dpark

36 ms·

691.
by dpark 10mo ago
Too late to fix the typos. Bleh. “You don’t need to treat it like an engineer.”
692.
by dpark 10mo ago
> If there's something weird in the code, I need to know if it's necessary. What does this have to do with LLMs? I agree this sort of thing happens all the time. Today. With code written by humans. If you’re lucky you can go as
693.
by dpark 10mo ago
> You can’t just ask AI to dump, you need to vaguely describe what design elements you think are important Right. And that’s what I’ve tried to do but I am not confident it’s captured the most critical info in an efficient way. > I ca
694.
by dpark 10mo ago
> I know exactly what the result should be, the LLM is just typing it for me. This is the mental model people should be working with. The LLM is there to tighten the loop from thought to code. You doing need to test it like an engineer.
695.
by dpark 10mo ago
I need to play with this more. I’ve had AI generate a bunch of small summaries that it could theoretically use to optimize future work. I haven’t asked it specifically to just dump info as it’s doing other work yet. The files I had it gener
696.
by dpark 10mo ago
If your concern is philosophical, and you are defining LLMs as not having a “why”, then of course they cannot write down “why” because it doesn’t exist. This is the philosophical discussion I am trying to avoid because I don’t think it’s fr
697.
by dpark 10mo ago
It’s from Working Effectively with Legacy Code . I don’t recall the exact definition but it’s something to that effect. Legacy = lack of automated tests. The biggest barrier to changing code is usually insufficient automated testing. Peopl
698.
by dpark 10mo ago
Do you prompt for anything specific to record or does your prompt just contain something general like “read .aidump if present for potentially useful context and update or create .aidump with any useful information”?
699.
by dpark 10mo ago
Fair, but it would be interesting to see how people are implementing this “write the docs you need to do a better job” logic and putting it into use. I’m playing with this but would love to see someone’s success story. “I did X and now the
700.
by dpark 10mo ago
I still feel like in most of these discussions the criticism of LLMs is that they are poor replacements for great engineers. Yeah. They are. LLMs are great tools for great engineers. They won’t replace good engineers and they won’t make shi
701.
by dpark 10mo ago
> probably not create a single component of a complex distributed system that will fit into an existing architecture, with exactly the correct behaviour based on some obscure domain knowledge that pretty much exists only in your company.
702.
by dpark 10mo ago
I wish there were good guides on how to get the best out of LLMs. All of these tips about adding documentation etc seem very useful but I’ve never seen good guides on how to do this effectively or sustainably.
703.
by dpark 10mo ago
Do you not write code? Is your code base frozen, or do you write code for new features and bug fixes? The fact that AI can churn out code 1000x faster does not mean you should have it churn out 1000x more code. You might have a list of 20
704.
by dpark 10mo ago
It’s like anything else, you’ve got to check the results and potentially push it to fix stuff. I recently had AI code up a feature that was essentially text manipulation. There were existing tests to show it how to write effective tests and
705.
by dpark 10mo ago
I feel like this is a forest for the trees kind of thing. It is implied that the code being created is for “capabilities”. If your AI is churning out needless code, then sure, that’s a bad thing. Why would you be asking the AI for code you
706.
by dpark 10mo ago
> Are you trying to use LLMs to fool yourself into thinking this still isn't the game of humans needing to understand what's going on? This is a key question. If you look at all the anti-AI stuff around software engineering, th
707.
by dpark 10mo ago
> It can output something that looks like the "why" This feels like a distinction without difference. This is an extension of the common refrain that LLMs cannot “think”. Rather than get overly philosophical, I would ask what t
708.
by dpark 10mo ago
Can you explain why that’s damning?
709.
by dpark 10mo ago
Because I’ve been a software engineer for over 20 years. If I look at a feature and feel like it will take me a day and an LLM churns it out in a hour including the iterating, I’m confident that using the LLM was meaningfully faster. Especi
710.
by dpark 10mo ago
It’s a metaphor. With enough oversight, a qualified engineer can get good results out of an underperforming (or extremely junior) engineer. With a junior engineer, you give the oversight to help them grow. With an underperforming engineer
711.
by dpark 10mo ago
The solution for low performers is very close oversight. If you imagine an LLM as a very junior engineer who needs an inordinate amount of hand holding (but who can also read and write about 1000x faster than you and who gets paid approxima
712.
by dpark 10mo ago
Have you tried it? LLMs are quite good at summarizing. Not perfect, but then neither are humans.
713.
by dpark 10mo ago
I suspect that we are going to have a wave of gurus who show up soon to teach us how to code with LLMs. There’s so much doom and gloom in these sorts of threads about the death of quality code that someone is going to make money telling peo
714.
by dpark 10mo ago
I like this. “By purchasing from us you agree that you cannot enforce your ridiculous terms of service and if you try, you also owe us a pony.”
715.
by dpark 10mo ago
Don’t worry. If Amazon decided to undercut by selling at a loss, they would absolutely put it in their ToS that retailers cannot exploit this loophole and they would sue to enforce their ToS.
716.
by dpark 10mo ago
Clearly he made the comment to justify to strangers on the internet why he needs to buy a bigger truck. Truly the need to “adjust the angle of the handlebars awkwardly” is a great burden.
717.
by dpark 10mo ago
Right. The monitor here is a QD OLED so all emitters are actually blue. That’s why I’m not sure if the physical size concern is as legitimate.
718.
by dpark 10mo ago
Probably because ClearType and equivalent tech are specifically tuned to maximize legibility on this type of layout.
719.
by dpark 10mo ago
QD OLED doesn’t actually have different colored OLED elements though. Does this apply to that tech?
720.
by dpark 10mo ago
> perfectly adequate Exactly what I want for the thing I stare at for 8 hours/day. Not great. Not good. Perfectly adequate.

More ›