5 ms·

[flagged]

behehebd 7mo ago
OP isnt holding it right. How would you trust autocomplete if it can get it wrong? A. you don't. Verify!
wvenable 7mo ago
I don't trust it completely but I still use it. Trust but verify. I've had some funny conversations -- Me:"Why did you choose to do X to solve the problem?" ... It:"Oh I should totally not have done that, I'll do Y instead". But it's far from being so unreliable that it's not useful.
- sid_talks 7mo ago
  > Trust but verify. I guess I should have used ‘completely trust’ instead of ‘trust’ in my original comment. I was referring to the subset of developers who call themselves vibe coders.
  - wvenable 7mo ago
    I think I like "blindly trust" better because vibe coders literally aren't looking.
- meatmanek 7mo ago
  I find that if I ask an LLM to explain what its reasoning was, it comes up with some post-hoc justification that has nothing to do with what it was actually thinking. Most likely token predictor, etc etc. As far as I understand, any reasoning tokens for previous answers are generally not kept in the context for follow-up questions, so the model can't even really introspect on its previous chain of thought.
  - wvenable 7mo ago
    I mostly find it useful for learning myself or for questioning a strange result. It usually works well for either of those. As you said, I'm probably not getting it's actual reasoning from any reasoning tokens but never thought that was happening anyway. It's just a way of interrogating the current situation in the current context. It providing a different result is exactly because it's now looking at the existing solution and generating from there.
  - redman25 7mo ago
    It depends on the harness and/or inference engine whether they keep the reasoning of past messages. Not to get all philosophical but maybe justification is post-hoc even for humans.
kelnos 7mo ago
You don't have to trust it. You can review its output. Sure, that takes more effort than vibe coding, but it can very often be significantly less effort than writing the code yourself. Also consider that "writing code" is only one thing you can do with it. I use it to help me track down bugs, plan features, verify algorithms that I've written, etc.
- slashdave 7mo ago
  And document!
vidarh 7mo ago
I've spent 30 years seeing the junk many human developers deliver, so I've had 30 years to figure out how we build systems around teams to make broken output coalesce into something reliable. A lot of people just don't realise how bad the output of the average developer is, nor how many teams successfully ship with developers below average. To me, that's a large part of why I'm happy to use LLMs extensively. Some things need smart developers. A whole lot of things can be solved with ceremony and guardrails around developers who'd struggle to reliably solve fizzbuzz without help.
- reconnecting 7mo ago
  Did you also notice the evolution of average developers over time? I mean, if you take code from a developer ten years ago and compare it with their output now, you can see improvement. I assume that over time, the output improves because of the effort and time the developer invests in themselves. However, LLMs might reduce that effort to zero — we just don't know how developers will look after ten years of using LLMs now. Still, if you have 30 years of experience in the industry, you should be able to imagine what the real output might be.
  - vidarh 7mo ago
    > Did you also notice the evolution of average developers over time? I mean, if you take code from a developer ten years ago and compare it with their output now, you can see improvement. This makes little sense to me. Yes, individual developers gets better. I've seen little to no evidence that the average developer has gotten better. > However, LLMs might reduce that effort to zero — we just don't know how developers will look after ten years of using LLMs now. It might reduce that effort to zero from the same people who have always invested the bare minimum of effort to hold down a job. Most of them don't advance today either, and most of them will deliver vastly better results if they lean heavily on LLMs. On the high end, what I see experienced developers do with LLMs involves a whole lot of learning, and will continue to involve a whole lot of learning for many years, just like with any other tool.
    - 7mo ago
hungryhobbit 7mo ago
[flagged]
- krapp 7mo ago
  LLMs screw up far more than 1% of the time. They screw up routinely, far more than a professionally trained human would, and in ways that would have said human declared mentally ill.
- shitloadofbooks 7mo ago
  I certainly wouldn't use a compiler that "screws up" 1% of the time; that's the perfect amount where it's extremely common where everything I use it for will have major issues but also so laborious to find amongst the 99% of correct output that I might as well not use it in the first place. Which is ironically, the exact case those of us who don't find LLM-assisted coding "worth it" make.
  - redman25 7mo ago
    How about a human coworker who screws up 1% of the time? Doesn’t sound so bad in that light. It’s the nature of being human. Good code review is the solution but if it’s faster to do it yourself, that’s fine too.
- bigfishrunning 7mo ago
  If they only screwed up 1% of the time, they'd be as good as the LinkedIn hype men want you to believe. They're far far worse then that in reality
- b00ty4breakfast 7mo ago
  not questioning the cost of adopting new tech is so foolish it boggles my mind that so many nominally intelligent people just close their eyes and take a bite without wondering whether that's really fudge on their sundae or something fecal. Pure ideology, as a certain sniffing slav would say
- komali2 7mo ago
  > enabling programmers around the world to be far more productive I know a lot of us feel this way, but why isn't there more evidence of it than our feelings? Where's the explosion of FOSS projects and businesses? And why do studies keep coming out showing decreased productivity? Why aren't there oodles of studies showing increases of productivity? I like kicking back and letting claude do my job but I've yet to see evidence of this increased productivity. Objectively speaking, "I" seem to be "writing" the same amount of code as I was before, just with less cognitive effort.
bdangubic 7mo ago
we worked with humans for decades and are used to 25x less reliability
diehunde 7mo ago
Many of us are literally being forced to use it at work by people who haven't written a line of code in years (VPs, directors, etc) and decided to play around with it during a weekend and blew their minds.
0xbadcafebee 7mo ago
I could say the same about every web app in the world... they fail every single day, in obvious, preventable ways. Don't look into the javascript console as you browse unless you want a horror show. Yet here we all are, using all these websites, depending on them in many cases for our livelihoods.
pocksuppet 7mo ago
LLMs are tool-shaped objects: https://minutes.substack.com/p/tool-shaped-objects https://minutes.substack.com/p/tool-shaped-objects Without adequate real-world feedback, the simulation starts to feel real: https://alvinpane.com/essays/when-the-simulation-starts-to-feel-real https://alvinpane.com/essays/when-the-simulation-starts-to-f...
tomhow 7mo ago
Sure, but we’re trying to have curious conversation here, whereas this is the kind of dismissive, even curmudgeonly comment we're hoping to avoid. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[flagged]

OP isnt holding it right. How would you trust autocomplete if it can get it wrong? A. you don't. Verify!

I don't trust it completely but I still use it. Trust but verify. I've had some funny conversations -- Me:"Why did you choose to do X to solve the problem?" ... It:"Oh I should totally not have done that, I'll do Y instead". But it's far from being so unreliable that it's not useful.

sid_talks 7mo ago
> Trust but verify. I guess I should have used ‘completely trust’ instead of ‘trust’ in my original comment. I was referring to the subset of developers who call themselves vibe coders.
- wvenable 7mo ago
  I think I like "blindly trust" better because vibe coders literally aren't looking.
meatmanek 7mo ago
I find that if I ask an LLM to explain what its reasoning was, it comes up with some post-hoc justification that has nothing to do with what it was actually thinking. Most likely token predictor, etc etc. As far as I understand, any reasoning tokens for previous answers are generally not kept in the context for follow-up questions, so the model can't even really introspect on its previous chain of thought.
- wvenable 7mo ago
  I mostly find it useful for learning myself or for questioning a strange result. It usually works well for either of those. As you said, I'm probably not getting it's actual reasoning from any reasoning tokens but never thought that was happening anyway. It's just a way of interrogating the current situation in the current context. It providing a different result is exactly because it's now looking at the existing solution and generating from there.
- redman25 7mo ago
  It depends on the harness and/or inference engine whether they keep the reasoning of past messages. Not to get all philosophical but maybe justification is post-hoc even for humans.

kelnos 7mo ago

You don't have to trust it. You can review its output. Sure, that takes more effort than vibe coding, but it can very often be significantly less effort than writing the code yourself. Also consider that "writing code" is only one thing you can do with it. I use it to help me track down bugs, plan features, verify algorithms that I've written, etc.

slashdave 7mo ago
And document!

vidarh 7mo ago

I've spent 30 years seeing the junk many human developers deliver, so I've had 30 years to figure out how we build systems around teams to make broken output coalesce into something reliable. A lot of people just don't realise how bad the output of the average developer is, nor how many teams successfully ship with developers below average. To me, that's a large part of why I'm happy to use LLMs extensively. Some things need smart developers. A whole lot of things can be solved with ceremony and guardrails around developers who'd struggle to reliably solve fizzbuzz without help.

reconnecting 7mo ago
Did you also notice the evolution of average developers over time? I mean, if you take code from a developer ten years ago and compare it with their output now, you can see improvement. I assume that over time, the output improves because of the effort and time the developer invests in themselves. However, LLMs might reduce that effort to zero — we just don't know how developers will look after ten years of using LLMs now. Still, if you have 30 years of experience in the industry, you should be able to imagine what the real output might be.
- vidarh 7mo ago
  > Did you also notice the evolution of average developers over time? I mean, if you take code from a developer ten years ago and compare it with their output now, you can see improvement. This makes little sense to me. Yes, individual developers gets better. I've seen little to no evidence that the average developer has gotten better. > However, LLMs might reduce that effort to zero — we just don't know how developers will look after ten years of using LLMs now. It might reduce that effort to zero from the same people who have always invested the bare minimum of effort to hold down a job. Most of them don't advance today either, and most of them will deliver vastly better results if they lean heavily on LLMs. On the high end, what I see experienced developers do with LLMs involves a whole lot of learning, and will continue to involve a whole lot of learning for many years, just like with any other tool.
  - 7mo ago

hungryhobbit 7mo ago

[flagged]

krapp 7mo ago
LLMs screw up far more than 1% of the time. They screw up routinely, far more than a professionally trained human would, and in ways that would have said human declared mentally ill.
shitloadofbooks 7mo ago
I certainly wouldn't use a compiler that "screws up" 1% of the time; that's the perfect amount where it's extremely common where everything I use it for will have major issues but also so laborious to find amongst the 99% of correct output that I might as well not use it in the first place. Which is ironically, the exact case those of us who don't find LLM-assisted coding "worth it" make.
- redman25 7mo ago
  How about a human coworker who screws up 1% of the time? Doesn’t sound so bad in that light. It’s the nature of being human. Good code review is the solution but if it’s faster to do it yourself, that’s fine too.
bigfishrunning 7mo ago
If they only screwed up 1% of the time, they'd be as good as the LinkedIn hype men want you to believe. They're far far worse then that in reality
b00ty4breakfast 7mo ago
not questioning the cost of adopting new tech is so foolish it boggles my mind that so many nominally intelligent people just close their eyes and take a bite without wondering whether that's really fudge on their sundae or something fecal. Pure ideology, as a certain sniffing slav would say
komali2 7mo ago
> enabling programmers around the world to be far more productive I know a lot of us feel this way, but why isn't there more evidence of it than our feelings? Where's the explosion of FOSS projects and businesses? And why do studies keep coming out showing decreased productivity? Why aren't there oodles of studies showing increases of productivity? I like kicking back and letting claude do my job but I've yet to see evidence of this increased productivity. Objectively speaking, "I" seem to be "writing" the same amount of code as I was before, just with less cognitive effort.

bdangubic 7mo ago

we worked with humans for decades and are used to 25x less reliability

diehunde 7mo ago

Many of us are literally being forced to use it at work by people who haven't written a line of code in years (VPs, directors, etc) and decided to play around with it during a weekend and blew their minds.

0xbadcafebee 7mo ago

I could say the same about every web app in the world... they fail every single day, in obvious, preventable ways. Don't look into the javascript console as you browse unless you want a horror show. Yet here we all are, using all these websites, depending on them in many cases for our livelihoods.

pocksuppet 7mo ago

LLMs are tool-shaped objects: https://minutes.substack.com/p/tool-shaped-objects https://minutes.substack.com/p/tool-shaped-objects Without adequate real-world feedback, the simulation starts to feel real: https://alvinpane.com/essays/when-the-simulation-starts-to-feel-real https://alvinpane.com/essays/when-the-simulation-starts-to-f...

tomhow 7mo ago

Sure, but we’re trying to have curious conversation here, whereas this is the kind of dismissive, even curmudgeonly comment we're hoping to avoid. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html