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LLM Inevitabilism

(tomrenner.com)
1611 points SwoopsFromAbove | 14 comments | 15 Jul 25 04:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.718s | source | bottom
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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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AndyKelley ◴[15 Jul 25 07:08 UTC] No.44568699[source]▶
You speak with a passive voice, as if the future is something that happens to you, rather than something that you participate in.
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1. salviati ◴[15 Jul 25 07:12 UTC] No.44568718[source]▶
Isn't it kind of both?

Did luddites ever have a chance of stopping the industrial revolution?

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2. StanislavPetrov ◴[15 Jul 25 07:16 UTC] No.44568743[source]▶
Did the Dutch ever have a chance to stop the massive run up in tulip prices?

It's easy to say what was inevitable when you are looking into the past. Much harder to predict what inevitable future awaits us.

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3. bgwalter ◴[15 Jul 25 07:16 UTC] No.44568747[source]▶
No, but software engineers for example have more power, even in an employer's market, than Luddites.

You can simply spend so much time on meticulously documenting that "AI" (unfortunately!) does not work that it will be quietly abandoned.

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4. elliotec ◴[15 Jul 25 07:20 UTC] No.44568768[source]▶
What? Can you elaborate?
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5. TeMPOraL ◴[15 Jul 25 07:35 UTC] No.44568846[source]▶
Software engineers have less power than we'd like to think; we may be paid a lot relative to the baseline, but for vast majority that's not even in the "rich" range anymore, and more importantly, we're not ones calling the shots - not anymore.

But even if, that presupposes a kind of unity of opinion, committing the exact same sin the article we're discussing is complaining about. Many engineers believe that AI does, in fact, work, and will keep getting better - and will work towards the future you'd like to work against.

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6. bgwalter ◴[15 Jul 25 07:48 UTC] No.44568921{3}[source]▶
The exact same sin? It seems that you don't go off message even once:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44568811

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7. grues-dinner ◴[15 Jul 25 07:59 UTC] No.44568976[source]▶
It's interesting that the Dutch actually had more success at stopping the actual tide coming in than controlling a market tide (which was more like a tidal wave I suppose).
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8. TeMPOraL ◴[15 Jul 25 08:20 UTC] No.44569086{4}[source]▶
The article is wrong though :). It's because people make choices, that this future is inevitable - enough people are independently choosing to embrace LLMs because of a real or perceived value. That, as well as the (real and perceived) reasons for it are plain and apparent, so it's not hard to predict where this leads in aggregate.
9. TeMPOraL ◴[15 Jul 25 08:23 UTC] No.44569112{3}[source]▶
One is external, the other exists within. A literal tidal wave is a problem for everyone; a market tide is - by definition - an opportunity to many.
10. kaffekaka ◴[15 Jul 25 08:51 UTC] No.44569247{3}[source]▶
The dutch have walls/dams that keep the ocean away.
11. ben_w ◴[15 Jul 25 09:12 UTC] No.44569348[source]▶
The Luddites were among the precursors to Marx et al.; even a revolution wasn't enough to hold back industrialisation, and even that revolution had a famous example of the exact kind of resource-distribution failure that Marx would have had in mind when writing (Great Famine in Ireland was contemporaneous with the Manifesto, compare with Holodomor).
12. Yizahi ◴[15 Jul 25 09:13 UTC] No.44569352[source]▶
Luddites weren't stopping industrial revolution. They were fighting against mass layoffs, against dramatic lowering of wages and against replacement of skilled workers with unskilled ones. Now this reminds me of something, hmmm...
13. nradov ◴[15 Jul 25 09:14 UTC] No.44569359[source]▶
No one will read that documentation. And by the time you finish writing it, the frontier AI models will have improved.
14. modo_mario ◴[15 Jul 25 10:10 UTC] No.44569643[source]▶
The luddites or at least some of them threatened employers, factories and/or machinery with physical aggression. They lived in the locations where these industries for a long time remained tho automation certainly made the industry more mobile. Like unions they used collective bargaining power in part derived from their geographic location and presence among each other.

A Guatemalan or Indian can write code for my boss today...instead of me. Software engineers despite the cliff in employment and the like are still rather well paid and there's plenty of room to undercut and for people to disregard principles. If this is perceived to be an issue to them at all. If you talk to many irl... Well it is not in the slightest.