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Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

(martinfowler.com)
416 points floverfelt | 2 comments | 28 Aug 25 18:52 UTC | HN request time: 0.399s | 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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keeda ◴[28 Aug 25 23:10 UTC] No.45058056[source]▶
More of a error-correcting feedback loop rather than a filter, really. Which is very much what we do as humans, apparently. One recent theory of neuroscience that is becoming influential is Predictive Processing --https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding -- this postulates that we also constantly generate a "mental model" of our environment (a literal "prediction") and use sensory inputs to correct and update it.

So the only real difference between "perception" and a "hallucination" is whether it is supported by physical reality.

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1. sethammons ◴[29 Aug 25 05:07 UTC] No.45060421[source]▶
You ever see something out of the corner of your eye and you were mistaken? It feels like LLM hallucinations. "An orange cat on my counter?!" And an instant later, your brain has reclassified "a basketball on my counter" as that fits the environment model better as several instant-observations gather contexts: not moving, more round, not furry, I don't own a cat, yesterday my kid mentioned something about tryouts, boop insta-reclassification from cat to basketball.

I can recognize my own meta cognition there. My model of reality course corrects the information feed interpretation on the fly. Optical illusions feel very similar whereby the inner reality model clashes with the observed.

For general ai, it needs a world model that can be tested against and surprise is noted and models are updated. Looping llm output with test cases is a crude approximation of that world model.

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2. osullivj ◴[29 Aug 25 05:28 UTC] No.45060542[source]▶
I leaned heavily on my own meta cognition recently when withdrawing from a bereavment benzo habit recently. The combo of flu symptoms, anxiety and hallucinations are fierce. I knew O was seeing things that were not real; light fittings turning into a rotating stained glass slideshow. So I'm totally on board with the visual model hypothesis. My own speculation is that audio perception is less predictive as audio structure persists deeper into my own DMT sessions than does vision, where perspective quickly collapses and vision becomes kaleidoscopic. Which may be a return to the vision we had as newborns. Maybe normal vision is only attained via socialisation?