6 ms·

I have come to the conclusion that many people are going to live this AI period pretty much like the five stages of grief: denial that it can work, anger at the

I have come to the conclusion that many people are going to live this AI period pretty much like the five stages of grief: denial that it can work, anger at the new robber barons, bargaining that yeah it kinda works but not really well enough, catastrophic world view and depression, and finally acceptance of the new normality. I'm still at the bargaining phase, personally.

vova_hn2 7mo ago
> yeah it kinda works but not really well enough I mean, at some point it was true. I remember that around 2023, when I first encountered colleagues trying to use ChatGPT for coding, I thought "by the time you are done with your back-and-forth to correct all the errors, I would have already written this code manually". That was true then, but not anymore.
- bigstrat2003 7mo ago
  No, it's still very much true. Every now and then I use an LLM to write code and the vast majority of the time it turns out to take just as much time (if not more) than it would've taken to write the code myself.
  - hellojimbo 7mo ago
    You are either using it wrong or you are writing extremely niche code that has bad llm coverage
    - neonstatic 7mo ago
      or you are in denial about what he is saying
    - Zimzom 7mo ago
      I suspect I fall into the former camp, but I'm not sure where to start when it comes to learning how to use llms "the right way". I'm not a proper software engineer, but I do a lot of scripting and most of my attempts to let a model speed up a menial task (e.g. a small bash or python script for some data parsing or chaining together other tools), end up with me doing extensive rewrites because the model is completely inconsistent in naming convention, pattern reusage, etc.
  - BinaryIgor 7mo ago
    Exactly. Verification is not cheap at all
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- globular-toast 7mo ago
  This is true for things you already understand. It works for implementing yet another CRUD view because I've done it a million times before. I know exactly what the code should look like, but it takes a while to type it in. When my typing speed is the bottleneck then of course LLMs win (and I use them for that all the time). But the interesting stuff where you don't understand the problem yet, it doesn't make it quicker. Because then the bottleneck is my understanding. Things take time. And sleep. They require hands-on experience. It doesn't matter how fast LLMs can churn out code. There's a limit to how fast I can understand things. Unless, of course, I'm happy shipping code I don't understand, which I'm not.
  - yusefnapora 7mo ago
    Unfortunately, it seems that few of the people willing to pay money for software development actually care whether you understand the code or not. Unless it breaks in a publicly embarrassing way, of course. Then "you own the code" and the sacrificial human in the loop can be dredged out to take the blame. All the incentives nudge you towards less and less critical evaluation of the output. The results of careful evaluation are much harder to measure than "this guy is cranking out 10x the code compared to last year!" And while you were busy thoughtfully internalizing the output, the guy next to you has been letting Strega Nona's pasta pot go brrr and spew another thousand lines of spaghetti on top, ready for you to review. Eventually "lgtm" becomes the default, and "do you want me to go ahead and implement that for you" starts sounding like the only way to keep your head above water.
- riffraff 7mo ago
  I think it's still true, but very domain specific. I am not confident it will stay true.
cherryteastain 7mo ago
What's the 'new normality' in the fifth stage? Do you think you'll start to believe it actually works 100%? Or that you won't change your assessment that it works only sometimes, but maybe pulling the lever on the slot machine repeatedly is better/more efficient than doing it yourself?
- sdenton4 7mo ago
  When you resolve bottlenecks, new bottlenecks become apparent. Right now, it's looking like assessment and evaluation are massive bottlenecks.
  - qsera 7mo ago
    > it's looking like assessment and evaluation are massive bottlenecks. So I think LLMs have moved the effort that used to be spent on fun part (coding) into the boring part (assessment and evaluation) that is also now a lot bigger..
    - hellojimbo 7mo ago
      When writing banal code, you can just ask it to write unit tests for certain conditions and it'll do a pretty good job. The cutting edge tools will correctly automatically run and iterate on the unit tests when they dont pass. You can even ask the agent to setup TDD.
    - jochem9 7mo ago
      You could build (code, if you really want) tools to ease the review. Of course we already have many tools to do this, but with LLMs you can use their stochastic behavior to discover unexpected problems (something a deterministic solution never can). The author also talks about this when talking about the security review (something I rarely did in the past, but also do now and it has really improved the security posture of my systems). You can also setup way more elaborate verification systems. Don't just do a static analyis of the code, but actually deploy it and let the LLM hammer at it with all kinds of creative paths. Then let it debug why it's broken. It's relentless at debugging - I've found issues in external tools I normally would've let go (maybe created an issue for), that I can now debug and even propose a fix for, without much effort from my side. So yeah, I agree that the boring part has become the more important part right now (speccing well and letting it build what you want is pretty much solved), but let's then automate that. Because if anything, that's what I love about this job: I get to automate work, so that my users (often myself) can be lazy and focus on stuff that's more valuable/enjoyable/satisfying.
threethirtytwo 7mo ago
Less than 6 months ago I would say about 50% of HN was at the denial phase saying it's just a next token predictor and that it doesn't actually understand code. To all of you I can only say, you were utterly wrong and I hope you realize how unreliable your judgements all are. Remember I'm saying this to roughly 50% of HN., an internet community that's supposedly more rational and intelligent than other places on the internet. For this community to be so wrong about something so obvious.... That's saying something.
- bigstrat2003 7mo ago
  > To all of you I can only say, you were utterly wrong and I hope you realize how unreliable your judgements all are. They weren't wrong though. It objectively is just a next turn predictor and doesn't understand code. That is how the thing works.
  - threethirtytwo 7mo ago
    Not true. You’re a next token predictor and clearly the tokens you predict indicate that the way you predict the next token is much much more then simply a probabilistic detection. You’re a black box and so is the LLM and the evidence is pointing at emergent properties we don’t completely understand but are completely inline with what we understand as reasoning. Don’t make me cite George Hinton or other preeminent experts to show you how wrong you all are. Use your brain. It is changing the industry from the ground up. It understands.
    - qsera 7mo ago
      >Don’t make me cite George Hinton or other preeminent experts to show you how wrong you all are. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvNCVYkHKfg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvNCVYkHKfg
      - threethirtytwo 7mo ago
        Yann Lecunn was vocal about his stance against LLMs very early on and claimed they were a dead end. Well he's been proven fucking wrong. Completely. George Hinton was his mentor and George is the main god father of AI while Yann is more of a malfunctioning student still holding onto the stochastic parrot monicker. Here's George saying what you need to know: https://www.reddit.com/r/agi/comments/1qwoee7/godfather_of_ai_geoffrey_hinton_says_people_who/ https://www.reddit.com/r/agi/comments/1qwoee7/godfather_of_a...
dgxyz 7mo ago
I’m at the fucking loom smashing stage personally. We don’t have to accept things.
- orangecoffee 7mo ago
  How long can you afford to stay in this phase? Is there some framework you can suggest where this path works?
  - sph 7mo ago
    “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” — George Bernard Shaw The antidote to runaway hype is for someone to push back, not to just relent and accept your fate. Who cares about affording to. We need more people with ideals stronger than the desire to make a lot of money.
    - orangecoffee 7mo ago
      Sure, hype pushback is fine.
  - dgxyz 7mo ago
    My existence is defined not but what I adopted but what I sabotaged or refused to deal with. 30 years in I haven't made a mistake and I don't think I am making one here. The positive bets I made have been spot on as well. I think I have a handle on what works for society and humanity at least. When I say AI, I mean specifically LLMs. There isn't a single future position where all the risks are suitably managed, there is a return of investment and there is not a net loss to society. Faith, hope, lies, fraud and inflated expectations don't cut it and that is what the whole shebang is built on. On top of that, we are entering a time of serious geopolitical instability. Creating more dependencies on large amounts of capital and regional control is totally unacceptable and puts us all at risk. My integrity is worth more than sucking this teat.
    - 7mo ago

vova_hn2 7mo ago

> yeah it kinda works but not really well enough I mean, at some point it was true. I remember that around 2023, when I first encountered colleagues trying to use ChatGPT for coding, I thought "by the time you are done with your back-and-forth to correct all the errors, I would have already written this code manually". That was true then, but not anymore.

bigstrat2003 7mo ago
No, it's still very much true. Every now and then I use an LLM to write code and the vast majority of the time it turns out to take just as much time (if not more) than it would've taken to write the code myself.
- hellojimbo 7mo ago
  You are either using it wrong or you are writing extremely niche code that has bad llm coverage
  - neonstatic 7mo ago
    or you are in denial about what he is saying
  - Zimzom 7mo ago
    I suspect I fall into the former camp, but I'm not sure where to start when it comes to learning how to use llms "the right way". I'm not a proper software engineer, but I do a lot of scripting and most of my attempts to let a model speed up a menial task (e.g. a small bash or python script for some data parsing or chaining together other tools), end up with me doing extensive rewrites because the model is completely inconsistent in naming convention, pattern reusage, etc.
- BinaryIgor 7mo ago
  Exactly. Verification is not cheap at all
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
globular-toast 7mo ago
This is true for things you already understand. It works for implementing yet another CRUD view because I've done it a million times before. I know exactly what the code should look like, but it takes a while to type it in. When my typing speed is the bottleneck then of course LLMs win (and I use them for that all the time). But the interesting stuff where you don't understand the problem yet, it doesn't make it quicker. Because then the bottleneck is my understanding. Things take time. And sleep. They require hands-on experience. It doesn't matter how fast LLMs can churn out code. There's a limit to how fast I can understand things. Unless, of course, I'm happy shipping code I don't understand, which I'm not.
- yusefnapora 7mo ago
  Unfortunately, it seems that few of the people willing to pay money for software development actually care whether you understand the code or not. Unless it breaks in a publicly embarrassing way, of course. Then "you own the code" and the sacrificial human in the loop can be dredged out to take the blame. All the incentives nudge you towards less and less critical evaluation of the output. The results of careful evaluation are much harder to measure than "this guy is cranking out 10x the code compared to last year!" And while you were busy thoughtfully internalizing the output, the guy next to you has been letting Strega Nona's pasta pot go brrr and spew another thousand lines of spaghetti on top, ready for you to review. Eventually "lgtm" becomes the default, and "do you want me to go ahead and implement that for you" starts sounding like the only way to keep your head above water.
riffraff 7mo ago
I think it's still true, but very domain specific. I am not confident it will stay true.

cherryteastain 7mo ago

What's the 'new normality' in the fifth stage? Do you think you'll start to believe it actually works 100%? Or that you won't change your assessment that it works only sometimes, but maybe pulling the lever on the slot machine repeatedly is better/more efficient than doing it yourself?

sdenton4 7mo ago
When you resolve bottlenecks, new bottlenecks become apparent. Right now, it's looking like assessment and evaluation are massive bottlenecks.
- qsera 7mo ago
  > it's looking like assessment and evaluation are massive bottlenecks. So I think LLMs have moved the effort that used to be spent on fun part (coding) into the boring part (assessment and evaluation) that is also now a lot bigger..
  - hellojimbo 7mo ago
    When writing banal code, you can just ask it to write unit tests for certain conditions and it'll do a pretty good job. The cutting edge tools will correctly automatically run and iterate on the unit tests when they dont pass. You can even ask the agent to setup TDD.
  - jochem9 7mo ago
    You could build (code, if you really want) tools to ease the review. Of course we already have many tools to do this, but with LLMs you can use their stochastic behavior to discover unexpected problems (something a deterministic solution never can). The author also talks about this when talking about the security review (something I rarely did in the past, but also do now and it has really improved the security posture of my systems). You can also setup way more elaborate verification systems. Don't just do a static analyis of the code, but actually deploy it and let the LLM hammer at it with all kinds of creative paths. Then let it debug why it's broken. It's relentless at debugging - I've found issues in external tools I normally would've let go (maybe created an issue for), that I can now debug and even propose a fix for, without much effort from my side. So yeah, I agree that the boring part has become the more important part right now (speccing well and letting it build what you want is pretty much solved), but let's then automate that. Because if anything, that's what I love about this job: I get to automate work, so that my users (often myself) can be lazy and focus on stuff that's more valuable/enjoyable/satisfying.

threethirtytwo 7mo ago

Less than 6 months ago I would say about 50% of HN was at the denial phase saying it's just a next token predictor and that it doesn't actually understand code. To all of you I can only say, you were utterly wrong and I hope you realize how unreliable your judgements all are. Remember I'm saying this to roughly 50% of HN., an internet community that's supposedly more rational and intelligent than other places on the internet. For this community to be so wrong about something so obvious.... That's saying something.

bigstrat2003 7mo ago
> To all of you I can only say, you were utterly wrong and I hope you realize how unreliable your judgements all are. They weren't wrong though. It objectively is just a next turn predictor and doesn't understand code. That is how the thing works.
- threethirtytwo 7mo ago
  Not true. You’re a next token predictor and clearly the tokens you predict indicate that the way you predict the next token is much much more then simply a probabilistic detection. You’re a black box and so is the LLM and the evidence is pointing at emergent properties we don’t completely understand but are completely inline with what we understand as reasoning. Don’t make me cite George Hinton or other preeminent experts to show you how wrong you all are. Use your brain. It is changing the industry from the ground up. It understands.
  - qsera 7mo ago
    >Don’t make me cite George Hinton or other preeminent experts to show you how wrong you all are. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvNCVYkHKfg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvNCVYkHKfg
    - threethirtytwo 7mo ago
      Yann Lecunn was vocal about his stance against LLMs very early on and claimed they were a dead end. Well he's been proven fucking wrong. Completely. George Hinton was his mentor and George is the main god father of AI while Yann is more of a malfunctioning student still holding onto the stochastic parrot monicker. Here's George saying what you need to know: https://www.reddit.com/r/agi/comments/1qwoee7/godfather_of_ai_geoffrey_hinton_says_people_who/ https://www.reddit.com/r/agi/comments/1qwoee7/godfather_of_a...

dgxyz 7mo ago

I’m at the fucking loom smashing stage personally. We don’t have to accept things.

orangecoffee 7mo ago
How long can you afford to stay in this phase? Is there some framework you can suggest where this path works?
- sph 7mo ago
  “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” — George Bernard Shaw The antidote to runaway hype is for someone to push back, not to just relent and accept your fate. Who cares about affording to. We need more people with ideals stronger than the desire to make a lot of money.
  - orangecoffee 7mo ago
    Sure, hype pushback is fine.
- dgxyz 7mo ago
  My existence is defined not but what I adopted but what I sabotaged or refused to deal with. 30 years in I haven't made a mistake and I don't think I am making one here. The positive bets I made have been spot on as well. I think I have a handle on what works for society and humanity at least. When I say AI, I mean specifically LLMs. There isn't a single future position where all the risks are suitably managed, there is a return of investment and there is not a net loss to society. Faith, hope, lies, fraud and inflated expectations don't cut it and that is what the whole shebang is built on. On top of that, we are entering a time of serious geopolitical instability. Creating more dependencies on large amounts of capital and regional control is totally unacceptable and puts us all at risk. My integrity is worth more than sucking this teat.
  - 7mo ago