←back to thread

LLM Inevitabilism

(tomrenner.com)
1613 points SwoopsFromAbove | 1 comments | 15 Jul 25 04:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.226s | 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 #
petetnt ◴[15 Jul 25 06:34 UTC] No.44568449[source]▶
There’s always a distinct lack of the names in the posts like this. What was the library that was being changed to what? You say it had ”no good documentation”, but it clearly has some sort of documentation considering the LLM did such a good job on the rewrite. Do you understand the ”large library” now?
replies(3): >>44568484 #>>44568676 #>>44568759 #
mg ◴[15 Jul 25 07:18 UTC] No.44568759[source]▶
You are right. I always wish for more specifics too when we talk about code here.

The library was https://mediabunny.dev/

Before I used my own proprietary code for media encoding/decoding. I also tested a WASM port of ffmpeg for a while.

Mediabunny's documentation might be fine for some developers, but personally I prefer a reference where I have a list of all functions and their specifications.

Yes, I understand the library much better now.

replies(1): >>44570149 #
1. petetnt ◴[15 Jul 25 11:45 UTC] No.44570149[source]▶
Personally looking at the documentation I would say that "no good documentation" is highly misleading, because the documentation that it provides is incredibly detailed from quick starts to detailed explanations, offers a lot of examples and has very high quality typings with inline documentation. Not to mention the code itself is documented thoroughly. Sure it doesn't have an API reference, but you get that from the typings, that what I usually do - just check the imports first and go from there.