Using LLMs at Oxide | slacker news

As usual with Oxide's RFDs, I found myself vigorously head-nodding while reading. Somewhat rarely, I found a part that I found myself disagreeing with:

> Unlike prose, however (which really should be handed in a polished form to an LLM to maximize the LLM’s efficacy), LLMs can be quite effective writing code de novo.

Don't the same arguments against using LLMs to write one's prose also apply to code? Was this structure of the code and ideas within the engineers'? Or was it from the LLM? And so on.

Before I'm misunderstood as a LLM minimalist, I want to say that I think they're incredibly good at solving for the blank page syndrome -- just getting a starting point on the page is useful. But I think that the code you actually want to ship is so far from what LLMs write, that I think of it more as a crutch for blank page syndrome than "they're good at writing code de novo".

I'm open to being wrong and want to hear any discussion on the matter. My worry is that this is another one of the "illusion of progress" traps, similar to the one that currently fools people with the prose side of things.

I guess to follow up slightly more:

- I think the "if you use another model" rebuttal is becoming like the No True Scotsman of the LLM world. We can get concrete and discuss a specific model if need be.

- If the use case is "generate this function body for me", I agree that that's a pretty good use case. I've specifically seen problematic behavior for the other ways I'm seeing it OFTEN used, which is "write this feature for me", or trying to one shot too much functionality, where the LLM gets to touch data structures, abstractions, interface boundaries, etc.

- To analogize it to writing: They shouldn't/cannot write the whole book, they shouldn't/cannot write the table of contents, they cannot write a chapter, IMO even a paragraph is too much -- but if you write the first sentence and the last sentence of a paragraph, I think the interpolation can be a pretty reasonable starting point. Bringing it back to code for me means: function bodies are OK. Everything else gets questionable fast IME.