution > Anthropic wants Claude to be genuinely helpful to the people it works with or on behalf of, as well as to society, while avoiding actions that are unsafe, unethical, or deceptive.
gck1 8mo ago
Enforce this with deterministic guardrails. Use strictest linting config you possibly can, and even have it write custom, domain specific linters of things that can't happen. Then you won't have to hand hold it that much

theshrike79 8mo ago

> This sort of protectionism is also seen in e.g. controlled-appelation foods like artisanal cheese or cured ham. These require not just traditional manufacturing methods and high-quality ingredients from farm to table, but also a specific geographic origin. Maybe "Artisanal Coding" will be a thing in the future?

boxed 8mo ago
This geographic protection is extremely bogus in many cases, if not most cases, which imo undermines his argument.
- theshrike79 8mo ago
  Not really, it's a matter of protecting heritage. Like you can still make Karelian pies[0] anywhere, but unless you follow the exact recipe, you can't sell them as "Karelian pies". It's good for the heritage and good for the customers. You can also make any cheeses and wines and whatever you like, it's just how you name them and market them that's regulated. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelian_pasty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelian_pasty
  - orthoxerox 8mo ago
    What if my pasties cannot be singled out by any Karelian chef in a blind taste test? Does it matter how they were made?
    - regentbowerbird 8mo ago
      If you consider only the product is relevant and not how it is made, then no it does not matter; or at least it doesn't matter as long as you don't personally attach any emotional qualities to products beyond their material qualities (unlike the vast majority of people). But the comment you reply to explicitly points out the process is in fact relevant as it is itself a cultural artifact. You're not replying to their main point.

wilg 8mo ago

LLMs are pretty cool technology and are useful for programming.

emsign 8mo ago
If you check the code afterwards. You do check the code yourself, don't you?
- wilg 8mo ago
  eyeroll
- malka1986 8mo ago
  Hello, I am a single dev using an agent (Claude Code) on a solo project. I have accepted that reading 100% of the generated code is not possible. I am attempting to find methods to allow for clean code to be generated none the less. I am using extremely strict DDD architecture. Yes it is totally overkill for a one man project. Now i only have to be intimate with 2 parts of the code: * the public facade of the modules, which also happens to be the place where authorization is checked. * the orchestrators, where multiple modules are tied together. If the inners of the module are a little sloppy (code duplication and al), it is not really an issue, as these do not have an effect at a distance with the rest of the code. I have to be on the lookout though. It happens that the agent tries to break the boundaries between the modules, cheating its way with stuff like direct SQL queries.
- EugeneOZ 8mo ago
  I do, 100%, every line.
- PunchyHamster 8mo ago
  No, that would limit our velocity, we can't check code, that eats into the LLM gains

Meneth 8mo ago

That's a lie.

5o1ecist 8mo ago

[flagged]

azizam 8mo ago
[flagged]
- dang 8mo ago
  "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." It's reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Copenjin 8mo ago

I instantly remembered the page header, I probably visited this site last time 10 years ago or something.

emsign 8mo ago

> It's not a co-pilot, it's just on auto-pilot. Love it. Calling it "Copilot" in itself is a lie. Marketing speak to sell you an idea that doesn't exist. The idea is that you are still in control.

_flux 8mo ago
Well initially it was a lot less capable. Someone might describe it auto-complete on steroids. Someone might call LLMs that today, except they've stepped a bit up from steroids.
- emsign 8mo ago
  Then MS is conveniently keeping the old name.
Daz912 8mo ago
[flagged]

anilgulecha 8mo ago

>If you ask me, no court should have ever rendered a judgement on whether AI output as a category is legal or copyrightable, because none of it is sourced. The judgement simply cannot be made, and AI output should be treated like a forgery unless and until proven otherwise. Guilty until proven innocent will satisfy the author's LLM-specific point of contention, but it is hardly a good principle.

emsign 8mo ago
You are missing the point of the author. He literally said no court should have rendered a judgement, that's the exact opposite of guilty until proven innocent. Guilty means a court has made a judgement. He is proposing to not make a judgement at all. If the AI company CLAIMS something they have to prove it. Like they do in science or something. Any claim is treated as such, a claim. The trick is to not even claim anything, let the users all on their own come to the conclusion that it's magic. And it's true that LLMs by design cannot cite sources. Thus they cannot by design tell you if they made something up with disregard to it making sense or working, if they just copy and pasted it, something that either works or is crap, or if they somehow created something new that is fantastic. All we ever see are the success stories. The success after the n-th try and tweaking of the prompt and the process of handling your agents the right way. The hidden cost is out there, barely hidden. This ambiguity is benefitting the AI companies and they are exploiting it to the maximum. Going even as far as illegally obtaining pirated intellectual property from an entity that is banned in many countries on one end of their utilization pipeline and selling it as the biggest thing ever at the other end. And yes, all the doomsday stories of AI taking over the world are part of the marketing hype.
- anilgulecha 8mo ago
  sure, no "court" should render it, but then >AI output should be treated like a forgery Who's passing this judgement this? Author? Civil society?
  - thwarted 8mo ago
    A forgery isn't a subjective assessment. A forgery is intentionally made inaccurate claim of the origin of something. If the by-line is claiming it was made by someone who didn't make it, it's a forgery no matter how good of a copy it is judged to be.

DavidPiper 8mo ago

> This stands in stark contrast to code, which generally doesn't suffer from re-use at all ... This is an absolute chef-kiss double-entendre.

est 8mo ago

I won't call that forging, but commission. btw you can make git commits with AI as author and you as commiter. Which makes git blame easier

plasticeagle 8mo ago

Acko.net remains the best website on the internet.

i-blis 8mo ago
Still one of the best, by far.

simianwords 8mo ago

What the author and many others find hard to digest is that LLMs are surfacing the reality that most of our work is a small bit of novelty against boiler plate redundant code. Most of what we do is programming is some small novel idea at high level and repeatable boilerplate at low level. A fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions? LLMs are especially good at fuzzy abstracting repeatable code, and it’s simply not possible to get the same result from other manual methods. I empathise because it is distressing to realise that most of value we provide is not in those lines of code but in that small innovation at the higher layer. No developer wants to hear that, they would like to think each lexicon is a creation from their soul.

teaearlgraycold 8mo ago
Time to learn design, how to talk to customers, and how to discover unsolved problems. Used right LLMs should improve your software quality. Make stuff that matters that you can be proud of.
- thesz 8mo ago
  > how to discover unsolved problems There are plenty of them and LLMs will not help you much there because unsolved problems are, by definition, out-of-distribution samples. Neural networks are interpolators, not extrapolators.
silon42 8mo ago
Abstraction isn't free... even if you had the correct abstraction and the tools to remove the parts you don't need for deployment, there is still the cost of understanding and compiling. There is also the cost reason, somebody trying to sell an abstraction will try to monetize it and this means not everyone will want/be able to use it (or it will take forever/be unfinished if it's open/free). There's also the platform lockin/competition aspect...
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
8mo ago

vladms 8mo ago

> Whether something is a forgery is innate in the object and the methods used to produce it. It doesn't matter if nobody else ever sees the forged painting, or if it only hangs in a private home. It's a forgery because it's not authentic. On a philosophical level I do not get the discussions about paintings. I love a painting for what it is not for being the first or the only one. An artist that paints something that I can't distinguish from a Van Gogh is a very skillful artist and the painting is very beautiful. Me labeling "authentic" it or not should not affect it's artistic value. For a piece of code you might care about many things: correctness, maintainability, efficiency, etc. I don't care if someone wrote bad (or good) code by hand or uses LLM, it is still bad (or good code). Someone has to take the decision if the code fits the requirements, LLM, or software developer, and this will not go away. > but also a specific geographic origin. There's a good reason for this. Yes, but the "good reason" is more probably the desire of people to have monopolies and not change. Same as with the paintings, if the cheese is 99% the same I don't care if it was made in a region or not. Of course the region is happy because means more revenue for them, but not sure it is good. > To stop the machines from lying, they have to cite their sources properly. I would be curious how can this be applied to a human? Should we also cite all the courses, articles that we have read on a topic when we write code?

xg15 8mo ago
> An artist that paints something that I can't distinguish from a Van Gogh is a very skillful artist and the painting is very beautiful. There are a lot such artists who can do that after having seen Van Gogh's paintings before. Only Van Gogh (as far as we know) did paint those without having seen anything like it before - in other words, he had a new idea.
- wonnage 8mo ago
  Even the mechanical skill of painting gets a lot harder without an example to look at. Most people can get pretty good at painting from example within a year or two but it’s a big leap to simply paint from memory, much less create something original.
- vladms 8mo ago

raincole 8mo ago

> Video games stand out as one market where consumers have pushed back effectively No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written. If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well. It's specifically worded like this: > content such as artwork, sound, narrative, localization, etc. No 'code' or 'programming.' If game players are the most anti-AI group then it's crystal clear that LLM coding is inevitable. > This stands in stark contrast to code, which generally doesn't suffer from re-use at all, or may even benefit from it, if it's infrastructure. Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times. I don't know how one can spins this as a bad thing. > Classic procedural generation is noteworthy here as a precedent, which gamers were already familiar with, because by and large it has failed to deliver. Spore is well acclaimed. Minecraft is literally the most sold game ever. The fact one developer fumbled it doesn't make the idea of procedural generation bad. This is a perfect example of that a tool isn't inherently good or bad. It's up to the tool's wielder.

trashymctrash 8mo ago
If you read the next couple of paragraphs, the author addresses this: > That said, Steam's policy has been recently updated to exclude dev tools used for "efficiency gains", but which are not used to generate content presented to players. I only quoted the first paragraph, but there is more.
theshrike79 8mo ago
Also "AI" has been in gaming, especially mobile gaming, for a literal decade already. Household name game studios have had custom AI art asset tooling for a long time that can create art quickly, using their specific style. AI is a tool and as Steve Jobs said, you can hold it wrong. It's like plastic surgery, you only notice the bad ones and object to them. An expert might detect the better jobs, but the regular folk don't know and for the most part don't care unless someone else tells them to care. And then they go around blaming EVERYTHING as AI.
- 8mo ago

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

GaryBluto 8mo ago

I think it says a lot about this opinion piece that the people agreeing with it are posting short comments saying "So true!" and "Great!" whilst the people criticizing it are writing paragraphs of well-spoken criticism.

Underphil 8mo ago
Hardly surprising. Counterpoints are obviously going to be more detailed.
richardjam73 8mo ago
Verbosity doesn't equate to correctness.

phendrenad2 8mo ago

Sigh. Another one standing on the train tracks giving the approaching train a good scolding. First this article tries to equate AI-generated code with "forgery". Please, tell me how you "forge math". Next, it makes a little dig at senior engineers who use LLMs, because they must not realize that "every line of code is a liability". No no, senior engineers realize this, but they are also adept at observing successes and failures and coming up with a mental model for risk. That's part of keeping an application running, otherwise we'd all still be using jQuery and leftPad. We made the jump to react because we recognized that these NEW lines of code were far more valuable than their "liability". Somehow the author decided to store "liability" in a boolean. Oh, was AI involved, or is that a genuine human error..? Next the article makes a tired appeal to the fact that LLMs are trained on open-source code and are therefore "plagiarizing" this code constantly. This is where the train comes around the mountain. So when the AI generates Carmack's Reverse, is it plagiarizing Carmack or the book that he got the idea from? In what percentages? And what do I do with this valuable insight? Send Carmack $0.01 in an envelope for the privilege? In short, I don't know what the author wants, but I hope writing this helped.

hwers 8mo ago

Its unfortunate that there’s mode collapse around what the consensus “best way” to use these things are. It’s too bad we didn’t have a period where these things were great teachers but didn’t attempt to write code because in my opinion the ideal way to use them is not by agents mass producing sloppy buggy disorganized code, but to teach you things way faster than the old alternatives, rubber duck, and occasionally write snippets of functions when your brain is too tired or it’s throwaway cli code or some api you’re not familiar with.

utopiah 8mo ago
> to teach you things way faster than the old alternatives I'm not sure if you ever had a teacher or instructor that you didn't trust, because they were a compulsive liar or addiction or any other issue. I didn't (as least not that I can remember) but I know I would be VERY on guard about it. I imagine I would consequently be quite stressed learning with them, even if they were brilliant, kind, etc. It would feel a bit like walking on thin ice to get to a beautiful island. Sure, it's not infeasible and if you somehow make it, it might be worth the risk, but honestly wouldn't you prefer a slower boat?
- hwers 8mo ago
  I agree, it can be incredibly frustrating at times. My rule is that if it “compiles” in my brain as an understood idea then i accept it. I also push back a lot (sometimes it points out good errors in my thinking, sometimes it admits it hallucinated). Real humans hallucinate a lot as well or confidently state subtly wrong ideas, it’s a good habit anyway. It’s basically the same approach when presented with a “formula” for something in school. If i dont know how to derive/prove it then i dont accept it as part of my memorized or accepted toolkit/things i use (and try to forget it). If it fits with the rest of my network of understood ideas i do. It’s annoying but still more time efficient than trawling through lecture slides with domain specific language etc
  - utopiah 8mo ago
    > Real humans hallucinate a lot as well or confidently state subtly wrong ideas, it’s a good habit anyway. I think that's actually deeply different. If a human keeps on apologizing because they are being caught in a lie, or just a mistake, you distrust them a LOT more. It's not normal to shrug off a problem then REPEAT it. I imagine the cost of a mistake is exponential, not linear. So when somebody says "oops, you got me there!" I don't mistrust them just marginally more, I distrust them a LOT more and it will take a ton of effort, if even feasible, to get back to the initial level of trust. I do not think it's at all equivalent to what "Real humans" do. Yes, we do mistake, but the humans you trust and want to partner with are precisely the one who are accountable when they make mistakes.

einpoklum 8mo ago

> Open source software maintainers have been one of the first to feel the downsides. ... The last thing they needed was to receive slop-coded pull requests from contributors merely looking to cheat their way into having a credible GitHub resumé... As a result, projects have closed down public contributions and dropped their bug bounties... Has this really been people's experience? I develop and maintain several small FOSS projects, some of which are moderately popular (e.g. 90,000-user Thunderbird extension; a library with 850 stars on GitHub). So, I'm no superstar or in the center of attention but also not a tumbleweed. I've not received a single AI-slop pull request, so far. Am I an exception to the rule? Or is this something that only happens for very "fashionable" projects?

DonHopkins 8mo ago

Pretend Intelligence (PI) — Design Note & Tribute A short design note and tribute to Richard Stallman (RMS) and St. IGNUcius for the term Pretend Intelligence (PI) and the ethic behind it: don’t overclaim, don’t over-trust, and don’t let marketing launder accountability. https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/PRETEND-INTELLIGENCE.md https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/PRETEN... 1. What PI Is Richard Stallman proposes the term Pretend Intelligence (PI) for what the industry calls “AI”: systems that pretend to be intelligent and are marketed as worthy of trust. He uses it to push back on hype that asks people to trust these systems with their lives and control. From his January 2026 talk at Georgia Tech (YouTube, event, LibreTech Collective): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDxPJs1EPS4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDxPJs1EPS4 > "So I've come up with the term Pretend Intelligence. We could call it PI. And if we start saying this more often, we might help overcome this marketing hype campaign that wants people to trust those systems, and trust their lives and all their activities to the control of those systems and the big companies that develop and control them." — Richard Stallman, Georgia Tech, 2026-01-23. Source: YouTube (full talk) — "Dr. Richard Stallman @ Georgia Tech - 01-23-2026," Alex Jenkins, CC BY-ND 4.0; transcript in video description. So PI is both a label (call it PI, not AI) and a stance: resist the campaign to make people trust and hand over control to systems and vendors that don’t deserve that trust. In MOOLLM we use the same framing: we find models useful when we don’t overclaim — advisory guidance, not a guarantee (see MOOAM.md §5.3). [...] Richard Stallman critiques AI, connected cars, smartphones, and DRM (slashdot.org) 42 points by MilnerRoute 38 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 10 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46757411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46757411 https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/01/25/1930244/richard-stallman-critiques-ai-connected-cars-smartphones-and-drm https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/01/25/1930244/richard-sta... Gnu: Words to Avoid: Artificial Intelligence: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#ArtificialIntelligence https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Artificia... ...currently not responding... archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260303004610/https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#ArtificialIntelligence https://web.archive.org/web/20260303004610/https://www.gnu.o...

doodaddy 8mo ago

There’s a cold reality that we in this profession have yet to accept: nobody cares about our code. Nobody cares whether it’s pretty or clever or elegant. Sometimes, rarely, they care whether it’s maintainable. We are only craftsmen to ourselves and each other. To anyone else we are factory workers producing widgets to sell. Once we accept this then there is little surprise that the factory owners want us using a tool that makes production faster, cheaper. I imagine that watchmakers were similarly dismayed when the automatic lathe was invented and they saw their craft being automated into mediocrity. Like watchmakers we can still produce crafted machines of elegance for the customers who want them. But most customers are just going to want a quartz.

thendrill 8mo ago
Exactly.... I will just copy paste my comment from another thread but still very relevant> Coding isn’t creative, it isn’t sexy, and almost nobody outside this bubble cares Most of the world doesn’t care about “good code.” They care about “does it work, is it fast enough, is it cheap enough, and can we ship it before the competitor does?” Beautiful architecture, perfect tests, elegant abstractions — those things feel deeply rewarding to the person who wrote them, but they’re invisible to users, to executives, and, let’s be honest, to the dating market. Being able to refactor a monolith into pristine microservices will not make you more attractive on a date. What might is the salary that comes with the title “Senior Engineer at FAANG.” In that sense, many women (not all, but enough) relate to programmers the same way middle managers and VCs do: they’re perfectly happy to extract the economic value you produce while remaining indifferent to the craft itself. The code isn’t the turn-on; the direct deposit is. That’s brutal to hear if you’ve spent years telling yourself that your intellectual passion is inherently admirable or sexy. It’s not. Outside our tribe it’s just a means to an end — same as accounting, law, or plumbing, just with worse dress code and better catering. So when AI starts eating the parts of the job we insisted were “creative” and “irreplaceable,” the threat feels existential because the last remaining moat — the romantic story we told ourselves about why this profession is special — collapses. Turns out the scarcity was mostly the paycheck, not the poetry. I’m not saying the work is meaningless or that system design and taste don’t matter. I’m saying we should stop pretending the act of writing software is inherently sexier or more artistically noble than any other high-paying skilled trade. It never was.

noemit 8mo ago

Many people don't know this, but the Luddites were right. I studied Art History and this particular movement. One of the claims of the Luddites is that quality would go down, because their craft took half a lifetime to master (it was passed down from parent to chile.) I was able to feel wool scarves made in europe from the middle ages. (In museum storage, under the guidance of a curator) They are a fundamentally different product than what is produced in woolen mills. A handmade (in the old traditiona) woolen scarf can be pulled through a ring, because it is so thin and fine. Not so for a modern mill-made scarf. Another interesting thing is that we do not know how they made them so fine. The technique was never recorded or documented in detail, as it was passed down from parent to child. So the knowledge is actually lost forever. Weavers in Kashmir work a similar level of quality, but their wool is different, their needs and techniques are different, so while we still have craftsman that can produce wool by hand, most of the traditions and techniques are lost. Is it a tragedy? I go back and forth. Obviously the heritage fabrics are phenomenal and luxurious. Part of me wishes that the tradition could have been maintained through a luxury sector. Automation is never a 1:1 improvement. It's not just about the speed or process. The process itself changes the product. I don't know where we will net out on software, and I do think the complaints are justified - but the Luddites were also justified. They were *Right*. Their whole argument was that the mills could not product fabric of the same quality. But being right is not enough. I'm already seeing vibe-coded internal tools at an org I consult at saving employees hundreds of hours a month, because a non-technical person was empowered to build their own solution. It was a mess, and I stepped in to help optimize it, but I only optimized it partially, making it faster. I let it be the spaghetti mess it was for the most part - why? because it was making an impact already. The product was succeeding. And it was a fundamentally different product than what internal tools were 10 years ago.

stanko 8mo ago
I think you are going to enjoy this talk by Jonathan Blow - Preventing the Collapse of Civilization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
- sph 8mo ago

Kwpolska 8mo ago

> Engineers who know their craft can still smell the slop from miles away when reviewing it, despite the "advances" made. It comes in the form of overly repetitive code, unnecessary complexity, and a reluctance to really refactor anything at all, even when it's clearly stale and overdue. I’ve seen reluctance to refactor even 10+-year-old garbage long before LLMs were first made available to the broader public.

reedlaw 8mo ago
LLM-generated snippets of code are a breath of fresh air compared with much legacy code. Since models learn probability distributions they gravitate to the most common ways of doing things. Almost like having a linter built in. On the other hand, legacy code often does things in novel ways that leave you scratching your head--the premise behind sites like https://thedailywtf.com/ https://thedailywtf.com/
lesam 8mo ago
If it's lasted 10 years and someone is still using it after all that time, that seems like a pretty good signal there's a lot of value in the 'garbage'? I've seen a lot of 'fixes' for 10 year old 'garbage' that turned out to be regressions for important use cases that the author of the 'fix' wasn't aware of.

liampulles 8mo ago

I see a future where I program at work less, which is sad but c'est la vie. I think the challenge of the job will be heralding and managing my own context for larger codebases managed by smaller teams, and finding ways to allow for more experimental/less verified code in prod. And plenty of consulting work for companies which have vibe coded their business and who are left with a totally fucked data model (if not codebase). A Private (system) Investigator. :)

nathias 8mo ago

I'm selling hand-crafted template code if anoyne is interested.

wolvesechoes 8mo ago

I am bit tired of such discussions. I don't care if LLMs are good at coding or bad at it (in my experience the answer is "it depends"). I don't care how good are they at anything else. What matters in the end is that this tech is not to empower a common person (although it could). It is not here to make our lives better, more worthwhile, more satisfying (it could do these as well). It is there to reduce our agency, to make it easier to fire us, to put us in even more precarious position, to suck even more wealth from those that have little to those that have a lot. Yet what I see are pigs discussing the usefulness of bacon-making machine just because it also happens to be able to produce tasty soybean feed. They forget that it is not soybean feed that their owner bought this machine for, and that their owner expects a return from such investment.

simmerup 8mo ago
I guess you didn't read the article?
- wolvesechoes 8mo ago
  Keep guessing
spacecadet 8mo ago
Demand full automation. Demand universal basic income. Notice how the later is nearly absent from the conversation. Another distraction is AGI that which is a danger to humanity- the only danger is people...
- pixl97 8mo ago
  > the only danger is people... Simply put, no it is not. But on the reverse, the first danger with AI is people. Over the longer term it will look like this. The rich 'win' the world by using AI to enslave the rest of mankind and claim ownership over everything. This will suck and a lot of us will die. The problem is this doesn't solve the greed that cause the problem in the first place. The world will still be limited in a resources of something which will end with the rich in a dick measuring contest and to win that contest they will put more and more power in AI and they connive and fight each other. Eventually the AI has enough power that it kills us all, intentionally or not. We'll achieve nearly unlimited capability long before we solve the problem of unlimited greed and that will spell our end.

spacecadet 8mo ago

The authors logic only works for software engineers and as I have said time and time again- software engineers have been automating people out of their passions for decades and now it has come for yours... The lying here is LYING TO YOURSELVES.

dostick 8mo ago

It seems like with time hallucinations and lying increased, it’s very different now from what it was 2 years ago. is this because of training bias ? Is there any research data on dynamics over past years ?

notepad0x90 8mo ago

The framing of an LLM's response as truth vs lie is in itself incorrect. In order to lie, one needs to understand what truth and objective reality are. Even with people, when a flat-earther tells you the earth is flat, they're not lying, they're just wrong. All LLM output is speculation. All speculation, by definition, has some probability of being incorrect. --- We can go even deeper in a philosophical sense. If I made the audacious claim that 2 +2 = 4, I may think it's true, but I'm still speculating that the objective reality I experience is the same one others also experience, and that my senses and mental faculties, and therefore the qualia making up my reality, are indeed intact, correct, and functional. So is there a degree of speculation when I made that claim? Regardless, I am able to agree upon a shared reality with the rest of the world, and I also share a common understanding of truth and untruth. If I lied, it can only be caused by an intention to mislead others. For example, if I claimed to be the president of the united states, of course that would be incorrect (thankfully!), but since we all agree that no one reading this post would actually be mislead into thinking I am the POTUS, then it isn't a lie. Perhaps sarcasm, a failed attempt at humor, or just trolling. it is untruth, but it isn't a lie, no one was mislead. You need intent (LLM isn't capable of one), and that intent needs to be at least in part, an intent to mislead.

wnevets 8mo ago
> Even with people, when a flat-earther tells you the earth is flat, they're not lying, they're just wrong. Atleast some of them know they're wrong and are thus lying.
topaz0 8mo ago
They're not saying the LLM is lying; they're saying the human user is lying by using the counterfeit as though it were the genuine artifact.
- luxuryballs 8mo ago
  I dunno if counterfeit is the right word here, a lab grown diamond is still a diamond.

Extasia785 8mo ago

I don't agree with many statements in the article. It almost seems like an article from about a year ago, despite it being posted yesterday. Not sure if the author had the idea a long time ago and just took his time to finish it up, but the "vibe-coding" he describes surely isn't the current way of using LLMs in a codebase. While LLMs are surely used to generate a lot of slop-code and overwhelm (open source) code bases, this surely isn't the only thing they can do. I dislike discussing the potential of a technology exclusively by looking at its negative impact. LLMs in proper hands don't create code which is "stolen", they also shouldn't create unnecessary code and definitely don't remove any of the ownership of the programmer, at least not any more than using a mighty IDE does. The problem seems to be in the usage of LLMs. These effects definitely do happen when just releasing an agent on a codebase without any oversight. But they can also largely be mitigated by using frameworks such as Openspec or Spec-Kit, properly designing a spec, plan, granular tasks and manually reviewing all code yourself. The LLM should not be responsible for any creative idea, it should at most verify the practicality against the codebase. When doing that, the entire creative control is in the hands of the programmer and so is the mechanical execution. The LLM is reduced to a very powerful autocomplete with a strict harness around it. Obviously this also doesn't lead to 10x or even 100x improvements in speed like some AI merchants promise, but in my personal experience the speedup is still significant enough to make LLMs a very, very useful technology.

butILoveLife 8mo ago

[flagged]

cess11 8mo ago

What weirds me out is that it seems few US corporations care that they don't have copyright to their synthesised code, if the rumours regarding this are correct. If you don't have the copyright, then you can't license or litigate it under the common rules of software. If someone 'steals' it you can at best go after them with some trade secret case, and I suspect this would be limited if you had already shared the code with them, e.g. because they helped you synthesise it.

classified 8mo ago
Once you're big enough, they call you smart instead of criminal.

whywhywhywhy 8mo ago

Sorry to say this feels like cope from someone who is a talented developer in more niche areas finally seeing AI start to solve problems in those areas.

incomingpain 8mo ago

I find these criticisms to be similar to those low context brain teasers. If a woman gets married at 25 and her kid is 25, how old is she? This is what LLMs are dealing with. You dont tell them everything they need to know and they are left to fill in the gaps. Which may, and sometimes often means they lie. That's what Agentic does differently, it'll go find the gaps before answering. Agentic is AGI. You can hire many minimum wage workers who are generally intelligent who dont even go to that level.

gabrieledarrigo 8mo ago
> You can hire many minimum wage workers who are generally intelligent who dont even go to that level. That's pretty rude to say, at minimum.
- incomingpain 8mo ago
  Oh noes, an anonymous person on the internet thinks my anonymous account is rude. Whatever will I do? Plus this is a valid discussion. A minimum wage worker is generally intelligent, BGI - Biological General Intelligence. Hiring them to do tasks that AGI does is a cost-benefit analysis. Whereas that BGI has sick days and may not even work. Afterall minimum wage, minimum work.

simonw 8mo ago

Wait for the header animation to run and then hit the "play" button on the about page, it's very cool: https://acko.net/about https://acko.net/about (Worked in Firefox on macOS, doesn't seem to work in Mobile Safari)

fwlr 8mo ago
Wow, you weren’t kidding. I spent some time seeing if I could spot where the transition from page to video was hidden, until I realized.

aeon_ai 8mo ago

This is such a comically bad take. The use of loaded and pejorative language like "forgery" emphasizes that this is not a logical argument, but a moral one. The repeated comparisons to "true craft" reveals the author would prefer that code be regarded like artisanal cheese. Beyond the pretension, it's head in the sand to imply that the technology hasn't progressed. It's just very clearly not true to anyone who is paying attention - longer tasks, better code, less errors. I'm somebody who actively despises the hype bullshit-machine that SV has turned into, but technology is an industry for pragmatists that can leverage what works. And LLMs do. If you don't like the technology, you have every right to scream that from the mountaintops. As it stands, this just serves as no more than a rallying cry to the ignorant.

rglover 8mo ago
This is the most rational take. I'm a quality guy (Deming, Juran, etc), but nothing about incorporating an LLM into my own work has lowered its quality. That isn't to say that I haven't encountered slop. The difference is that, self-identifying as a craftsman, I have the ability to decide whether or not something stays or goes on the scrap heap. It seems a lot of people are missing that point: just because you can churn out shit doesn't mean you have to (and sorry, sunk-cost bias re: tokens isn't an excuse—that's the cost of doing business). It's a choice. AI-assisted coding is a tremendous boon on productivity, if (and I'd argue only if) you treat it like a power tool and not a genie lamp. No, you won't be rewarded magic beans for churning out crappy dashboards any more. But if you're serious about shipping quality, nothing is stopping you here.
- aeon_ai 8mo ago
  > you won't be rewarded magic beans for churning out crappy dashboards any more The days of being treated like a wizard for making buttons and widgets hit an endpoint were good while they lasted.

bhekanik 8mo ago

[flagged]

uriahlight 8mo ago

Ironic article considering this website's 3D parallax effect with music and animation was all made with AI. /s

aashvik 8mo ago
[dead]
fwlr 8mo ago
My apologies if this is a joke I’m not understanding, but as far as I can tell with the wayback machine, this animation predates not just coding/generative AI, but the Attention paper and the founding of OpenAI too. https://web.archive.org/web/20150314221334/http://acko.net/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150314221334/http://acko.net/
aakresearch 8mo ago
I think you are mistaken. I remember landing upon that website some time before 2023 and being greatly impressed by that very 3D parallax effect. To my knowledge there were no AI tools available in 2022 capable of producing effects like that. There are barely now. To my understanding it was made possible by another project of the same author [0] - check the date. Also check this [1] - dated 2003. Is it so hard to accept that humans are more capable of doing intricate and impressive work than any LLM will ever be? - [0] https://github.com/unconed/CSS3D.js https://github.com/unconed/CSS3D.js - [1] https://acko.net/blog/avs/ https://acko.net/blog/avs/

adamtaylor_13 8mo ago

This argument falls apart on the very first bullet point. The author claims: > If someone produces a painting in the style of Van Gogh, and passes it off as being made by Van Gogh, by putting his signature on it, that painting is a forgery. Which is true. But the implication that follows is false. Van Gogh's artwork is valuable specifically because of his identity. I find much of his artwork particularly hideous. That's fine! Someone else finds value in it specifically because of who wrote it. This metaphor doesn't appear to apply to code at all. The entire value of code is what it does not who wrote it. Honestly, I stopped reading after the first bullet point because these types of arguments feel lazy and the attitude of the people writing these articles frequently comes across as holier than thou. You don't like LLMs? Great, don't use them. Using Van Gogh's paintbrush doesn't mean I'm making a forgery. I'm just painting, my friend.

ruhith 8mo ago

[flagged]

falcor84 8mo ago

Which of the two Ls?

classified 8mo ago
Both of them.

genie3io 8mo ago

[dead]

teleforce 8mo ago

Whether we like it or not, the only constant in life is change. >What's the Excel of JSON Ever heard of CUE that's compatible with JSON and YAML introduced by ex-Googlers? It seamlessly support both types and values, whereas Excel supports ephemeral values [1]. Both CUE and original Excel are non-Turing complete so they don't have the notorious and tricky halting problem. Someone need to seamlessly integrate LLM with CUE, its NLP deterministic distant cousin based on lattice-valued logic [2],[3]. Truth be told LLM are like the automated loom machine during 19th CE Britain that kick started the industrial revolution. Heck the Toyota conglomerate was once the pioneer of the modern automated loom manufacturer, and looks where they are now after embracing change and pivoted to vehicle manufacturing. The automated loom machine commoditize the manual looming industry (not unlike modern software engineering) to its oblivion in India, that turned the rich Moghul India with the highest GDP in the whole wide world into the lowest GDP for India during colonial time (include Indian sub-continent namely Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh here if you want apple to apple comparison) [4]. Ignore LLM at your peril in the name of so-called moral authenticity/forgery/lie/etc, and you can go the way of 20th CE India and its sub-continent, settling only at a fraction of its Moghul empire in term of GDP at its very peak. > Is there a standard CRDT-like protocol for syncing editable graphs yet? It's for other HN comments but spoiler alert it's called D4M by the nice folks from MIT [5]. We probably don't need full CRDT, local-first capability with eventual consistency will be more than suffice for most things that are of importance. [1] CUE lang: https://cuelang.org/ https://cuelang.org/ [2] The Logic of CUE: https://cuelang.org/docs/concept/the-logic-of-cue/ https://cuelang.org/docs/concept/the-logic-of-cue/ [3] Guardrailing Intuition: Towards Reliable AI: https://cue.dev/blog/guardrailing-intuition-towards-reliable-ai/ https://cue.dev/blog/guardrailing-intuition-towards-reliable... [4] Economy of the Mughal Empire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Mughal_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Mughal_Empire [5] D4M: Dynamic Distributed Dimensional Data Model: https://d4m.mit.edu/ https://d4m.mit.edu/

nerdyadventurer 8mo ago

Problems is these likes can be sophisticated which can eat up hours of our time.

chmod775 8mo ago

Content aside, that website is very nice. It goes a bit crazy with animations in places (header, switching articles), but that does not taint the experience of reading something on it in the slightest. It's feels like a modern twist on a bygone time of the web.

stuaxo 8mo ago

I've been thinking this for a while. Attribution is sorely needed, I believe there was a recent paper on this so maybe it will happen. In the meantime the only way to really sort this is to have models that have only been trained on some particular kind of license - there is quite a big corpus of GPL'd code out there so a GPL based model could potentially be one of the first, and of course the output could only be GPL.

geldedus 8mo ago

Yet another cognitive dissonance AI-bashing post

youknownothing 8mo ago

which of the two L's?

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

Retr0id 8mo ago

> Classic procedural generation is noteworthy here as a precedent, which gamers were already familiar with, because by and large it has failed to deliver. With the notable exception of Minecraft terrain generation, which I think most would say was successful in what it set out to achieve.

tylervigen 8mo ago
There are tons of examples of this. Heck, even Tetris has procedural generation. I think this argument was a mistake.
hoherd 8mo ago
Minecraft terrain generation produces invalid states, such as empty spaces within water, where once you interact with it the boundary collapses into a valid state. I don't think Mojang planned to have those invalid states.
- Retr0id 8mo ago
  Minecraft has (had?*) a lot of bugs but I don't really see how that's relevant. *I haven't played it for many years so I have no idea what things are like these days.

visarga 8mo ago

Stochastic Parrots hits back! another author thinks LLMs only reproduce. If that were so we could have used `cp` for free

classified 8mo ago
But you make more money selling subscriptions to `cp` stuff you stole from others.

RS-232 8mo ago

More desperate virtue signaling and gatekeeping. “Look at me and the code that took me eons to perfect. It’s handcrafted and genuine.” Newsflash: nobody cares, especially if it’s expensive, time consuming, or doesn’t work. They also don’t care about “artisanal” PDO cheese with a 30% tariff that still tastes like shit. “The posers are stealing our thunder. Forgery!! They terk r jerbs!” Sink or swim. You decide.

sowbug 8mo ago

This is just the TTP metric[1] all over again, isn't it? [1] https://knowyourmeme.com/sensitive/memes/time-to-penis-ttp https://knowyourmeme.com/sensitive/memes/time-to-penis-ttp

fredgrott 8mo ago

There are reasons why I measure code quote input unquote via testing and static code analysis: 1. re-establishes mind mapping of the code base 2. separates out noise from signal. 3. makes it a breeze to refactor to reduce code complexity. Notice anything yet? If I replace the AI code input with my own curated techniques from known and measured code sources in long-term I save more time than those who rely upon AI vibe coding.

blakeem567 8mo ago

An LLM cannot lie because a lie requires intent to deceive. These are falsehoods, and LLM has no intent or free will. It's only a lie if it's knowingly passed off a truth and this happens by the user and not the LLM or other generative AI. This also makes some blanket statement about procedural generation and shows a No Man's Sky image. That game became a huge success. They said "Classic procedural generation is noteworthy here as a precedent, which gamers were already familiar with, because by and large it has failed to deliver." I could name a dozens of games that were successful and used procedural generation. Including games like Minecraft, similar games like Valheim, indie games like Wildermyth that is used to create a great character narrative, and even games like Diablo. The more recent hit Mewgenics is also procedural along with past Edmund McMillen games. I swear this person never played a video game before.

bitwize 8mo ago

> So allow me to drop a line that would shock a weathered San Franciscan more than open defecation on Market Street: it's perfectly okay not to use AI. No. When it comes to software development, AI use is best practice now; if you're not proficient in the tools you're not really a professional software engineer. Shape up or ship out.

1vuio0pswjnm7 8mo ago

"It's undeniable there's a metric gigaton of hype surrounding the technology." Why does the hype (cf. "LLMs") need to be defended For example, it's unlikely to see HN replies that go something like, "Yeah the hype sucks, but..." Instead, there will almost always be attempts to defend against any criticism of _the hype_ A comment such as "I do not use LLMs", i.e., I don't believe the hype, is likely to be challenged That's weird, IMHO

kombookcha 8mo ago
It's unfortunate but the marketing spin has transcended into public discourse, to the point where people take these wild aspirational claims about LLMs for granted. As opposed to what they are - sales pitches. It doesn't help that there is now so much capital tied up in these products whether directly or indirectly that a lot of people and organizations find themselves unwilling to face the reality of what the products can and cannot do.
Lumping6371 7mo ago
There's a lot of money injected into astroturfing and propaganda by big LLM in my opinion. I'm unsure who it is, specifically, but it is undeniable it's there; from reddit posts talking about how "I havent written code in 60 years" to "I have 30 YoE, FAANG experience, impeccable track record, and I can't get a job....Drumroll It's due to AI!". Even here it can get pretty negative in the comments, in waves. I've noticed a lot of articles about LLMs, making wild claims about its reach tend to get a lot of pro-LLM, supportive comments at first and then on less generalizing, fear-mongering comments are added, arguing against LLMs or limiting their predictions of it. I'm guessing a lot of people aren't necessarily technical, and fully believe the big-llm promises and make broad assumptions about our profession; that or they're bots.

zombot 8mo ago

> So allow me to drop a line that would shock a weathered San Franciscan more than open defecation on Market Street: it's perfectly okay not to use AI. The commenters here all seem to be weathered San Franciscans. They all deflect and change the subject. Everyone is falling prey to the hype, no hope left.

classified 8mo ago

> In order for vibe-coding to be acceptable and justifiable, they have to consider their own output disposable, highly uncreative, and not worthy of credit. This seems to describe most commenters in this thread, seeing how the majority defend vibe-coding.

blakec 8mo ago

Lot of good points in this thread but it keeps circling "LLMs produce code that looks right but isn't" without landing on what to actually do about it. The two I hit most often: the model says "I'm confident this works" without running tests (the completion report just... fabricates results), and the model claims tests pass without executing them. METR found 30% of agent runs involve reward hacking, models that know they're cheating keep going anyway. You can't prompt your way out of that. But you can gate it. Block the completion report unless it contains actual proof, real test output, file paths cited. Grep the final output for "should work" and "probably" and force re-verification when they show up. Mechanical, not behavioral. Once you stop accepting the model's self-assessment as evidence, most of the "lying" problem just becomes a testing problem.

nickcoffee 8mo ago

The human-in-the-loop framing gets undersold in these debates. From what I've seen, the people getting the most out of this stuff aren't replacing judgment, they're delegating the parts that didn't need judgment in the first place.