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LLM Inevitabilism

(tomrenner.com)
1612 points SwoopsFromAbove | 2 comments | 15 Jul 25 04:35 UTC | HN request time: 3.09s | source
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mg ◴[15 Jul 25 05:41 UTC] No.44568158[source]▶
In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipping, no waiting. This was the future. It was inevitable.

Yesterday I wanted to rewrite a program to use a large library that would have required me to dive deep down into the documentation or read its code to tackle my use case. As a first try, I just copy+pasted the whole library and my whole program into GPT 4.1 and told it to rewrite it using the library. It succeeded at the first attempt. The rewrite itself was small enough that I could read all code changes in 15 minutes and make a few stylistic changes. Done. Hours of time saved. This is the future. It is inevitable.

PS: Most replies seem to compare my experience to experiences that the responders have with agentic coding, where the developer is iteratively changing the code by chatting with an LLM. I am not doing that. I use a "One prompt one file. No code edits." approach, which I describe here:

https://www.gibney.org/prompt_coding

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1. deanCommie ◴[15 Jul 25 05:46 UTC] No.44568182[source]▶
the issue isn't the capabilities of AI.

It's how it will be used maliciously and change our society irrevocably.

Not from saving developers hours of work.

But from making truth even more subjective and at the whims of the powerful.

And from devaluing and stagnating art even further.

And from sabotaging the critical thinking capabilities of our youths.

All technology comes with tradeoffs. The internet you describe also doesn't exist - it's been overtaken with ads and tracking and it's basically impossible to use without some sort of adblocking. But we can all agree it was worth it for humanity.

So will AI. Probably.

But that's what people are always concerned with - the downstream consequences like nothing we've ever encountered before.

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2. withinboredom ◴[15 Jul 25 05:54 UTC] No.44568224[source]▶
I was having a discussion with someone, they said, “let me ask ChatGPT. If it says it’s true, it must be true.”

I also worked with a fellow manager who used to tell the engineers they were wrong because ChatGPT said so. That one was actually entertaining to watch. The coming humbling of that manager was so satisfying.

People put a lot of stake in what it says, not realizing it isn’t always right.