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Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

(martinfowler.com)
416 points floverfelt | 1 comments | 28 Aug 25 18:52 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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sebnukem2 ◴[28 Aug 25 19:28 UTC] No.45056066[source]▶
> hallucinations aren’t a bug of LLMs, they are a feature. Indeed they are the feature. All an LLM does is produce hallucinations, it’s just that we find some of them useful.

Nice.

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tptacek ◴[28 Aug 25 19:48 UTC] No.45056284[source]▶
In that framing, you can look at an agent as simply a filter on those hallucinations.
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1. armchairhacker ◴[28 Aug 25 20:32 UTC] No.45056728[source]▶
This vaguely relates to a theory about human thought: that our subconscious constantly comes up with random ideas, then filters the unreasonable ones, but in people with delusions (e.g. schizophrenia) the filter is broken.

Salience (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salience_(neuroscience)), "the property by which some thing stands out", is something LLMs have trouble with. Probably because they're trained on human text, which ranges from accurate descriptions of reality to nonsense.