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LLM Inevitabilism

(tomrenner.com)
1611 points SwoopsFromAbove | 2 comments | 15 Jul 25 04:35 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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scubbo ◴[15 Jul 25 05:48 UTC] No.44568192[source]▶
> Hours of time saved

Come back in a week and update us on how long you've spent debugging all the ways that the code was broken that you didn't notice in those 15 minutes.

Usually I don't nitpick spelling, but "mimnutes" and "stylisitic" are somewhat ironic here - small correct-looking errors get glossed over by human quality-checkers, but can lead to genuine issues when parsed as code. A key difference between your two examples is that the failure-cases of an HTML download are visible and treated-as-such, not presented as successes; you don't have to babysit the machine to make sure it's doing the right thing.

EDIT: plus, everything that sibling comments pointed out; that, even if AI tools _do_ work perfectly (they don't, and never will), they'll still do harm when "working-as-intended" - to critical thinking, to trust in truth and reporting, to artistic creation, to consolidation of wealth and capital.

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1. gopalv ◴[15 Jul 25 06:27 UTC] No.44568403{3}[source]▶
> Come back in a week and update us on how long you've spent debugging all the ways that the code was broken that you didn't notice in those 15 minutes.

I was a non believer for most of 2024.

How could such a thing with no understanding write any code that works.

I've now come to accept that all the understanding it has is what I bring and if I don't pay attention, I will run into things like you just mentioned.

Just about the same if I work with a human being with no strong opinions and a complete lack of taste when it comes to the elegance of a solution.

We often just pass over those people when hiring or promoting, despite their competence.

I was being sold a "self driving car" equivalent where you didn't even need a steering wheel for this thing, but I've slowly learned that I need to treat it like automatic cruise control with a little bit of lane switching.

Need to keep the hands on the wheel and spend your spare attention on the traffic far up ahead, not the phone.

I don't write a lot of code anymore, but my review queue is coming from my own laptop.

> Usually I don't nitpick spelling, but "mimnutes" and "stylisitic" are somewhat ironic here

Those are errors an AI does not make.

I used to be able to tell how conscientious someone was by their writing style, but not anymore.

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2. scubbo ◴[15 Jul 25 17:08 UTC] No.44573428[source]▶
> I was being sold a "self driving car" equivalent where you didn't even need a steering wheel for this thing, but I've slowly learned that I need to treat it like automatic cruise control with a little bit of lane switching.

> Need to keep the hands on the wheel and spend your spare attention on the traffic far up ahead, not the phone.

Now _this_ is a more-balanced perspective!

(And, to be clear - I use AI in my own workflow as well, extensively. I'm not just an outside naysayer - I know when it works, _and when it doesn't_. Which is why unreasonable claims are irritating)