←back to thread

LLM Inevitabilism

(tomrenner.com)
1613 points SwoopsFromAbove | 2 comments | 15 Jul 25 04:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.459s | source
Show context
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

replies(58): >>44568182 #>>44568188 #>>44568190 #>>44568192 #>>44568320 #>>44568350 #>>44568360 #>>44568380 #>>44568449 #>>44568468 #>>44568473 #>>44568515 #>>44568537 #>>44568578 #>>44568699 #>>44568746 #>>44568760 #>>44568767 #>>44568791 #>>44568805 #>>44568823 #>>44568844 #>>44568871 #>>44568887 #>>44568901 #>>44568927 #>>44569007 #>>44569010 #>>44569128 #>>44569134 #>>44569145 #>>44569203 #>>44569303 #>>44569320 #>>44569347 #>>44569391 #>>44569396 #>>44569574 #>>44569581 #>>44569584 #>>44569621 #>>44569732 #>>44569761 #>>44569803 #>>44569903 #>>44570005 #>>44570024 #>>44570069 #>>44570120 #>>44570129 #>>44570365 #>>44570482 #>>44570537 #>>44570585 #>>44570642 #>>44570674 #>>44572113 #>>44574176 #
1. iLoveOncall ◴[15 Jul 25 09:03 UTC] No.44569303[source]▶
Are you seriously comparing the internet and LLMs?

You know what's the difference between both?

Internet costs a fraction of LLMs to serve literally everyone in the world. It is universally useful and has continuously become more and more useful since it started.

LLMs are insanely expensive to the point of them having to be sold at a loss to have people using them, while the scope they are promised to cover has narrowed year after year, from "it will automate everything for every job" to "it can write boilerplate code for you if you're a bit lucky and nobody looks at the code review too closely".

The only inevitability when it comes to LLMs is that investments will dry up, the bubble will pop, and it's gonna be like back in 2000.

replies(1): >>44569455 #
2. jononor ◴[15 Jul 25 09:30 UTC] No.44569455[source]▶
The Internet was also very expensive in its infancy. Dialup charged by the minute for mere kilobytes. The cost per MB dropped by a factor 1000x over the course of 30 years. It took billions in investments, and millions of people working on it to make it happen. Give LLLms a couple of decades, and the price for a given capability will have increased by 1-4 orders of magnitude.