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LLM Inevitabilism

(tomrenner.com)
1613 points SwoopsFromAbove | 3 comments | 15 Jul 25 04:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.693s | 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. cmiles74 ◴[15 Jul 25 12:59 UTC] No.44570674[source]▶
This whole comparison is weird. The internet opened doors of communication between people who were very distant from each other. It enabled new methods of commerce and it made it easier for people to research and purchase product. Anyone interested in a particular subject could find other people interested in that same area and learn from them, increasing their knowledge. Ad-hoc organizations were much easier.

These are all things that the majority of people wanted. I understand that software developers find many benefits from using LLMs and I encourage us to put that to the side for the moment. When we look at the rest of the places where LLMs are being put to use, how excited are the majority of people?

I'd argue that people, in the larger sense, are nowhere near as excited about LLMs as they were about the internet.

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2. wyager ◴[15 Jul 25 13:05 UTC] No.44570712[source]▶
Many people were extremely skeptical of the internet in the early 90s. You can find old clips of news shows basically mocking the idea.
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3. cmiles74 ◴[15 Jul 25 21:47 UTC] No.44576153[source]▶
Many people are skeptical of LLMs today. Still, it's hard to argue that the non-technical population has the same level of interest in LLMs that they had in the internet back in the 90s.