[HN Gopher] The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying
___________________________________________________________________
The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying
Author : LorenDB
Score : 591 points
Date : 2026-03-05 04:02 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (acko.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (acko.net)
| feverzsj wrote:
| More like Lunatic.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| In can be both. There are two L's to pick from.
| barcodehorse wrote:
| Lovely lizard machine.
| chromehearts wrote:
| Incredible website
| mogoman wrote:
| try scrolling up and down a few times on the logo and see what
| happens
| einr wrote:
| This rules. What a good, sensible, sober post.
| kombookcha wrote:
| What a wonderful read.
| baq wrote:
| Lying implies knowing what's true
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Oh sorry my mistake! you're right I don't know what's true.
| GuestFAUniverse wrote:
| And "lazy".
|
| Claude makes me mad: even when I ask for small code snippets to
| be improved, it increasingly starts to comment "what I could
| improve" in the code I stead of generating the embarrassingly
| easy code with the improvement itself.
|
| If I point it to that by something like "include that yourself",
| it does a decent job.
|
| That's so _L_azy.
| emsign wrote:
| LLMs are cheaters because their goal isn't to produce good code
| but to please the human.
| js8 wrote:
| That's a problem with any self-improving tools, not just
| LLMs. Successful self-improvement leads to efficiency, which
| is just another name for laziness.
| gck1 wrote:
| Enforce this with deterministic guardrails. Use strictest
| linting config you possibly can, and even have it write custom,
| domain specific linters of things that can't happen. Then you
| won't have to hand hold it that much
| theshrike79 wrote:
| > This sort of protectionism is also seen in e.g. controlled-
| appelation foods like artisanal cheese or cured ham. These
| require not just traditional manufacturing methods and high-
| quality ingredients from farm to table, but also a specific
| geographic origin.
|
| Maybe "Artisanal Coding" will be a thing in the future?
| boxed wrote:
| This geographic protection is extremely bogus in many cases, if
| not most cases, which imo undermines his argument.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Not really, it's a matter of protecting heritage.
|
| Like you can still make Karelian pies[0] anywhere, but unless
| you follow the exact recipe, you can't sell them as "Karelian
| pies". It's good for the heritage and good for the customers.
|
| You can also make any cheeses and wines and whatever you
| like, it's just how you name them and market them that's
| regulated.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelian_pasty
| orthoxerox wrote:
| What if my pasties cannot be singled out by any Karelian
| chef in a blind taste test? Does it matter how they were
| made?
| regentbowerbird wrote:
| If you consider only the product is relevant and not how
| it is made, then no it does not matter; or at least it
| doesn't matter as long as you don't personally attach any
| emotional qualities to products beyond their material
| qualities (unlike the vast majority of people).
|
| But the comment you reply to explicitly points out the
| process is in fact relevant as it is itself a cultural
| artifact. You're not replying to their main point.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| The main point is "It's good for the heritage and good
| for the customers."
|
| How are the customers hurt if their pie has not been
| baked by a babushka in Petrozavodsk using the old
| original recipe, but by an anonymous migrant worker in a
| dark kitchen using an optimized recipe if the end result
| is objectively the same? The packaging doesn't have to
| say who it was made by.
|
| I also don't see the problem with the heritage. The
| comment I replied to already said anyone could call their
| pies Karelian, so there was no restriction that
| benefitted the residents of a specific region. I can see
| a PDO-like carveout that goes "we want to preserve the
| traditional pie-making of Karelia, so we want this
| activity to remain economically viable. Therefore, only
| pies baked in Karelia can be sold as Karelian pies." But
| I don't see how Sysco baking the same pies and
| distributing them nationwide helps maintain the heritage.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Customers want a very specific thing, rules exist that
| say if you sell something called Specific Thing it must
| be made a very specific way or you can't call it that.
|
| Even if you make something that tastes and looks exactly
| like the original, you still can't call it Specific Thing
| because the process wasn't followed as it's an integral
| part of the product. Think of it like a trademark. You
| can't create some brown sugary stuff and sell it as Coca-
| Cola - even if it tastes EXACTLY like it does.
|
| Nothing about this is about profit or economic viability,
| it's not even a small part of the equation. The purpose
| is to preserve cultural heritage and not dilute it with
| shitty imitations calling themselves something they are
| not.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| >if the end result is objectively the same
|
| The issue is how this will be handled in law. Can the law
| define this in a way that is not overly strict or overly
| permissive? The current attempts is effectively the law
| doing this, but with an overly strict approach of what
| counts as 'objectively the same' by judging the process
| and not purely the outcome. Would it be possible to make
| the law's definition of this more permissive, to focus
| only on the product produced, without accidentally
| becoming overly permissive?
| flohofwoe wrote:
| The 'Handmade Network' is essentially this (in a good way
| though) - and long before LLMs got good enough for code-
| generation - instead as a counter philosophy to the soulless
| "enterprise software development" where a feature that could be
| implemented in 10 lines of code is wrapped in 1000 lines of
| "industry-best-practices" boilerplate.
|
| Programming via LLMs is just the logical conclusion to this
| niche of industrialized software development which favours
| quantity over quality. It's basically replacing human bots
| which translate specs written by architecture astronauts into
| code without having to think on their own.
|
| And good riddance to that type of 'spec-in-code-out' type of
| programming, it should never have existed in the first place.
| Let the architecture astronauts go wild with LLMs implementing
| their ideas without having to bother human programmers who
| actually value their craft ;)
| theshrike79 wrote:
| I'm kinda leaning towards the analogy that LLMs are to
| programming as textile machines were to the loom.
|
| People still pay for hand-knit fabrics (there's one place in
| Italy that makes silk by hand and it costs 5 figures per
| foot), but the vast majority is machine made.
|
| Same thing will happen to code, unless the bubble bursts
| really badly. Most bulk API Glue CRUD stuff and basic web UI
| work will be mostly automated and churned off automated
| agentic production lines.
|
| But there will still be a market for that special human touch
| in code, most likely when you need safety/security or
| efficiency/speed.
| harambae wrote:
| > Maybe "Artisanal Coding" will be a thing in the future?
|
| Steve Gibson was hand-coding assembly (often beautifully and
| making for very compact binaries) long after almost everyone
| else had switched to C language or higher in abstraction. This
| is the closest analogy I can think of it.
|
| It had it's own cult following, but I wouldn't say it was a
| massive movement.
| wilg wrote:
| LLMs are pretty cool technology and are useful for programming.
| emsign wrote:
| If you check the code afterwards. You do check the code
| yourself, don't you?
| wilg wrote:
| eyeroll
| malka1986 wrote:
| Hello, I am a single dev using an agent (Claude Code) on a
| solo project.
|
| I have accepted that reading 100% of the generated code is
| not possible.
|
| I am attempting to find methods to allow for clean code to be
| generated none the less.
|
| I am using extremely strict DDD architecture. Yes it is
| totally overkill for a one man project.
|
| Now i only have to be intimate with 2 parts of the code:
|
| * the public facade of the modules, which also happens to be
| the place where authorization is checked.
|
| * the orchestrators, where multiple modules are tied
| together.
|
| If the inners of the module are a little sloppy (code
| duplication and al), it is not really an issue, as these do
| not have an effect at a distance with the rest of the code.
|
| I have to be on the lookout though. It happens that the agent
| tries to break the boundaries between the modules, cheating
| its way with stuff like direct SQL queries.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| I do, 100%, every line.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| No, that would limit our velocity, we can't check code, that
| eats into the LLM gains
| Meneth wrote:
| That's a lie.
| Copenjin wrote:
| I instantly remembered the page header, I probably visited this
| site last time 10 years ago or something.
| emsign wrote:
| > It's not a co-pilot, it's just on auto-pilot.
|
| Love it. Calling it "Copilot" in itself is a lie. Marketing speak
| to sell you an idea that doesn't exist. The idea is that you are
| still in control.
| _flux wrote:
| Well initially it was a lot less capable. Someone might
| describe it auto-complete on steroids.
|
| Someone might call LLMs that today, except they've stepped a
| bit up from steroids.
| emsign wrote:
| Then MS is conveniently keeping the old name.
| anilgulecha wrote:
| >If you ask me, no court should have ever rendered a judgement on
| whether AI output as a category is legal or copyrightable,
| because none of it is sourced. The judgement simply cannot be
| made, and AI output should be treated like a forgery unless and
| until proven otherwise.
|
| Guilty until proven innocent will satisfy the author's LLM-
| specific point of contention, but it is hardly a good principle.
| emsign wrote:
| You are missing the point of the author. He literally said no
| court should have rendered a judgement, that's the exact
| opposite of guilty until proven innocent. Guilty means a court
| has made a judgement.
|
| He is proposing to not make a judgement at all. If the AI
| company CLAIMS something they have to prove it. Like they do in
| science or something. Any claim is treated as such, a claim.
| The trick is to not even claim anything, let the users all on
| their own come to the conclusion that it's magic. And it's true
| that LLMs by design cannot cite sources. Thus they cannot by
| design tell you if they made something up with disregard to it
| making sense or working, if they just copy and pasted it,
| something that either works or is crap, or if they somehow
| created something new that is fantastic.
|
| All we ever see are the success stories. The success after the
| n-th try and tweaking of the prompt and the process of handling
| your agents the right way. The hidden cost is out there, barely
| hidden.
|
| This ambiguity is benefitting the AI companies and they are
| exploiting it to the maximum. Going even as far as illegally
| obtaining pirated intellectual property from an entity that is
| banned in many countries on one end of their utilization
| pipeline and selling it as the biggest thing ever at the other
| end. And yes, all the doomsday stories of AI taking over the
| world are part of the marketing hype.
| anilgulecha wrote:
| sure, no "court" should render it, but then
|
| >AI output should be treated like a forgery
|
| Who's passing this judgement this? Author? Civil society?
| thwarted wrote:
| A forgery isn't a subjective assessment. A forgery is
| intentionally made inaccurate claim of the origin of
| something. If the by-line is claiming it was made by
| someone who didn't make it, it's a forgery no matter how
| good of a copy it is judged to be.
| DavidPiper wrote:
| > This stands in stark contrast to code, which generally doesn't
| suffer from re-use at all ...
|
| This is an absolute chef-kiss double-entendre.
| est wrote:
| I won't call that forging, but commission.
|
| btw you can make git commits with AI as author and you as
| commiter. Which makes git blame easier
| plasticeagle wrote:
| Acko.net remains the best website on the internet.
| i-blis wrote:
| Still one of the best, by far.
| simianwords wrote:
| What the author and many others find hard to digest is that LLMs
| are surfacing the reality that most of our work is a small bit of
| novelty against boiler plate redundant code.
|
| Most of what we do is programming is some small novel idea at
| high level and repeatable boilerplate at low level. A fair
| question is: why hasn't the boilerplate been automated as
| libraries or other abstractions? LLMs are especially good at
| fuzzy abstracting repeatable code, and it's simply not possible
| to get the same result from other manual methods.
|
| I empathise because it is distressing to realise that most of
| value we provide is not in those lines of code but in that small
| innovation at the higher layer. No developer wants to hear that,
| they would like to think each lexicon is a creation from their
| soul.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Time to learn design, how to talk to customers, and how to
| discover unsolved problems. Used right LLMs should improve your
| software quality. Make stuff that matters that you can be proud
| of.
| silon42 wrote:
| Abstraction isn't free... even if you had the correct
| abstraction and the tools to remove the parts you don't need
| for deployment, there is still the cost of understanding and
| compiling.
|
| There is also the cost reason, somebody trying to sell an
| abstraction will try to monetize it and this means not everyone
| will want/be able to use it (or it will take forever/be
| unfinished if it's open/free).
|
| There's also the platform lockin/competition aspect...
| eucyclos wrote:
| I wrote a book a while back where I argued that coding involves
| choosing what to work on, writing it, and then debugging it,
| and that we tend to master these steps in reverse chronological
| order.
|
| It's weird to look at something that recent and think how dated
| it reads today. I also wrote about the Turing test as some
| major milestone of AI development, when in fact the general
| response to programs passing the Turing test was to shrug and
| minimize it
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I would argue that chatbots still barely pass the turing test
|
| They have such obvious patterns and tells that humans have
| already picked up on them and they can eventually sus out
| that they're talking to an LLM
|
| For instance I heard recently about someone talking
| (verbally) with an AI voiced customer support. They were very
| convinced, so they asked the support agent to calculate the
| product of two large numbers, and it replied with the result
| instantly
|
| I would argue that fails the chinese room
| wonnage wrote:
| Boilerplate has been with us since the dawn of programming.
|
| I still think LLMs as fancy autocomplete is the truth and not
| even a dig. Autocomplete is great. It works best when there's
| one clear output desired (even if you don't know exactly what
| it is yet). Nobody is surprised when you type "cal" and
| California comes up in an address form, why should we be
| surprised when you describe a program and the code is returned?
|
| Knowledge has the same problem as cosmology, the part we can
| observe doesn't seem to account for the vast majority of what
| we know us out there. Symbolic knowledge encompasses
| unfathomable multitudes and will eventually be solved by AI but
| the "dark matter" of knowledge that can't easily be expressed
| in language or math is still out in the wild
| Papazsazsa wrote:
| This is actually quite an insightful comment into the mindset
| of the tech set vs. the many writers and artists whose only
| 'boilerplate redundant code' is the language itself, and a
| loose aggregate of ideas and philosophies.
|
| Probably the original sin here is that we started calling them
| programming languages instead of just 'computer code'.
|
| Also - most of your work is far more than mere novelty! There
| are intangibles like your intellectual labor and time.
| vjerancrnjak wrote:
| Libraries create boundaries, which are in most cases arbitrary,
| that then limit the way you can interact with code, creating
| more boilerplate to get what you want from a library.
|
| Abstractions are the source of bloat. Without abstractions you
| can always reduce bloat, or you can reduce bloat in your glue,
| but you can't reduce glue.
|
| It takes discipline to NOT create arbitrary function signatures
| and short-lived intermediate data structures or type
| definitions. This is the beginning of boilerplate.
|
| So many advances in removing boilerplate are realizing your 5
| function calls and 10 intermediate data structures or type
| definitions, essentially compute a thing that you can do with 0
| function calls and 0 custom datatypes and less lines of code.
|
| The abstraction hides how simple the thing you want is.
|
| Problem is that all open source code looks like the bloat
| described above, so LLMs have no idea how to actually write
| code that is without boilerplate. The only place where I've
| seen it work is in shaders, which are usually written to avoid
| common pitfalls of abstraction.
|
| LLMs are incapable of writing a big program in 1 function and 1
| file, that does what you want. Splitting the program into
| functions or even multiple files, is a step you do after a lot
| of time, yet all open source looks nothing like that.
| auggierose wrote:
| Yep, people not understanding the value of abstraction is
| exactly why LLM coded apps are going to be a shit show. You
| _could_ use them to come up with better abstractions, but
| most will not.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| > Abstractions are the source of bloat. Without abstractions
| you can always reduce bloat, or you can reduce bloat in your
| glue, but you can't reduce glue.
|
| I don't think I agree. Here is an example.
|
| QTcpSocket socket;
| socket.connectToHost(QHostAddress::LocalHost, 1234);
|
| Vs:
|
| int clientSocket = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0);
| sockaddr_in serverAddr; serverAddr.sin_family =
| AF_INET; serverAddr.sin_port = htons(1234);
| inet_pton(AF_INET, "127.0.0.1", &serverAddr.sin_addr);
| connect(clientSocket, (sockaddr*)&serverAddr,
| sizeof(serverAddr))
| tovej wrote:
| We already have tools to generate boilerplate, and they work
| exceptionally well. The LLM just produces nondeterministic
| boilerplate.
|
| I also don't know what work you do, but I would not
| characterize the codebases I work in as "small bits of novelty"
| on boilerplate. Software engineering is always a holistic
| systems undertaking, where every subcomponent and the
| interactions between them have to be considered.
| lisper wrote:
| > why hasn't the boilerplate been automated as libraries or
| other abstractions?
|
| Cue the smug Lisp weenies.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Programmers aren't paid to code.
|
| FORTRAN ("formula translator") was one of the first programs
| ever written and it was supposed to make coding obsolete.
| Scientists will now be able to just type in formulas and the
| computer will just calculate the result, imagine that!
| zorked wrote:
| Is this claim historical? As in, it was actually made at the
| time?
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Which claim, exactly? That "coding will be made obsolete"?
|
| Yes, it is. Literally every programming innovation claims
| to "make coding obsolete". I've seen a half dozen in my own
| lifetime.
| bdangubic wrote:
| it is like knocking down the vending machine, you have to
| rock it back and forth a lot before it falls down
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Books are just simple theses and themes with hundreds of pages
| of boilerplate
| simianwords wrote:
| lot of people are saying this
| endymion-light wrote:
| This is a great example actually.
|
| To me, a function is a single sentence within a book. It may
| approach the larger picture, but that sentence can be
| reviewed, changed, switched around, killed by an editor.
|
| Some programmers believe they're fantastic sentence writers.
| They brag about how good of a sentence they write, they're
| entire worldview has been built on being good sentence
| creators. Especially within enterprises, you may spend your
| entire life writing sentences without ever really
| understanding the whole book.
|
| If your worldview has been built on sentence creation, and
| suddenly there's a sentence creator AI, you're going to be
| deathly afraid of it replacing you as a sentence writer.
| artisin wrote:
| Hit songs are just simple four-chord loops stretched over
| three minutes of synthetic boilerplate.
| thunderbong wrote:
| Both the books and the song analogies are incorrect. In the
| case of code, the users for whom the programmes are
| written, are not engaging with the statements of the code,
| they are interacting with interfaces the programmes
| provide.
|
| This is not the same when it comes to books and music.
| recursive wrote:
| There are many orders of magnitude more songs based on four
| chord loops than there are hit songs. Some people say it's
| easy to make a hit song. But there are a lot more people
| that want to do it than those that succeed. So I say no.
| Your take is reductive, and there is necessarily more to
| it.
| shinycode wrote:
| No I don't agree. Just because it's << boilerplate >>, that
| does not mean it's worthless or doesn't carry novelty. There is
| << boilerplate >> in building many things, house, cars etc
| where to add real new stuff it's << always the same base >> but
| you have to nail that base and there is real value in it. With
| craft and deep knowledge and pride. Every project is different
| and not everything can be made from a generic out-of-shelf
| product
| jimnotgym wrote:
| A house doesn't seem a good example, because it is made of
| physical things.
|
| from foundations import ConcreteStrip
|
| ConcreteStrip(x,y,z)
|
| Doesn't work for houses
| shinycode wrote:
| There isn't just concrete in a house. There is hundreds of
| things that could vary from house to house (even country to
| country and laws) so it's more like the building blocs are
| not only imports of lib but the language itself (raw
| materials) which makes it a fit analogy for me
| BoredomIsFun wrote:
| > Just because it's << boilerplate >>, that does not mean
| it's worthless
|
| Of course it is not. It is needed, by definition.
|
| > or doesn't carry novelty.
|
| Of course it does not. Why would a piece of code that simply
| fills a large C structure with constants be innovative?
|
| > Every project is different and not everything can be made
| from a generic out-of-shelf product
|
| Tangential to use of LLMs for boring boilerplate stuff.
| gampleman wrote:
| Actually I think this is one of the more tragic outcomes of the
| LLM revolution: it was already hard to get funding for
| ergonomic advances in programming before. Funding a new PL
| ecosystem or major library was no mean feat. Despite that,
| there were a number of promising advances that could have
| significantly raised the level of abstraction.
|
| However, LLMs destroy this economic incentive utterly. It now
| seems most productive to code in fairly low level TypeScript
| and let the machines spew tons of garbage code for you.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Most of the people doing the most rote and monotonous work were
| and are doing so in some of the least productive circumstances,
| with clear ways of increasing speed and productivity.
|
| If development velocity was truly an important factor in these
| businesses, we'd migrated away from that gang of four ass Java
| 8 codebase, given these poor souls offices, or at least
| cubicles to reduce the noise, we wouldn't make them spend 3
| hours a day in ceremonial meetings.
|
| The reason none of this happens is that even if these
| developers crank out code 10x faster, by the time it's made it
| past all the inertia and inefficiencies of the organization,
| the change is nearly imperceptible. Though the bill for the new
| office and the 2 year refactoring effort are much more
| tangible.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Yep. It's ridiculous to talk about 10x or 5x or 2x anything
| in any but the smallest companies. All this talk about
| programmer velocity is micro-optimizing something that's _not
| a bottleneck_.
| K0balt wrote:
| I've been thinking a lot about this. I think that AI
| software automation tools are disproportionately more
| useful in greenfield work done by small or tiny
| organizations. By an order of magnitude, maybe 2 in some
| cases.
|
| What that means is anyone's guess, but it seems like it
| should result in a Cambrian explosion of disruptive new
| companies, limited in scope by the idea space.
|
| The thing about small teams is, with a few exceptions, the
| biggest challenges are typically funnels for users and
| product-market fit, overcoming and exploitation of network
| effects, etc... so even in small orgs, if you make 30
| percent of the problem 4x faster/smaller you still have the
| other 70 percent which is now 92.5% of the problem.
|
| This applies even more acutely in larger organizations...
| so for them, 99 percent of the problem remains.
|
| Intangibles in an organization like reluctance, education,
| and organizational inertia fill the gap left by software
| acceleration, and in the end you only see tiny gains, if
| any.
|
| What really happened, on an organizational scale, is that
| software development costs went down. We wouldn't expect a
| wage collapse in coding to foment an explosive revolution
| in company profitability or dynamism. We shouldn't expect
| those things of LLM assistance.
|
| We should look at it as a reduction in cost with
| potentially dangerous side effects if not managed
| carefully, with an especially big reduction in r&d
| development costs.
| scuff3d wrote:
| Literally the most useful LLMs have been to me is dealing
| with the pile of corporate bullshit we have to put up with
| day to day.
|
| For example, we have to plan 8 to 12 sprints in advance.
| Full acceptance criteria, story points, and slotted into a
| sprint with points balanced across the team. Of course this
| is utterly useless, anything past the second sprint is
| going to be wrong, but they want it done. LLMs got me
| through that in a few hours instead of a few days.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >all the inertia and inefficiencies of the organization
|
| Honestly you can probably use this as a means to measure the
| amount of regulation, graft, and corruption in an economy.
|
| In a wild west free for all code velocity would likely be
| very fast with software popping up, changing rapidly, and
| some quickly disappearing.
|
| But in an economy that doesn't care what you make, then who
| you pay or what laws you buy is far more important.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| In many organizations, software just isn't what makes the
| money. It's a supporting role at best. The software needs
| to work reliably, and it needs to keep working for a long
| time, but it doesn't need to gain new features at a rapid
| pace.
|
| If the janitors swept the floors 10x faster, we wouldn't
| see any KPIs to shoot up from that. You still need it to
| happen regularly and reliably and on demand in case there's
| a mess, but it doesn't need to be fast.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >If the janitors swept the floors 10x faster, we wouldn't
| any KPIs to shoot up from that
|
| I mean I'd expect that you'd see a decrease in the number
| of janitor staff as was convenient per the companies
| policies. That and janitorial services would turn into
| contracted services rather than in house positions. Oddly
| enough both these things have already occurred as tooling
| to janitors became better and the legal incentives made
| it cheaper.
| qsera wrote:
| > most of our work is a small bit of novelty against boiler
| plate redundant code...
|
| Care to share some examples that prove your point?
| voidUpdate wrote:
| > "Why hasn't the boilerplate been automated as libraries or
| other abstractions?"
|
| Because a lot of programmers don't know how to copy-paste or
| make packages for themselves? We have boilerplate at my work,
| which comprises of some ready made packages that we can drop
| in, and tweak as needed, no LLMs required
| simianwords wrote:
| they don't go as deep as llm's which capture regularities at
| much more granular levels
| voidUpdate wrote:
| I'm not entirely sure what you mean... If something becomes
| repetitive enough to be boilerplate, we can just make it
| into a package and keep it around for the next time
| sph wrote:
| > A fair question is: why hasn't the boilerplate been automated
| as libraries or other abstractions?
|
| Because our ways of programming computers are still woefully
| inadequate and rudimentary. This is why we have a tons of
| technique for code reuse, yet we keep reinventing the wheel
| because they shatter in contact with reality. OOP was supposed
| to save us all in the 1990s, we've seen how it went.
|
| In other fields we've had a lot of time to figure out basic
| patterns and components that can be endlessly reused. Imagine
| if car manufacturers had to reinvent the screw, the piston, the
| gear and lubricants for every new car model.
|
| One example that has bugged me for a decade is: we've been in
| the Internet era for decades at this point, yet we spend a
| _lot_ of time reinventing communication. An average programmer
| can 't spend two days without having to deal with JSON
| serialization, or connectivity, or sending notifications about
| the state of a process. What about adding authentication and
| authorization? There is a whole cottage industry to simplify
| something that should be, by now, almost as basic as
| multiplying two integers. Isn't that utter madness? It is a
| miracle we can build complex systems at all when we have to
| focus on this minutiae that pop up in every single application.
|
| Now we have intelligences that can create code, using the same
| inadequate language of grunts and groans we use ourselves in
| our day to day.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Standardization and regulation forced a lot of the physical
| industries to change as the industrial revolution progressed.
| Before that point standards didn't really exist, especially
| over any large areas and technological progress suffered
| because of that. After that point solutions became much
| closer to drag and drop than what they were before.
|
| The question is, at what point of progress will it benefit
| the software industry.
| joquarky wrote:
| I was watching a film from 1959 where the main character
| just swaps headlights and tires from completely different
| cars like they were just nominally interchangeable.
|
| It feels like the era of standardization already came and
| went. It seems like product designers are now being
| deliberately obtuse so that their product quirks create
| lock-in and therefore more revenue. I expect that genAI
| will put fuel on this fire.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > fair question is: why hasn't the boilerplate been automated
| as libraries or other abstractions?
|
| Sometimes it has. The amount of generated code that selected
| count(distinct id) from customers would produce is huge.
| moffkalast wrote:
| It has been automated as much as possible, boilerplate is the
| result of people being terrible at designing programming
| languages. The whole idea of increasingly higher level ones was
| just that all along. Is there any point in writing a billion
| ADDC commands in assembly by hand when it takes one line in
| python?
|
| LLM type systems are the final level of abstraction that lifts
| it up to literal natural language. Any dev with decent self
| awareness would admit they were just copying shit from
| stackoverflow half the time before LLMs anyway, high level
| languages and libraries just streamline that process with
| canonical implementations.
|
| The value we provide is turning "person with problem" ->
| "person with solution to said problem" with as few caveats as
| possible. A programmer is that arrow, we solve problems. The
| more code we have to write to solve that problem, the _worse_
| we are at our job.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| what i find hard to digest is not being able to pay rent and
| dying of old age in a ditch in poverty
| vladms wrote:
| > Whether something is a forgery is innate in the object and the
| methods used to produce it. It doesn't matter if nobody else ever
| sees the forged painting, or if it only hangs in a private home.
| It's a forgery because it's not authentic.
|
| On a philosophical level I do not get the discussions about
| paintings. I love a painting for what it is not for being the
| first or the only one. An artist that paints something that I
| can't distinguish from a Van Gogh is a very skillful artist and
| the painting is very beautiful. Me labeling "authentic" it or not
| should not affect it's artistic value.
|
| For a piece of code you might care about many things:
| correctness, maintainability, efficiency, etc. I don't care if
| someone wrote bad (or good) code by hand or uses LLM, it is still
| bad (or good code). Someone has to take the decision if the code
| fits the requirements, LLM, or software developer, and this will
| not go away.
|
| > but also a specific geographic origin. There's a good reason
| for this.
|
| Yes, but the "good reason" is more probably the desire of people
| to have monopolies and not change. Same as with the paintings, if
| the cheese is 99% the same I don't care if it was made in a
| region or not. Of course the region is happy because means more
| revenue for them, but not sure it is good.
|
| > To stop the machines from lying, they have to cite their
| sources properly.
|
| I would be curious how can this be applied to a human? Should we
| also cite all the courses, articles that we have read on a topic
| when we write code?
| xg15 wrote:
| > _An artist that paints something that I can 't distinguish
| from a Van Gogh is a very skillful artist and the painting is
| very beautiful._
|
| There are a lot such artists who can do that _after having seen
| Van Gogh 's paintings before_. Only Van Gogh (as far as we
| know) did paint those _without_ having seen anything like it
| before - in other words, he had a new idea.
| wonnage wrote:
| Even the mechanical skill of painting gets a lot harder
| without an example to look at. Most people can get pretty
| good at painting from example within a year or two but it's a
| big leap to simply paint from memory, much less create
| something original.
| vladms wrote:
| So, if we apply to software, should we quote Dijkstra each
| time we use his graph algorithm?
|
| Should we also say "if you can implement Dijkstra's
| algorithm" it's irrelevant because "you did not have the
| idea"?
|
| It's great to credit people that have an idea first. I fail
| to see how using an idea is that "bad" or "not worthy", ideas
| should be spread and used, not locked by the first one that
| had them (except some small time period maybe).
| qsera wrote:
| No, can't apply the same reasoning to software, because the
| other is art, and hence tied to emotion, taste etc.
| jesterswilde wrote:
| Regarding art, what do you feel about museums? Why would you go
| see an original instead of simply looking at a jpg.
|
| Even if you aren't in the group, there is clearly a group of
| people who appreciate seeing the original, the thing that
| modified our collective artistic trajectory.
|
| Forgeries and master studies have a long history in art. Every
| classically trained worth their salt has a handful of forgeries
| under their belt. Remaking work that you enjoy helps you
| appreciate it further, understand the choices they made and get
| a better for feel how they wielded the medium. Though these
| forgeries are for learning and not intended to be pieces in
| their own right.
| vladms wrote:
| > Regarding art, what do you feel about museums? Why would
| you go see an original instead of simply looking at a jpg.
|
| I go to a museum to see a curated collection with
| explanations in a place that prevents distractions (I can't
| open a new tab) and going with people that might be
| interested to talk about what they see and feel. It's as well
| a social and personal experience on top information
| gathering.
|
| > there is clearly a group of people who appreciate seeing
| the original,
|
| There are many people interested in many things, do you want
| to say that "because some people think it is important, it
| must be important"? There were many people with really weird
| and despicable ideas along history and while I am neutral to
| this one, they definitely don't convince me just by their
| numbers.
|
| > simply looking at a jpg.
|
| Technically a jpg would not work because is lossy
| compression. But a png at the correct resolution might do the
| trick for some things (paintings that you see from far), but
| not for others. Museum have multiple objects that would be
| hard to put in an image (statues, clothes, bones, tables,
| etc.). You definitely can't put
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedian_(artwork) in a jpg -
| but the discussion surrounding it touches topics discussed
| here.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > Regarding art, what do you feel about museums? Why would
| you go see an original instead of simply looking at a jpg.
|
| Generally you get a much better 'view' of the artwork in a
| museum. It's higher 'resolution' you can view it from
| multiple angles etc.
|
| There are some exceptions. You're probably going to get a
| better look at the Mona Lisa online than if you try and see
| it at the Louvre.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Eh, there is plenty of artwork with high resolution scans
| online in which you'll have to take a magnifying glass to
| the museum if you want a closer view.
| Otterly99 wrote:
| Art in general is a bit weird like that.
|
| The value of a piece is definitely not completely tied to its
| physical attributes, but the story around it. The story is what
| creates its scarcity and generates the value.
|
| It is similar for collectible items. If I had in my possession
| the original costume that Michael Jackson wore in thriller, I
| am sure I could sell it for thousands of dollars. I can also
| buy a copy for less than a hundred.
|
| Same with luxury brands. Their price is not necessarily linked
| to their quality, but to the status they bring and the story
| they tell (i.e. wearing this transforms me into somebody
| important).
|
| It can seem quite silly, but I think we are all doing it to
| some extent. While you said that a good forgery shouldn't
| affect one's opinion on the object (and I agree with you), what
| about AI-generated content? If I made a novel painting in the
| style of Van Gogh, you might find it beautiful. What if I told
| you I just prompted it and painted it? What if I just printed
| it? There are levels of involvement that we are all willing to
| accept differently.
| oreally wrote:
| > I would be curious how can this be applied to a human? Should
| we also cite all the courses, articles that we have read on a
| topic when we write code?
|
| Yea this is the kind of BS and counter-productiveness that
| irrational radicals try to push the crowd towards.
|
| The idea that one owns your observations of their work and can
| collect rent on it is absurd.
| pixl97 wrote:
| The Right to Read is a great story on showing just how greedy
| and stupid people would get if we allow them. Society and
| culture is large scale theft. Imagine having to pay to learn
| about the idea of fire, or to use the alphabet. Simply put
| humanity would have never progressed much farther than
| animals. And yet, as the complexity of our ideas increase,
| suddenly many humans start thinking that owning ideas, many
| forever, is just great and will not have any negative
| ramifications.
| qsera wrote:
| >Me labeling "authentic" it or not should not affect it's
| artistic value.
|
| The problem with automated imitation generators is that they
| can produce thousands of painting that _imitate_ Van Gogh, but
| does not have the same soul.
|
| It is the same reason why these things cannot create genuinely
| funny jokes. They cannot assess the funnyness of the
| themselves. They cannot feel, and cannot do the filtering based
| on emotion.
|
| It is easy to recognize the emptiness of a joke, but not so
| easy for a painting, or some other form of art.
|
| This is why it will never work for art. But the sad thing is
| that that will not stop them from being used to create art.
| Because it just needs to sell.
|
| I would say that for art, at least for most of the movies,
| music etc, this was already the case. So nothing much to lose.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >but does not have the same soul.
|
| Define soul, how about a legal/scientific description that
| accurately covers all bases?
|
| The funny jokes thing is funny too, if someone told you a
| joke and you thought it was funny, then they told you it was
| from an LLM, would it stop being funny.
| qsera wrote:
| That is why I said it is hard to spot an souless painting.
|
| >if someone told you a joke and you thought it was funny,
| then they told you it was from an LLM, would it stop being
| funny.
|
| No. It wouldn't. But they can't generate funny jokes.
|
| I would be really happy if I am wrong, and it is possible
| to laugh all day by reading endless jokes from an LLM...
| raincole wrote:
| > Video games stand out as one market where consumers have pushed
| back effectively
|
| No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art
| assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares
| about how the code is written.
|
| If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll
| know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well. It's
| specifically worded like this:
|
| > content such as artwork, sound, narrative, localization, etc.
|
| No 'code' or 'programming.'
|
| If game players are the most anti-AI group then it's crystal
| clear that LLM coding is inevitable.
|
| > This stands in stark contrast to code, which generally doesn't
| suffer from re-use at all, or may even benefit from it, if it's
| infrastructure.
|
| Yeah, _exactly_. And LLM help developers save time from writing
| the same thing that has be done by other developers for a
| thousand times. I don 't know how one can spins this as a bad
| thing.
|
| > Classic procedural generation is noteworthy here as a
| precedent, which gamers were already familiar with, because by
| and large it has failed to deliver.
|
| Spore is well acclaimed. Minecraft is literally the most sold
| game ever. The fact one developer fumbled it doesn't make the
| idea of procedural generation bad. This is a perfect example of
| that a tool isn't inherently good or bad. It's up to the tool's
| wielder.
| trashymctrash wrote:
| If you read the next couple of paragraphs, the author addresses
| this:
|
| > That said, Steam's policy has been recently updated to
| exclude dev tools used for "efficiency gains", but which are
| not used to generate content presented to players.
|
| I only quoted the first paragraph, but there is more.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Also "AI" has been in gaming, especially mobile gaming, for a
| literal decade already.
|
| Household name game studios have had custom AI art asset
| tooling for a long time that can create art quickly, using
| their specific style.
|
| AI is a tool and as Steve Jobs said, you can hold it wrong.
| It's like plastic surgery, you only notice the bad ones and
| object to them. An expert might detect the better jobs, but the
| regular folk don't know and for the most part don't care unless
| someone else tells them to care.
|
| And then they go around blaming EVERYTHING as AI.
| delaminator wrote:
| "I hate CGI video"
|
| "So you hated the TV Series Ugly Betty then?"
|
| "What? that's not CGI!"
|
| This video is 15 years old
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDjorAhcnbY
| wormpilled wrote:
| I think that's a different category, though. Those
| backgrounds are actual video recordings of real places, not
| 3D environments modeled from scratch. It looks 'real'
| because the background actually exists.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| It's still 100% CGI compositing and definitely not all of
| them are real places or real objects.
|
| In that specific 15 year old example they're mostly
| composited, you're right about that.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I love Ian Hubert's demos of green screening in Blender.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxD6H3ri8RI
|
| His Blender Conference talk about photogrammetry / camera
| projection / projection mapping was fantastic:
|
| World Building in Blender - Ian Hubert
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whPWKecazgM
| delaminator wrote:
| Computer Generated Imagery.
| runarberg wrote:
| Your case would have been better if you had used _Mad Max:
| Fury Road_ , or even _Titanic_ as examples, rather then a
| mediocre TV show nobody remembers. _Ugly Betty_ used green
| screens to make production cheaper, that did not improve
| the show (although it may have improved the profit
| margins). _Mad Max: Fury Road_ on the other hand used CGI
| to significantly improve the visual experience. The added
| CGI probably _increased_ the cost of the production, and
| subsequently it is one of the greatest, most awesome, movie
| ever made.
|
| Actually if you look at the scene from Greys Anatomy [0:54]
| you can see where CGI is used to improve the scene (rather
| then cut costs), and you get this amazing scene of the
| Washington State Ferry crash.
|
| I think you can see the parallels here. When people say
| they hate AI they are generally referring to the sloppy
| stuff it generates. It has enabled a proliferation of cheap
| slop. And with few exception it seems like generating cheap
| slop is all it does (these exception being specialized
| tools e.g. in image processing software).
| delaminator wrote:
| > mediocre TV show
|
| Won 3 Primetime Emmys
|
| 52 wins & 124 nominations total
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0805669/awards/
|
| I guess it's just too lowbrow for you.
| runarberg wrote:
| Award winning shows and movies does not exclude
| forgettable cash grabs.
|
| However, my counter examples included _Grey's Anatomy_ ,
| _Mad Max_ , and _Titanic_. None of these are considered
| high literature exactly (and all of them are award
| winning as well).
| keyringlight wrote:
| Another example is upscaled texture mods, which has been a
| trend for a long while before 'large language' took off as a
| trend. Mods to improve textures in a game are definitely not
| new and that probably means including from other sources, but
| the ability to automate/industrialize that (and presumably a
| lot of training material available) meant there was a big
| wave of that mod category a few years back. My impression is
| that gamers will overlook a lot so long as it's 'free' or at
| least are very anti-business (even if the industry they enjoy
| relies upon it), the moment money is involved they suddenly
| care a lot about the whole fabric being hand made and need
| verification that everyone involved was handsomely rewarded.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| This should be completely crushed by Nano Banana models?
| theshrike79 wrote:
| The issue isn't objective quality or realism, it's
| sticking to a specific style consistently.
|
| _Everyone_ (and their grandmother) can instantly tell a
| ChatGPT generated image, it has a very distinct style -
| and in my experience no amount of prompting will make it
| go away. Same for Grok and to a smaller degree Google's
| stuff.
|
| What the industry needs (and uses) is something they can
| feed a, say, wall texture into and the AI workflow will
| produce a summer, winter and fall variant of that - in
| the exact style the specific game is using.
| mejutoco wrote:
| I think txt2img and img2img are terms to find those uses.
| bavell wrote:
| And comfyUI workflows. People have been doing this for
| awhile now.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| ComfyUI is relatively new, but pretty good at what it
| does
| raincole wrote:
| If we're talking about texture upscaling alone (I suppose
| that's what the parent comment means), Nano Banana is a
| huge overkill.
| tovej wrote:
| An LLM has never saved me time. It has always produced
| something that doesn't quite work, has the rough shape of what
| I want, but somehow always gets all the details wrong.
|
| I can type up what I want much faster and be sure it's at least
| solving the right problem, even if it may have bugs.
|
| There are also tools to generate boilerplate that work much
| much better than LLMs. And they're deterministic.
| vntok wrote:
| > An LLM has never saved me time. It has always produced
| something that doesn't quite work, has the rough shape of
| what I want, but somehow always gets all the details wrong.
|
| This reads like a skill issue on your end, in part at least
| in the prompting side.
|
| It does take time to reach a point where you can prompt an
| LLM sufficiently well to get a correct answer in one shot,
| developing an intuitive understanding of what absolutely
| needs to be written out and what can be inferred by the
| model.
| Jooror wrote:
| I'm curious about how you landed "git gud; prompt better"
| and not "maybe the domain I work in is a better fit for LLM
| code". Or, to be a bit less generous, consider the
| possibility that the code you're generating is boilerplate,
| marshaling, and/or API calls. A facade of perceived
| complexity over something that's as complex as a filter-map
| or two.
| 3371 wrote:
| Sharing my 2 cents.
|
| In the past 2 months I've been using all the SOTA models
| to help me design a new DSL for narrative scripting (such
| as game story telling) and a c# runtime implementation o
| the script player engine.
|
| The language spec and design is about 95% authored by me
| up to this point; I have the LLMs work on the 2nd layer:
| the implementation specs/guidelines and the 3rd layer:
| concrete c# implementation.
|
| Since it's a new language, I consider it's somewhat
| new/novel tasks for LLMs (at least, not like boilerplate
| stuff like HTTP API or CRUD service). I'd say, these LLMs
| have been very helpful - you can tell they sometimes get
| confused and have trouble to comply to the foreign
| language spec and design - but they are mostly smart
| enough to carry out the objectives, and they get better
| and better after the project got on track and has plenty
| of files/resources to read and reference.
|
| And I'd also say "prompt better" is a important factor,
| just much more nuanced/complicated. I started with 0
| experience with LLM agents and have learned a lot about
| how to tame them, and developed a protocol to collaborate
| with agents, these all comes from countless trial and
| errors, but in the end get boiled down to "prompt
| better".
| Jooror wrote:
| I wonder if my intuition here is correct; I would posit
| that "PL implementation" is a far more popular and well-
| explored field than it seems. How many toy/small/labor-
| of-love langs make it to Show HN? How many more simply
| don't?
|
| I've never personally caught the language implementation
| bug. I appreciate your perspective here.
| 3371 wrote:
| I totally agree, and I was fully aware of how common
| people make language for fun when I replied.
|
| But I feel like the rationale would still stands:
| Considering LLMs' natures, common boilerplate tasks are
| easy because they can kind of just "decompress" from
| training data. But for a new language design, unless the
| language is almost identical to some other captured by
| the model, "decompression" would just fail.
| tovej wrote:
| As someone who has implemented a fair few DSLs, lexical
| and syntactic analysis is pretty much the same anywhere,
| and the structure of the lexer/parser does not really
| depend on the grammar of the language.
|
| And even semantic analysis is at least very similar in
| most PLs. Even DSLs. Assuming you're using concepts like
| variables and functions.
|
| When it comes to codegen / interpreter runtimes, things
| start to diverge. But this also depends on the use case.
| More often than not a DSL is a one-to-one map to an
| existing language, with syntactic sugar on top.
|
| I'm curious, what's the DSL you're working on?
| 3371 wrote:
| It's pretty much WIP but if you are interested here is
| the repo. https://github.com/No3371/zoh
|
| The points you brought up all are valid. Lexer, parser
| and general concepts are not language-specific, yes, and
| I wasn't talking about how the implementation is
| different.
|
| When I said "you can tell they sometimes get confused and
| have trouble to comply to the foreign language spec and
| design", I was thinking about the many times they just
| fail to write in my language even when provided will full
| language specs. LLMs don't "think" and boilerplate is
| easy for LLMs because highly similar syntax structure
| even identical code exist in their training data, they
| are kind of just copying stuff. But that doesn't work
| that well when they are tasked to write in a original
| language that is... too creative.
| tovej wrote:
| I am prompting better. It doesn't help the LLM be more
| productive than me on a regular tuesday.
|
| Sure, I can get the task done by delegating everything to
| an agentic workflow, but it just adds a bunch of useless
| overhead to my work.
|
| I still need to know what the code does at the end of the
| day, so I can document it and reason about it. If I write
| the code myself, it's easy. If an LLM does it, it's a
| chore.
|
| And even without those concerns, the LLM is still slower
| than me. Unless it's trivial boilerplate, in which case
| other tools serve me better and cheaper.
|
| I'll note that a compiler is one of the most well
| understood and implemented software projects, much of it
| open source, which means the LLM has a lot of prior art
| that it can copy.
| vntok wrote:
| The parent is specifically talking about producing
| boilerplate code -a domain in which LLM excell at- and
| not having had any success at that. It's therefore not a
| leap of logic to assume they haven't put (enough) effort
| into getting better at prompting first, which is
| perfectly fine per se but leans towards a skill issue and
| not an immutable property of gen AI.
|
| The uncomfortable fact remains that one cannot really
| expect to get much better results from an LLM without
| putting some work themselves. They aren't magical
| oracles.
| tovej wrote:
| That is not at all what I said, please read my post more
| carefully before speculating.
|
| I am talking about using LLMs in general, not for boiler
| plate specifically.
|
| My point about boilerplate is that I have tools that
| solve this for me already, and do it in a more
| predictable way.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| > _I'm curious about how you landed "git gud; prompt
| better" and not "maybe the domain I work in is a better
| fit for LLM code"._
|
| 1. Personal experience. Lazy prompting vs careful
| prompting.
|
| 2. They're coincidentally good at things I'm good at, and
| shit at things I don't understand.
|
| 3. Following from 2, when used by somebody who does
| understand a problem space which I do not, they easily
| succeed. That dog vibe coding games succeeded in getting
| claude to write games because his master knew a thing or
| two about it. I on the other hand have no game Dev
| experience, even almost no hobby experience with games
| specifically, so I struggle to get any game code that
| even remotely works.
| Jooror wrote:
| Irrespective of the domain you specifically listed in 3
| (game dev is, believe it or not, one of the "more
| complex" domains), you have completely failed to miss the
| point.
|
| > 2. They're coincidentally good at things I'm good at,
| and shit at things I don't understand.
|
| This may well be! In the perfect world this would be
| balanced with the knowledge that maybe "the things you're
| good at" are objectively* easier than "things you don't
| understand". Speaking for myself, I'm proficient in many
| more easy things than hard things.
|
| *inasmuch as anything can be "objectively" easier
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I have definitely considered the possibility that I'm
| simply good at easy things and the LLM is good at easy
| things, and that hard things are hard for both of us. And
| there certainly must be some element of that going on,
| but I keep noticing that different people get different
| quality results for the same kind of problems, and it
| seems to line up with how good they themselves would be
| at that task. If you know the problem space well, you can
| describe the problem (and approaches to it) with a
| precision that people unfamiliar with the problem space
| will struggle with.
|
| I think you can observe this in action by making vague
| requests, seeing how it does, then roll back that work
| and make a more precise request using relevant jargon and
| compare the results. For example, I asked claude to make
| a system that recommends files with similar tags. It gave
| me a recommender that just orders files by how many tags
| they had in common with the query file. This is the kind
| of solution that somebody may think up quick but it
| doesn't actually work great in practice. Then I reverted
| all of that and instead specified that it should use a
| vector space model with cosine similarity. It did pretty
| good but there was something subtly off. That is however
| about the limit of my expertise in this direction, so I
| tabbed over to a session with ChatGPT and discussed the
| problem on a high level for about 20 minutes, then asked
| ChatGPT to write up a single terse technically precise
| paragraph describing the problem. I told ChatGPT to use
| no bullet points and write no psuedocode, telling it the
| coding agent was already an expert in the codebase so let
| it worry about the coding. I give that paragraph to
| claude and suddenly it clicks, it bangs out a working
| solution without any drama. So I conclude the quality of
| the prompting determined the quality of the results.
| rybosworld wrote:
| When web search first arrived, the same thing happened.
| That is, some people didn't like using the tool because
| it wasn't finding what they wanted. This is still true
| for a lot of folks today, actually.
|
| It's less "git gud; prompt better", and more, "be able to
| explain (well) what you want as the output". If someone
| messages the IT guy and says "hey my computer is broken"
| - what sort of helpful information can the IT guy offer
| beyond "turn it on and off again"?
| tovej wrote:
| I can assure you I give LLMs all the information they
| need. Including hints to what kind of solution to use.
| They still fail.
| rybosworld wrote:
| So how do you rectify your anecdotal experience against
| those made by public figures in the industry who we can
| all agree are at least pretty good engineers? I think
| that's important because if we want to stay ~anonymous,
| neither you nor I can verify the reputation of one
| another (and therefore, one another's relative master of
| the "Craft").
|
| Here are some well known names who are now saying they
| regularly use LLM's for development. For many of these
| folks, that wasn't true 1-2 years ago:
|
| - Donald Knuth: https://www-cs-
| faculty.stanford.edu/%7Eknuth/papers/claude-c...
|
| - Linus Torvalds:
| https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/hobby-github-repo-
| shows-l...
|
| - John Carmack:
| https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1909311174845329874
|
| My point being - some random guy on the internet says
| LLM's have never been useful for them and they only
| output garbage vs. some of the best engineers in the
| field using the same tools, and saying the exact opposite
| of what you are.
| bendmorris wrote:
| >Here are some well known names who are now saying they
| regularly use LLM's for development. For many of these
| folks, that wasn't true 1-2 years ago:
|
| This is a huge overstatement that isn't supported by your
| own links.
|
| - Donald Knuth: the link is him acknowledging _someone
| else_ solved one of his open problems with Claude. Quote:
| "It seems that I'll have to revise my opinions about
| "generative AI" one of these days."
|
| - Linus Torvalds: used it to write a tool in Python
| because "I know more about analog filters--and that's not
| saying much--than I do about python" and he doesn't care
| to learn. He's using it as a copy-paste replacement, not
| to write the kernel.
|
| - John Carmack: he's literally just opining on what he
| thinks will happen in the future.
| tovej wrote:
| You are overstating those sources. That alone makes me
| doubt that you're engaging in this discussion in good
| faith.
|
| I read them all, and in none of them do any of the three
| say that they "regularly use LLMs for development".
|
| Carmack is speculating about how the technology will
| develop. And Carmack has a vested interest in AI, so I
| would not put any value on this as an "engineers
| opinion".
|
| Torvalds has vibe coded one visualizer for a hobby
| project. That's within what I might use to test out LLM
| output: simple, inconsequential, contained. There's no
| indication in that article that Linus is using LLMs for
| any serious development work.
|
| Knuth is reporting about somebody else using LLMs for
| mathematical proofs. The domain of mathematical proofs is
| much more suitable for LLM work, because the LLM can be
| guided by checking the correctness of proofs.
|
| And Knuth himself only used the partial proof sent in by
| someone else as inspiration for a handcrafted proof.
|
| I don't mind arguing this case with you, but please don't
| fabricate facts. That's dishonest
| dntrshnthngjxct wrote:
| If you do not plan out the architecture soundly, no amount of
| prompting will fix it if it is bad. I know this because my
| "handmade" project made with backward compatibility and
| horrible architecture keeps being badly fixed by LLM while
| the ones that rely on preemptive planning of the features and
| architecture, end up working right.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I think that's true, but something even more subtle is
| going on. The quality of the LLM output depends on how it
| was prompted in a way more profound than I think most
| people realize. If you prompt the LLM using jargon and
| lingo that indicate you are already well experienced with
| the domain space, the LLM will rollplay an experienced
| developer. If you prompt it like you're a clueless PHB
| who's never coded, the LLM will output shitty code to match
| the style of your prompt. This extends to architecture, if
| your prompts are written with a mature understanding of the
| architecture that should be used, the LLM will follow suit,
| but if not then the LLM will just slap together something
| that looks like it might work, but isn't well thought out.
| simonask wrote:
| This is magical thinking.
|
| LLMs are physically incapable of generating something
| "well thought out", because they are physically incapable
| of thinking.
| Tossrock wrote:
| Tell Donald Knuth that: https://www-cs-
| faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cyc...
| Marha01 wrote:
| It is magical thinking to claim that LLMs are definitely
| physically incapable of thinking. You don't know that. No
| one knows that, since such large neural networks are
| opaque blackboxes that resist interpretation and we don't
| really know how they function internally.
|
| You are just repeating that because you read that before
| somewhere else. Like a stochastic parrot. Quite ironic.
| ;)
| tovej wrote:
| They really aren't that mysterious. We can confidently
| say that they function at the lexical level, using Monte
| Carlo principles to carve out a likely path in lexical
| space. The output depends on the distribution of n-grams
| in the training set, and the composition of the text in
| it's context window.
|
| This process cannot produce reasoning.
|
| 1) an LLM cannot represent the truth value of statements,
| only their likelihood of being found in its training
| data.
|
| 2) because it uses lexical data, an LLM will answer
| differently based on the names / terms used in a prompt.
|
| Both of these facts contradict the idea that the LLM is
| reasoning, or "thinking".
|
| This isn't really a very hit take either, I don't think
| I've talked to a single researcher who thinks that LLMs
| are thinking.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I don't care if the machine has a soul, I only care what
| the machine can produce. With good prompting, the machine
| produces more ""thoughtful"" results. As an engineer,
| that's all I care about.
| dncornholio wrote:
| LLM's keep messing up even on a plain Laravel codebase..
| tovej wrote:
| You're just strawmanning now. I've prompted extremely well-
| specced, contained features, and the LLM has failed
| nonetheless.
|
| In fact, the more details I give it about a specific
| problem, the more it seems to hallucinate. Presumably
| because it is more outside the training set.
| bendmorris wrote:
| You're going to get a lot of "skill issue" comments but your
| experience basically matches mine. I've only found LLMs to be
| useful for quick demos where I explicitly didn't care about
| the quality of implementation. For my core responsibility it
| has never met my quality bar and after getting it there has
| not saved me time. What I'm learning is different people and
| domains have very different standards for that.
| lxgr wrote:
| > I don't know how one can spins this as a bad thing.
|
| People spin all kinds of things if they believe (accurately or
| not) that their livelihood is on the line. The knee-jerk "AI
| universally bad" movement seems just as absurd to me as the
| "AGI is already here" one.
|
| > Spore is well acclaimed. Minecraft is literally the most sold
| game ever.
|
| Counterpoint: Oblivion, one of the first high-profile games to
| use procedural terrain/landscape generation, seemed very
| soulless to me at the time.
|
| As I see it, it's all a matter of how well it's executed. In
| the best case, a skilled artist uses automation to fill in
| mechanical rote work (in the same way that e.g. renaissance
| artists didn't make every single brushstroke of their
| masterpieces themselves).
|
| In the worst (or maybe even average? time will tell) case,
| there are only minimal human-made artistic decisions flowing
| into a work and the output is a mediocre average of everything
| that's already been done before, which is then rightfully
| perceived as slop.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > Oblivion, one of the first high-profile games to use
| procedural terrain/landscape generation
|
| I might be misremembering but wasn't the Oblivion proc-gen
| entirely in the development process, not "live" in the game,
| which means...
|
| > "In the best case, a skilled artist uses automation to fill
| in mechanical rote work"
|
| ...is what Bethesda did, no?
| lxgr wrote:
| Yes, but I beg to differ on the "skilled" part. I find the
| result very jarring somehow; the scale of the world didn't
| seem right. (Probably because it was too realistic; part of
| the art of game terrain design is reconciling the
| inherently unrealistic scales.)
| bombcar wrote:
| WoW had this but you never really thought about it - even
| the massive capital cities were a few blocks at most.
|
| The problem with procedural generation is it's hard to
| make it as action-packed and desirable as WoW zones, and
| even _those_ quickly become fly-over territory.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| > _Counterpoint: Oblivion, one of the first high-profile
| games to use procedural terrain /landscape generation, seemed
| very soulless to me at the time._
|
| Is that even a counter point? Nobody in their right mind
| would ever claim that procedural generation is impossible to
| fuck up. The reason Minecraft/etc are good examples is
| because they prove procedural generation can work, not that
| it always works.
| lxgr wrote:
| True, I should have said "counterexample". Procedural
| generation is just another tool, in the end, and it can be
| used for great or mediocre results like any other.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| > Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing
| the same thing that has be done by other developers for a
| thousand times. I don't know how one can spins this as a bad
| thing
|
| Do you ever ask _why_ you 're writing the same thing over and
| over again? That's literally the foundational piece of being an
| engineer; understanding when you're reinventing the wheel when
| there's a perfectly good wheel nearby.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| When you make a function f(a, b, c)
|
| It is reusable only if simply changing a, b, c is enough to
| give the function that you want. Options object etc
| _parameterise_ that function. It is useful only if the
| variability in reuse you desire is spanned by the parameters.
| This is syntactic reuse.
|
| With LLMs, the parameterisation goes into semantic space.
| This makes code _more_ reusable.
|
| A model trained on all of GitHub can reuse all that code
| regardless of whether they are syntactically reusable or not.
| This is semantic reuse, which is naturally much broader.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| There are two important failures I see with this logic:
|
| First, I am not arguing for _reusability_. Reusability is
| one of the most common mistakes you can make as a software
| engineer because you are over-generalizing what you need
| before you need it. Code should be written for your
| specific use case, and only generalized as problems appear.
| But if you can recognize that your specific use case fits a
| known problem, then you can find the best way to solve that
| problem, faster.
|
| Second, when you're using an LLM to make your code more
| 'reusable' you are taking full responsibility for
| everything that LLM vomits out. You're no longer assembling
| a car from well known parts, taking care to tailor it to
| your use case as needed. You're now building everything in
| said car, from the tires to the engine and the rearview
| mirror.
|
| Coding is a constant balance between understanding what
| you're solving for and what can solve it. Using LLMs takes
| the worst of both worlds, by offloading both your
| understanding of the problem and your understanding of the
| solution.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| I am not talking about using an LLM to make code reusable
| in the sense youre arguing.
|
| My point is that the very act of training an LLM on any
| corpus of code, automatically makes all of that code
| reusable, in a much broader semantic way rather than
| through syntax. Because the LLM uses a compressed
| representation of all that code to generate the function
| you ask it to. It is like having an npm where it already
| has compressed the code specific to your situation (like
| you were saying) that you want to write.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| > _Second, when you 're using an LLM to make your code
| more 'reusable' you are taking full responsibility for
| everything that LLM vomits out. You're no longer
| assembling a car from well known parts, taking care to
| tailor it to your use case as needed. You're now building
| everything in said car, from the tires to the engine and
| the rearview mirror._
|
| If you are anything above a mid level ticket taker, your
| responsibility exceeds what you personally write. When I
| was an "architect" responsible for the implementation and
| integration work of multiple teams at product companies -
| mostly startups - and now a tech lead in consulting, I'm
| responsible for knowing how a lot of code works that I
| further write and I'm the person called to carpet by the
| director/CTO then and the customer now.
|
| I was responsible for what the more junior developers
| "vomit out", the outside consulting company doing the
| Salesforce integration or god forbid for a little while
| the contractors in India. I no more cars about whether
| the LLM decided to use a for loop or while loop than I
| cared about the OSQL (not a typo) that the Salesforce
| consultants used. I care about does the resulting
| implementation meet the functional and non functional
| requirements.
|
| On my latest two projects, I understand the customer from
| talking to sales before I started, I understand the
| business requirements from multiple calls with the
| customer, I understand the architecture because I
| designed it myself from the diagrams and 8 years of
| working with and (in a former life at AWS) and reviewing
| it with the customer.
|
| As far as reusability? I've used the same base internal
| management web app across multiple clients.
|
| I built it (with AI) for one client. Extracted the
| reusable parts and removed the client specific parts and
| deployed a demo internally (with AI) and modified it and
| added features (with AI) for another client. I haven't
| done web development since 2002 seriously except a little
| copy paste work. I didn't look at a line of code. I used
| AWS Cognito for authentication. I verified the database
| user permissions.
|
| Absolutely no one in the value chain cares if the project
| was handcrafted or written by AI - as long as it was done
| on time, on budget and meets requirements.
|
| Before the gatekeeping starts, I've been working for 30
| years across 10 jobs and before that I was a hobbyist for
| a decade who started programming in 65C02 assembly in
| 1986.
| Sharlin wrote:
| > Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing
| the same thing that has be done by other developers for a
| thousand times.
|
| Before LLMs we did already have a way to "save developers time
| from writing the same thing that has been done by other
| developers for a thousand times", you know? A LLM doing the
| same thing the 1001st time is not code reuse. Code reuse is
| code reuse.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| Oh come on, you don't have to be condescending about function
| calls.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47260385
| Sharlin wrote:
| I was talking about libraries, higher-level units of reuse
| than individual functions. And your "syntactic" vs
| "semantic" reuse makes zero sense. Functions are literally
| written and invoked for their semantics - what they make
| happen. "Syntactic reuse" would be macros if anything, and
| indeed macros are very good at reducing boilerplate.
|
| You might have a more compelling argument if instead of
| syntax and semantics you contrasted semantics and
| _pragmatics_.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| A library is a collection of data structures functions.
| My argument still holds.
|
| > Syntactic reuse would be macros
|
| Well sure. My point is that what can be reused is decided
| ahead of time and encoded in the syntax. Whereas with
| LLMs it is not, and is encoded in the semantics.
|
| > Pragmatics
|
| Didn't know what that is. Consider my post updated with
| the better terms.
| runarberg wrote:
| I'm not sure your logic is sound. It sounds like you are
| insisting on some nuance which simply isn't there. LLM
| generates unmaintainable slop, which is extremely
| difficult to reason about, uses wrong abstractions,
| violates DRY, violates cohesion, etc.
|
| The industry has known how to reuse codes for two decades
| now (npm was released 16 years ago; pip 18 years ago).
| Using LLMs for code reuse is a step in the wrong
| direction, at least if you care about maintaining your
| code.
| naasking wrote:
| > LLM generates unmaintainable slop
|
| LLMs generate what you tell them to, which means it will
| be slop if you're careless and good if you're careful,
| just like programming in general.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| Oh sure the quality is extremely unreliable and I am not
| a fan of its style of coding either. Requires quite a bit
| of hand holding and sometimes it truly enrages me. I am
| just saying that LLM technology opens up another
| dimension of code reuse which is broader. Still a ways to
| go, not in the foundation model, those have plateaued,
| but in refining them for coding.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Hard agree. Before LLMs, if there was some bit of code needed
| across the industry, somebody would put the effort into
| writing a library and we'd all benefit. Now, instead of
| standardizing and working together we get a million slightly
| different incompatible piles of stochastic slop.
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| Before LLMs companies and people were forced to use one-
| size-fits-all solutions and now they can build custom,
| bespoke software that fits their needs.
|
| See how it's a matter of what you're looking at?
| edgyquant wrote:
| This was happening before llms in webdev
| deltaburnt wrote:
| I don't think we should use webdev as an example of why
| lossy copy and paste works for the industry.
| remich wrote:
| Yeah and then when that library stops being maintained or
| gets taken over, everything breaks.
| raincole wrote:
| Because code reuse is hard. Like, really hard. If it weren't
| we wouldn't be laughing at left-pad. If it weren't hard we
| wouldn't have so many front-end JavaScript frameworks. If it
| weren't Unreal wouldn't still have their own GC and std-like
| implementation today. Java wouldn't have been reinventing
| build system every five years.
|
| The whole history of programming tool is exploring how to
| properly reuse code: are functions or objects the fundamental
| unit of reuse? is diamond inheritance okay? should a language
| have an official package management? build system? should C++
| std have network support? how about gui support? should
| editors implement their own parsers or rely on language
| server? And none of these questions has a clear answer after
| thousands if not millions of smart people attempted. (well
| perhaps except the function vs object one)
|
| Electron is the ultimate effort of code reuse: we reuse the
| tens of thousands of human-years invested to make a markup-
| based render engine that covers 99% of use case. And everyone
| complains about it, the author of OP article included.
|
| LLM-coding is not code reuse. It's more like throwing hands
| up and admitting humans are yet not smart enough to properly
| reuse code except for some well-defined low level cases like
| compiling C into different ISA. And I'm all for that.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"well perhaps except the function vs object one"
|
| If this is what I think it is, I consider it very lopsided
| view, failure to recognize what model fits for what case
| and looking at everything from a hammer point of view
| raincole wrote:
| I think function is the fundamental unit and object is an
| extra level over it (it doesn't mean there is no use for
| object). Thinking objects/classes are the
| fundamental/minimal level is straight up wrong.
|
| Of course it's just my opinion.
| FpUser wrote:
| My opinion: Fundamental levels are data and operations
| (your functions). Not my view that class is a foundation.
| It is a representation convenient for some cases and not
| so much for other
| Garlef wrote:
| I think you could also argue that LLMs in coding are
| actually just a novel approach at code reuse: At the
| microscopic level, they excel at replicating known patterns
| in a new context.
|
| (Many small dependencies can be avoided by letting the LLM
| just re-implememt the desired behavior; ~ with tradeoffs,
| of course)
|
| The issue is orchestrating this local reuse into a coherent
| global codebase.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| LLMs in coding are like code reuse in the same way your
| neighbor hotwiring your car you parked in your driveway
| is just borrowing it
|
| You didn't park your car in your driveway so anyone could
| take it to get groceries
| plagiarist wrote:
| I didn't accept "copyright infringement is literal
| property theft" when the corporations were trying to
| convince us it was.
| layer8 wrote:
| The problems with leftpad are a problem with the NPM
| ecosystem, not with code reuse as such. There are other
| dependency ecosystems that don't have these problems.
| bandrami wrote:
| I have terrible news: LLMs don't actually make it easier,
| though it feels like they do at first
| krige wrote:
| > Spore is well acclaimed
|
| And yet it also effectively ended Will Wright's career. Rave
| press reviews are not a good indicator of anything, really.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| Tbf Spore's acclaim comes with the caveat that it completely
| failed to live up to years of pre-release hype. Much of the
| goodwill it's garnered since, which is reflected in review
| scores, only came after the storm of controversy over Spore
| not being "the ultimate simulator which would mark the 'end
| of history' for gaming" died down.
|
| And you wouldn't really have any idea this was the case if
| you weren't there when it happened.
| dannersy wrote:
| You're cherry picking. The open world games aren't as
| compelling anymore since the novelty is wearing off. I can
| cherry pick, too. For example, Starfield in all its grandeur is
| pretty boring.
|
| And the users may not care about code directly, but they
| definitely do indirectly. The less optimized and more off-the-
| shelf solutions have seen a stark decrease in performance but
| allowing game development to be more approachable.
|
| LLMs saving engineers and developers time is an unfounded claim
| because immediate results does not mean net positive. Actually,
| I'd argue that any software engineer worth their salt knows
| intimately that more immediate results is usually at the
| expense of long term sustainability.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Startfield is boring because of the bad writing and they made
| a space exploration game where there are loading screens
| between the planet and space and you don't actually explore
| space.
|
| They fundamentally misunderstood what they were promising,
| it's the same as making a pirate game where you never steer
| the ship or drop anchor.
|
| You can prove people are not bored with the concept as new
| gamers still start playing fallout new Vegas or skyrim today
| despite them being old and janky.
| alexpotato wrote:
| This is why Sid Meier's Pirates [0] remains such a great
| game.
|
| It was really a combination of mini-games:
|
| - you got steer a ship (or fleet of ships) around the
| Caribbean
|
| - ship to ship combat
|
| - fencing
|
| - dancing (with the Governors' daughters)
|
| - trading (from port to port or with captured goods0
|
| - side quests
|
| Each time I played it with my oldest, it felt like a brand
| new game.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier%27s_Pirates!
| dannersy wrote:
| I think my point stands. Procedural generation is a tool
| that usually works best when it is supplementary. What
| makes New Vegas an amazing game is all the hand built
| narratives and intricate storylines. So yeah, I agree,
| Starfield is boring because of the story. But if the
| procedural vastness was interesting enough to not be
| boring, then we wouldn't be talking about this to begin
| with.
| pojzon wrote:
| Im inclined to say that if Bathesta used LLMs for story
| based on known best seller books - it would be better
| than the garbage created by so called "modern script
| writers".
|
| The same could be said about Hollywood movies and series.
|
| When agenda is more important than fun, books, movies,
| games are not labour of love but neglet.
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| > Starfield in all its grandeur is pretty boring.
|
| And yet "No Mans Sky" is massively popular.
|
| > ny software engineer worth their salt knows intimately that
| more immediate results is usually at the expense of long term
| sustainability.
|
| And any software engineer worth their salt realizes there are
| 100s if not 1000s of problems to be solved and trying to
| paint a broad picture of development is naive. You have only
| seen 1% (at best) of the current software development field
| and yet you're confidently saying that a tool that is being
| used by a large part of it isn't _actually_ useful. You 'd
| have to have a massive ego to be able to categorically tell
| thousands of other people that what they're doing is both
| wrong and not useful and that they things they are seeing
| aren't actually true.
| dannersy wrote:
| No Man's Sky got better as they were more intentional with
| their content. The game has more substance and a lot of
| that had to be added by hand. It is dropped in procedurally
| but they had to touch it up, manually, to make it
| interesting. Let's not revise history.
|
| I don't think it has anything to do with ego. There are
| studies on the topic of AI and productivity and I assume we
| have a way to go before we can say anything concretely.
| Software workflows permeate the industry you're in. You're
| putting words in my mouth, I said nothing about what people
| are doing is wrong or not useful. I said the claim that
| generative AI is making engineers more productive is an
| unfounded one. What code you shit out isn't where the work
| starts or ends. Using expedient solutions and having to
| face potentially more work in the future isn't even
| something that is a claim about software, I can make that
| claim about life.
|
| You need to evaluate what you read rather than putting your
| own twist on what I've said.
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| You said:
|
| > LLMs saving engineers and developers time is an
| unfounded claim
|
| By whom exactly? If I say it saves me time, and another
| developer says the same, and so on, than it is
| categorically not unfounded. In fact, it's the opposite.
|
| You've completely missed the point if you don't
| understand how telling other people that their own
| experience in such a large field is "unfounded" simply
| because it doesn't line up with your experience.
|
| > we have a way to go before we can say anything
| concretely
|
| No YOU do. It's quite apparent to me how it can save time
| in the myriad of things I need to perform as a software
| developer (and have been doing).
| Zarathruster wrote:
| Yeah I mean, I think procgen is cool tech, but there's a
| reason we don't talk about Daggerfall the same way we talk
| about Morrowind
| dannersy wrote:
| Agreed.
| Nursie wrote:
| > Spore is well acclaimed.
|
| Spore was fun (IMHO) but at the time of release was considered
| a disappointment compared to its hype.
| bartread wrote:
| > Classic procedural generation is noteworthy here as a
| precedent, which gamers were already familiar with, because by
| and large it has failed to deliver.
|
| Yes, this is a wildly uneducated perspective.
|
| Procedural generation has often been a key component of some
| incredibly successful, and even iconic games going back
| decades. Elite is a canonical example here, with its galaxies
| being procedurally generated. Powermonger, from Bulldog,
| likewise used fractal generation for its maps.
|
| More recently, the prevalence of procedurally generated rogue-
| likes and Metroidvanias is another point against. Granted,
| people have got a bit bored of these now, but that's because
| there were so many of them, not because they were unsuccessful
| or "failed to deliver".
| bombcar wrote:
| Procedural generation underlies the most popular game of all
| time (Minecraft) and is foundational for numerous other games
| of a similar type - Dwarf Fortress, et al.
|
| And it's used to power effect where you might not expect it
| (Stardew Valley mines).
|
| What procedural generation does NOT work at is generating
| "story elements" though perhaps even that can fall, Dwarf
| Fortress already does decently enough given that the player
| will fill in the blanks.
| optionalsquid wrote:
| > And it's used to power effect where you might not expect
| it (Stardew Valley mines).
|
| Apparently Stardew Valley's mines are not procedurally
| generated, but rather hand-crafted. Per their recent 10
| year anniversary video, the developer did try to implement
| procedural generation for the mines, but ended up scrapping
| it:
|
| https://www.stardewvalley.net/stardew-valley-10-year-
| anniver...
| bombcar wrote:
| They're quasi-generated with random elements and fixed
| elements - similarly to early Diablo procedural
| generation.
| xerox13ster wrote:
| That's not the same procedural generation as GPT or
| diffusion and you know it.
|
| It's not even in the same ballpark as Elite, NMS,
| terraria, or Minecraft.
|
| The levels are all hand drawn, not generated by an
| algorithm, even if they're shuffled. Eric Barone, the
| developer, has publicly said as much. Are you calling him
| a liar?
|
| It's like the difference between sudoku/crossword and
| conways game of life
| morissette wrote:
| And here I thought the most popular game of all time was
| Soccer or Super Mario Bros 3
| 6510 wrote:
| Quality is the same thing as popularity. That is why
| mcdonalds has 12 Michelin stars.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think they meant videogame, ruling out soccer.
|
| It looks like the Super Mario Bros series has a good
| showing, but it is the first one. I bet 3 falls into an
| unlucky valley where the game-playing population was not
| quite as large as it is now, but it isn't early enough to
| get the extreme nostalgia of the first one.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-
| selling_video_gam...
|
| Of course this assumes sales=popularity, but the latter
| is too hard to measure.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| Is it wildly uneducated to not know any of the games you
| mentioned? I didn't realize education covered less known
| video games? Wouldn't a better example be No Man's Sky, if
| we're talking procedural gen and eventually a good game.
|
| In any case, I agree that gamers by and large don't care to
| what extent the game creation was automated. They are happy
| to use automated enemies, automated allies, automated armies
| and pre-made cut scenes. Why would they stop short at
| automated code gen? I genuinely think 90% wouldn't mind if
| humans are still in the loop but the product overall is
| better.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > Is it wildly uneducated to not know any of the games you
| mentioned? I didn't realize education covered less known
| video games?
|
| Yes. It is "wildly uneducated" to have, and express, strong
| opinions about ANY field of endeavour where you are
| unfamiliar with large parts of that field.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Large? That's your opinion
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Of course it is.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Then it is "wildly uneducated" to have, and express,
| strong opinions about ANY field of endeavour where you
| cannot substantiate your claims.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Honest question: are you enjoying this? I looked at your
| comment history and you don't seem like a troll. What is
| going on right now?
| mikkupikku wrote:
| If you haven't heard of the modern roguelike genre you've
| probably been living under a rock, it seems like every
| other game these days at least calls itself such. Usually
| the resemblance to Rogue is so remote that it strains the
| meaning of the term, but procedural generation of levels
| is almost universal in this loosely defined genre.
|
| Elite is a bit more obscure, but really anybody who aims
| to be familiar with the history of games should recognize
| the name at least. Metroidvania isn't a game, but is a
| combination of the names of Metroid and Castlevania and
| you absolutely should know about both of those.
|
| Powermonger is new to me.
|
| And while the comment in question didn't mention it,
| others have: Minecraft. If you're not familiar with
| Minecraft you must be Rip Van Winkle. This should be the
| foremost game that comes to mind when anybody talks about
| procedural generation.
| nikitau wrote:
| Roguelike/lites are is of the most popular genres of indie
| games nowadays. One of it's main characteristics is
| randomization and procedural generation.
| tanjtanjtanj wrote:
| While there are many Roguelikes with procedural generation,
| I think the most popular ones do not. Slay the Spire, Risk
| of Rain 2, Hades 1/2, BoE etc are all handmade stages with
| a random order with randomized player powers rather than
| procedurally generated.
| banannaise wrote:
| I've seen a couple roguelike developers report that they
| played around with procedural generation, but it was
| difficult to prevent it from creating dungeons that were
| bad, unfun, or just straight-up killscreens. Turns out
| it's often easier to simply hand-draw good maps than to
| get the machine to generate okay-to-good ones.
|
| Procedural generation is good when variety matters more
| than quality, which is a relatively rare occurrence.
| htek wrote:
| That says more about the developer than procedural
| generation as a whole. Using procedural generation IS
| difficult, it requires understanding how to set up
| constraints on your p-random generated elements and
| ensuring the code validates that you have a "good"
| level/puzzle/whatever before dumping the PC into it.
| techpression wrote:
| I'm a hard core rogue-like player (easily over a thousand
| hours at least in all the games I've played) but even so I
| can admit that hey have nothing compared to a well crafted
| world like you'd find in From Software titles or Expedition
| 33, or classic Zelda games for that matter. Making a great
| world is an incredibly hard task though and few studios have
| the capabilities to do so.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It's a different type of thing, really. I like rogue-likes
| because they are a... pretty basic... story about my
| character, rather than a perfectly crafted story about
| somebody else's.
|
| Even when I play a game like Expedition 33 or Elden Ring,
| my brain (for whatever reason) makes a solid split between
| the cutscene versions of the characters and the gameplay
| version. I mean, in some games the gameplay characters is a
| wandering murderer, while the cutscene characters have all
| sorts of moral compunctions about killing the big-bad. They
| are clearly different dudes.
| angry_octet wrote:
| Rogue-like games use the most simple randomisation to
| generate the next room, and I burnt hundreds of hours in
| Mines of Moria before I forced myself to quit.
|
| Now with an LLM I could have AD&D-like campaigns,
| photorealistic renders of my character and the NPCs. I
| could give it the text of an AD&D campaign as a DM and have
| it generate walking and talking NOCs.
|
| The art of those great fantasy artists is definitely being
| stolen in generated images, and application of VLMs should
| require payment into some sort of art funding pool. But
| modern artists could well profit by being the intermediary
| between user and VLM, crafting prompts, both visual and
| textual, to give a consistent look and feel to a game.
|
| The essay author is smoking crack.
| tadfisher wrote:
| Artists want to create. They do not want to tweak prompts
| and click "Generate" repeatedly until the output matches
| their vision. I would find this maddening.
|
| But this wouldn't make sense anyway. Game companies won't
| foot the bill for real-time renders of your character,
| let alone a world of generated NPCs. If/when costs are
| low enough, and players accept a recurring subscription
| to play games, then this could happen, sure. No way in
| hell will artists be available in real-time to keep the
| generated imagery consistent.
| dkersten wrote:
| Almost every 3D game in the past 20 years uses procedural
| foliage generation (eg SpeedTree and similar). Many use
| procedural terrain painting. Many use tools like Houdini.
|
| So procedural generation is extremely prevalent in most AAA
| games and has been for a long time.
| larodi wrote:
| > No one cares about how the code is written.
|
| I would overstate:
|
| No one even cares how architecture is done. Unless you are the
| one fixing it or maintaining it.
|
| Sorry, no one. We all know Apple did some great stuff with
| their code, but we care more about the awful work done on the
| UI, right? I mean - the UI seems to not be breaking in these
| new OSs which is amazing feature... for a game perhaps, and
| most likely the code is top notch. But we care about other
| things.
|
| This is the reality, and the blind notion that so-many people
| care about code is super untrue. Perhaps someone putting money
| on developers care, but we have so many examples already of
| money put on implementation no matter what the code is. We can
| see everywhere funds thrown at obnoxious implementations, and
| particularly in large enterprises, that are only sustained by
| the weird ecosystem of white-collar jobs that sustains this
| impression.
|
| Very few people care about the code in total, and this can be
| observed very easy, perhaps it can be proved no other way
| around is possible.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| This is overstating it. Computers are amazing machines, and
| modern operating systems are also amazing. But even they
| cannot completely mask the downstream effects of poor quality
| code.
|
| You say you don't care, but I bet you do when you're dealing
| with a problem caused by poor code quality or bad choices
| made by the developer.
| miningape wrote:
| Yep willing to bet that the majority of people saying
| "users don't care how well the code is written" will crash
| out when some software they're using is slow and buggy,
| even more extremely if it glitches and deletes their work.
|
| Just like how most people don't care how well a bridge is
| designed... until it collapses.
| larodi wrote:
| yes, they will hit the TV or through the remote, or bang
| the mouse, or the box. I mean - if you tell me this is
| 'care', no... this is outrage, and it would probably not
| even be focused to one particular component.
|
| and for what is worth - the reason of failure may not be
| because of particular nut, but the combination of them
| all.
|
| the whole idea that most software is done in good faith
| is just plainly wrong, and most of the software we rely
| on a daily basis - all the enterprise bullshit - is very
| very very often not done in good faith, but rather just
| made, seamed, helped into some weird equilibrium of
| temporary performance.
|
| perhaps hardware is done right more than software ever
| is.
| BloondAndDoom wrote:
| One the topic procedural generation; rogue likes are all about
| it and new generation Diablo like games have definitely similar
| things, well respected new games like Blue Prince. There has
| never been such as successful period of time for procedural
| generation in games like now, and all of these are pre-AI. AI
| powered procedural generation is wet dream of rogue-like lovers
| hiddevb wrote:
| I don't think I agree with this take.
|
| I love procedural generation, and there is definitely a craft
| to it. Creating a process that generates a playable level or
| world is just very interesting to explore as an emergent
| system. I don't think LLMs will make these system more
| interesting by default. Of course there are still things to
| explore in this new space.
|
| It's similar to generative/plotter art compared to a
| midjourney piece of slop. The craft that goes into creating
| the code for the plotter is what makes it interesting.
| 1899-12-30 wrote:
| The key to non-disruptive LLM integration is using it in a
| purely additive way, supplementing a feature with
| functionality that couldn't be done before rather than
| replacing an existing part. Like adding ai generated images
| to accompany the dwarf fortress artifact descriptions. It
| could completely togglable and doesn't disrupt any existing
| mechanics, but would provide value to those that don't mind
| the slop.
| mathgradthrow wrote:
| localization? Why would you oppose LLMs doing localization?
| fhd2 wrote:
| I guess the chain of reasoning would be: AI for art is bad ->
| Writing is art -> Translation is writing.
|
| Personally, I do appreciate good localisation, Nintendo
| usually does a pretty impressive job there. I play games in
| their original language as long as I actually speak that
| language, so I don't have too many touch points with
| translations though.
| JadeNB wrote:
| In case they hallucinate? There's no point having content in
| a wide variety of languages if it's unpredictably different
| from the original-language content.
| teamonkey wrote:
| It's bad at it. At least, it can't be guaranteed to get
| nuance or context correct in a way that doesn't feel
| artificial to a fluent speaker.
|
| My favourite example I saw was where Google translated an
| information page of the Italian branch of a large
| multinational as "this is the UK branch of [multinational]",
| presumably because the LLM thought that was more contextually
| appropriate in English.
| larsiusprime wrote:
| Also RE: procgen, one of the hit games right now, Mewgenics, is
| doing super well and uses it extensively. Obviously it's old
| school procgen that makes use of tons of authored content, but
| it's still procgen.
| SirMaster wrote:
| >No one cares about how the code is written.
|
| People definitely do care. Nobody wants vibe-coded buggy slop
| code for their game.
|
| They want well designed and optimized code that runs the game
| smoothly on reasonable hardware and without a bunch of bugs.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| Your second paragraph does not follow, at all, from the
| first. These are completely orthogonal demands.
|
| The gaming industry is absolutely overwhelmed with
| outrageously inefficient, garbage, crash-prone code. It has
| become the norm, and it has absolutely nothing to do with AI.
|
| Like https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-
| times.... That something so outrageously trash made it to a
| hundreds-of-million dollar game, cursing millions to 10+
| minute waits, should shame everyone involved. It's actually
| completely normal in that industry. Trash code, thoughtless
| and lazily implemented, is the norm.
|
| Most game studios would likely hugely improve their game, har
| har, if they leveraged AI a lot _more_.
| roesel wrote:
| No one wants _buggy slop code_ for their game, but ultimately
| no one cares whether is has been hand crafted or vibe-coded.
|
| As proof, ask yourself which of the following two options you
| would prefer:
|
| 1. buggy code that was hand-written 2. optimized code that
| was vibe-coded
|
| I'll bet most people will choose 2.
| SirMaster wrote:
| I've never seen something as complex as a video game vibe
| coded that was actually well optimized. Especially when the
| person doing the prompting is not a software developer.
|
| So I personally do care and I am someone, so the answer is
| not no one.
| NeutralCrane wrote:
| Vibe coding as we know it has only been a thing for the
| last 12-18 months. So by definition the vibe-coded games
| you have seen are the ones being rushed.
| amiga386 wrote:
| > Players only object against AI art assets. And only when
| they're painfully obvious.
|
| Restaurant-goers only object against you spitting in their food
| if it's painfully obvious (i.e. they see you do it, or they
| taste it)
|
| Players are buying _your_ art. They are valuing it based on how
| you say you made it. They came down _hard_ on asset-flipping
| shovelware before the rise of AI (where someone else made the
| art and you just shoved it together... and the combination didn
| 't add up to much) and they come down hard on AI slop today,
| especially if you don't disclose it and you get caught.
| riversflow wrote:
| > They came down hard on asset-flipping shovelware before the
| rise of AI
|
| That's not what I remember, I remember PUBG being a viral hit
| that extensively used asset flipping.
| amiga386 wrote:
| The more nuanced take is that, if somehow your game is
| actually good or interesting _despite_ being full of other
| people 's assets, players will see the value that _you_
| created (e.g. making a fun game). This is missing in most
| "asset-flip" games.
|
| Another example comes from _Getting Over It with Bennett
| Foddy_ , which despite the fact it uses a lot of pre-bought
| art assets, the entire game has the indisputable hallmark
| of Bennett Foddy -- it has a ridiculously tricky control
| mechanism, and the whole game world you play in, should you
| make any mistakes, has a strong likelyhood of dropping you
| right back at the start, and it's all your own fault for
| not being able to recover from your mistakes under
| pressure. You can see this theme in his other games like
| _QWOP_ and _Baby Steps_
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| _No, it 's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art
| assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares
| about how the code is written._
|
| This reminded me of a conversation about AI I had with an
| artist last year. She was furious and cursing and saying how
| awful it is for stealing from artists, but then admitted she
| uses it for writing descriptions and marketing posts to sell
| her art.
| raincole wrote:
| Sinix even explicitly says that AI is an IP theft machine but
| it's okay to use AI to generate 360 rotation video to market
| your 2D works[0].
|
| To summarize this era we live in: my AI usage is justified
| but all the other people are generating slop.
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8fFM6kjZUk
|
| [1]: Disclaimer: I deeply respect Sinix as an art educator.
| If it weren't him I wouldn't have learnt digital painting.
| But it's still quite a weird take of him.
| Lord-Jobo wrote:
| Which I would point out isn't necessarily hypocrisy on their
| part.
|
| I can rage against guns and gun manufacturers for their
| negative effects on our nation and hate when they are used
| for monstrous evil, but also believe that police should have
| firearms and that the second amendment is important. It's a
| tool. You can hate the way it's made and marketed, and hate
| many of its popular use cases, and still think there are
| acceptable ways to use and market it without requiring a
| total abolition.
| Aushin wrote:
| I mean, the police probably shouldn't have firearms and the
| second amendment is one of the worst legal creations in
| human history.
| WarmWash wrote:
| Everyone is in it for themselves.
|
| The world makes waay more sense when you really internalize
| that. It doesn't necessarily mean people are selfish, large
| groups often have aligned interests, but when an individuals
| interest alignment changes, then their group membership
| almost always changes too.
|
| I'd bet she has a bunch of pirated content and anti-copyright
| remarks from the golden age of piracy as well.
| tovej wrote:
| That's not true. Most people are interested in fostering a
| community, even when it means sacrifice.
|
| There _have_ however been studies that show that this
| attitude is prevalent in (neoclassical) economics students
| and others who are exposed to (neoclassical) economic
| thinking: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs
| /pii/S22148...
|
| It's very effective propaganda. And we have a good example
| of it here. (Mot saying you're spreading it maliciously,
| but you are spreading it).
| Throaway1985123 wrote:
| People are in it for themselves...when it comes to
| participating in our capitalist economic system. The 2nd
| part is often left unsaid.
| WarmWash wrote:
| Humans overwhelming group themselves with groups that
| provide themselves with the best value prop. When the
| individuals circumstances change, which causes the value
| prop of the group to change, people overwhelming move to
| a new group. It's not a capitalist or socialist thing.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| If she's a practicing artist, she almost certainly cut her
| teeth doing tracing at some point. And if a digital artist,
| she almost certainly used a cracked copy of a tool.
|
| The big eye-opener for me in college was taking a class
| that put me up-close with artists and learning that there
| were, in the whole class, a grand total of two students who
| hadn't started doing 3D modeling on a cracked copy of Maya
| (and the two, if memory serves, learned on Blender).
| hamdingers wrote:
| At least to some extent, the anti-ai folks don't care about ai
| assisted programming because they see programmers as the
| "techbro" boogieman pushing ai into their lives, not fellow
| creatives who are also at a crossroads.
| Izkata wrote:
| > Spore is well acclaimed.
|
| Its creature creator was, but as a game it was always mediocre
| to bad. They had to drop something like 90% of the features and
| extremely dumb down the stages to get it released.
|
| It was also what introduced a lot of us to SecuROM DRM - it
| bricked my laptop in the middle of a semester.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| Games with ai art assets are some of the most popular right now
| in any case. Arc raiders being a great example where some of
| the voice assets are AI generated.
|
| Be careful of reading any viewpoint on the internet. Apparently
| no one used facebook or instagram and everyone boycotts
| anything with ai in it.
|
| In reality i think you'd be foolish not to make use of the
| tools available. Arc Raiders did the right thing by completely
| ignoring those sorts of comments. There may be a market for
| 100% organic video games but there's also a market for
| mainstream 'uses every ai tool available' type of games.
| Throaway1985123 wrote:
| Spore was not well-acclaimed precisely because it failed to
| live up to its promises as a world-builder. Only the 1st two
| stages were any good.
| pojzon wrote:
| 3/4 pf all code written now is auto-complete. Code was never
| the hard part.
| GaryBluto wrote:
| I think it says a lot about this opinion piece that the people
| agreeing with it are posting short comments saying "So true!" and
| "Great!" whilst the people criticizing it are writing paragraphs
| of well-spoken criticism.
| Underphil wrote:
| Hardly surprising. Counterpoints are obviously going to be more
| detailed.
| richardjam73 wrote:
| Verbosity doesn't equate to correctness.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Sigh. Another one standing on the train tracks giving the
| approaching train a good scolding. First this article tries to
| equate AI-generated code with "forgery". Please, tell me how you
| "forge math". Next, it makes a little dig at senior engineers who
| use LLMs, because they must not realize that "every line of code
| is a liability". No no, senior engineers realize this, but they
| are also adept at observing successes and failures and coming up
| with a mental model for risk. That's part of keeping an
| application running, otherwise we'd all still be using jQuery and
| leftPad. We made the jump to react because we recognized that
| these NEW lines of code were far more valuable than their
| "liability". Somehow the author decided to store "liability" in a
| boolean. Oh, was AI involved, or is that a genuine human error..?
| Next the article makes a tired appeal to the fact that LLMs are
| trained on open-source code and are therefore "plagiarizing" this
| code constantly. This is where the train comes around the
| mountain. So when the AI generates Carmack's Reverse, is it
| plagiarizing Carmack or the book that he got the idea from? In
| what percentages? And what do I do with this valuable insight?
| Send Carmack $0.01 in an envelope for the privilege? In short, I
| don't know what the author wants, but I hope writing this helped.
| hwers wrote:
| Its unfortunate that there's mode collapse around what the
| consensus "best way" to use these things are. It's too bad we
| didn't have a period where these things were great teachers but
| didn't attempt to write code because in my opinion the ideal way
| to use them is not by agents mass producing sloppy buggy
| disorganized code, but to teach you things way faster than the
| old alternatives, rubber duck, and occasionally write snippets of
| functions when your brain is too tired or it's throwaway cli code
| or some api you're not familiar with.
| utopiah wrote:
| > to teach you things way faster than the old alternatives
|
| I'm not sure if you ever had a teacher or instructor that you
| didn't trust, because they were a compulsive liar or addiction
| or any other issue. I didn't (as least not that I can remember)
| but I know I would be VERY on guard about it. I imagine I would
| consequently be quite stressed learning with them, even if they
| were brilliant, kind, etc.
|
| It would feel a bit like walking on thin ice to get to a
| beautiful island. Sure, it's not infeasible and if you somehow
| make it, it might be worth the risk, but honestly wouldn't you
| prefer a slower boat?
| hwers wrote:
| I agree, it can be incredibly frustrating at times. My rule
| is that if it "compiles" in my brain as an understood idea
| then i accept it. I also push back a lot (sometimes it points
| out good errors in my thinking, sometimes it admits it
| hallucinated). Real humans hallucinate a lot as well or
| confidently state subtly wrong ideas, it's a good habit
| anyway. It's basically the same approach when presented with
| a "formula" for something in school. If i dont know how to
| derive/prove it then i dont accept it as part of my memorized
| or accepted toolkit/things i use (and try to forget it). If
| it fits with the rest of my network of understood ideas i do.
| It's annoying but still more time efficient than trawling
| through lecture slides with domain specific language etc
| utopiah wrote:
| > Real humans hallucinate a lot as well or confidently
| state subtly wrong ideas, it's a good habit anyway.
|
| I think that's actually deeply different. If a human keeps
| on apologizing because they are being caught in a lie, or
| just a mistake, you distrust them a LOT more. It's not
| normal to shrug off a problem then REPEAT it.
|
| I imagine the cost of a mistake is exponential, not linear.
| So when somebody says "oops, you got me there!" I don't
| mistrust them just marginally more, I distrust them a LOT
| more and it will take a ton of effort, if even feasible, to
| get back to the initial level of trust.
|
| I do not think it's at all equivalent to what "Real humans"
| do. Yes, we do mistake, but the humans you trust and want
| to partner with are precisely the one who are accountable
| when they make mistakes.
| qsera wrote:
| >Real humans hallucinate..
|
| You seem to have a different understanding of what it means
| in the context of neural networks.
|
| Real humans will not make up non existent api and implement
| a solution with it, (unless they do it on purpose).
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| > My rule is that if it "compiles" in my brain as an
| understood idea then i accept it.
|
| Unfortunately, individual people are not anywhere as
| reliable as a compiler for ensuring compliance to reality.
| We are particularly susceptible to flattery and other
| emotional manipulation, which LLMs frequently employ. This
| becomes particularly problematic when you ask for feedback
| on an idea.
|
| In that case, a useful hack is to frame prompts as if
| you're an impartial observer and want help evaluating
| something, not as if the idea under evaluation is your own.
| endymion-light wrote:
| I feel like this is partially a skill issue - You can get
| direct, cited information from LLMs. There's a level of
| personal responsibility for over-using the tools and letting
| them feed you bad/false information, but if you try
| researching specific abstractions, newer documentation, most
| LLMS now correctly call and research the tools available,
| directly citing them.
|
| I think you can build a very easy workflow that reinforces
| rather than replaces learning, I've used a citation flow to
| link and put into practice a ton of more advanced programming
| techniques, that I found incredibly difficult to locate and
| research before AI.
|
| I'd say the comparison is faulty, it's more akin to swimming
| to an island (no-ai) vs using a boat. You control the speed
| and direction of the boat, which also means you have the
| responsbility of directing it to the correct location.
| utopiah wrote:
| The analogy was about the unknown thinnest of the ice, not
| just the fastest way to get there. It's specifically about
| the lack of reliability of the process.
| endymion-light wrote:
| Yes, I was disagreeing with the premise of the analogy -
| what would the slow boat in this case be? As my
| experience, going through software engineering before AI,
| is that you'd get lost to the ice, with nobody to really
| help you get out.
| utopiah wrote:
| If you get lost on the ice and you have someone who
| confidently tells you the path but is sometimes wrong, is
| it actually helpful?
|
| PS: sorry if the analogy is a bit wonky but it's quite
| dear to me as I do ice skating on frozen lakes and it's
| basically a life or death information "game" that I can
| relate to. It might not be a great analogy for others.
| endymion-light wrote:
| Haha it's a good analogy, i'm being a little bit
| argumentative for the sake of it potentially.
|
| I guess in my view - the main alternative you'd have
| beforehand is just to drown.
|
| For me, AI sits in a space where if you know how to use
| it, it can tell you all the thin spots of the ice
| accurately. You can then verify those spots, but there's
| a level of personal responsibility of verification.
|
| I'd agree there's currently a ton of people that are
| using these tools to essentially just find the specific
| route - but i'd argue those people probably shouldn't be
| skating in the first place, and would've fallen one way
| or the other.
| Jensson wrote:
| > I guess in my view - the main alternative you'd have
| beforehand is just to drown.
|
| Before most who didn't know the ice didn't went out on
| it, today a lot of people who shouldn't be there go far
| out on the ice.
| endymion-light wrote:
| Totally true - althuogh I feel like that's been the case
| since the first coding bootcamps
| utopiah wrote:
| > AI sits in a space where if you know how to use it, it
| can tell you all the thin spots of the ice accurately.
| You can then verify those spots, but there's a level of
| personal responsibility of verification.
|
| Right, but AFAICT most people just venture over the ice
| and don't bother to check. In fact a lot of people
| venture there, do check once or twice, then check less
| and less frequently. The fact that you do it is great but
| others seem a lot less careful, until cracks start to
| show and then it might be too late.
| endymion-light wrote:
| Very true - I won't dispute it!
|
| I'd only argue that people were doing this before AI,
| slop development was just copy pasting from the first
| stack overflow issue that matched the question rather
| than thinking
|
| So i'd argue there's a part of it that is just personal
| responsibility with how these tools are used
| raincole wrote:
| > It's too bad we didn't have a period where these things were
| great teachers but didn't attempt to write code
|
| The period is now. Just add "be a great teacher but don't
| attempt to write code" in the prompt.
|
| (yes, it's a teacher who gets things wrong from time to time.
| You still need to refer to the source and ground truth just
| like when you're taught by a human teacher.)
| f311a wrote:
| No, expectations have shifted. In a lot of companies,
| managers expect you to use LLMs to produce more features
| faster.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > _Open source software maintainers have been one of the first to
| feel the downsides. ... The last thing they needed was to receive
| slop-coded pull requests from contributors merely looking to
| cheat their way into having a credible GitHub resume... As a
| result, projects have closed down public contributions and
| dropped their bug bounties..._
|
| Has this really been people's experience?
|
| I develop and maintain several small FOSS projects, some of which
| are moderately popular (e.g. 90,000-user Thunderbird extension; a
| library with 850 stars on GitHub). So, I'm no superstar or in the
| center of attention but also not a tumbleweed. I've not received
| a single AI-slop pull request, so far.
|
| Am I an exception to the rule? Or is this something that only
| happens for very "fashionable" projects?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Pretend Intelligence (PI) -- Design Note & Tribute
|
| A short design note and tribute to Richard Stallman (RMS) and St.
| IGNUcius for the term Pretend Intelligence (PI) and the ethic
| behind it: don't overclaim, don't over-trust, and don't let
| marketing launder accountability.
|
| https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/PRETEN...
|
| 1. What PI Is
|
| Richard Stallman proposes the term Pretend Intelligence (PI) for
| what the industry calls "AI": systems that pretend to be
| intelligent and are marketed as worthy of trust. He uses it to
| push back on hype that asks people to trust these systems with
| their lives and control.
|
| From his January 2026 talk at Georgia Tech (YouTube, event,
| LibreTech Collective):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDxPJs1EPS4
|
| > "So I've come up with the term Pretend Intelligence. We could
| call it PI. And if we start saying this more often, we might help
| overcome this marketing hype campaign that wants people to trust
| those systems, and trust their lives and all their activities to
| the control of those systems and the big companies that develop
| and control them." -- Richard Stallman, Georgia Tech, 2026-01-23.
| Source: YouTube (full talk) -- "Dr. Richard Stallman @ Georgia
| Tech - 01-23-2026," Alex Jenkins, CC BY-ND 4.0; transcript in
| video description.
|
| So PI is both a label (call it PI, not AI) and a stance: resist
| the campaign to make people trust and hand over control to
| systems and vendors that don't deserve that trust. In MOOLLM we
| use the same framing: we find models useful when we don't
| overclaim -- advisory guidance, not a guarantee (see MOOAM.md
| SS5.3).
|
| [...]
|
| Richard Stallman critiques AI, connected cars, smartphones, and
| DRM (slashdot.org) 42 points by MilnerRoute 38 days ago | hide |
| past | favorite | 10 comments
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46757411
|
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/01/25/1930244/richard-sta...
|
| Gnu: Words to Avoid: Artificial Intelligence:
|
| https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Artificia...
|
| ...currently not responding... archive.org link:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20260303004610/https://www.gnu.o...
| doodaddy wrote:
| There's a cold reality that we in this profession have yet to
| accept: nobody cares about our code. Nobody cares whether it's
| pretty or clever or elegant. Sometimes, rarely, they care whether
| it's maintainable.
|
| We are only craftsmen to ourselves and each other. To anyone else
| we are factory workers producing widgets to sell. Once we accept
| this then there is little surprise that the factory owners want
| us using a tool that makes production faster, cheaper. I imagine
| that watchmakers were similarly dismayed when the automatic lathe
| was invented and they saw their craft being automated into
| mediocrity. Like watchmakers we can still produce crafted
| machines of elegance for the customers who want them. But most
| customers are just going to want a quartz.
| thendrill wrote:
| Exactly....
|
| I will just copy paste my comment from another thread but still
| very relevant>
|
| Coding isn't creative, it isn't sexy, and almost nobody outside
| this bubble cares
|
| Most of the world doesn't care about "good code." They care
| about "does it work, is it fast enough, is it cheap enough, and
| can we ship it before the competitor does?"
|
| Beautiful architecture, perfect tests, elegant abstractions --
| those things feel deeply rewarding to the person who wrote
| them, but they're invisible to users, to executives, and, let's
| be honest, to the dating market.
|
| Being able to refactor a monolith into pristine microservices
| will not make you more attractive on a date. What might is the
| salary that comes with the title "Senior Engineer at FAANG." In
| that sense, many women (not all, but enough) relate to
| programmers the same way middle managers and VCs do: they're
| perfectly happy to extract the economic value you produce while
| remaining indifferent to the craft itself. The code isn't the
| turn-on; the direct deposit is.
|
| That's brutal to hear if you've spent years telling yourself
| that your intellectual passion is inherently admirable or sexy.
| It's not. Outside our tribe it's just a means to an end -- same
| as accounting, law, or plumbing, just with worse dress code and
| better catering.
|
| So when AI starts eating the parts of the job we insisted were
| "creative" and "irreplaceable," the threat feels existential
| because the last remaining moat -- the romantic story we told
| ourselves about why this profession is special -- collapses.
| Turns out the scarcity was mostly the paycheck, not the poetry.
|
| I'm not saying the work is meaningless or that system design
| and taste don't matter. I'm saying we should stop pretending
| the act of writing software is inherently sexier or more
| artistically noble than any other high-paying skilled trade. It
| never was.
| cure_42 wrote:
| This is just sad. If your passion for creating something you
| can be proud of is entirely propped up by imaginary sex
| appeal that not even most teenagers would believe exists,
| it's no surprise you'd arrive at such a cynical, pathetic
| conclusion.
|
| Your perspective is a path with only one logical end. That
| nothing you do or think or believe matters unless someone
| you're attracted to finds it attractive.
|
| That is not how I or most others live. We take pride in and
| derive satisfaction from our accomplishments without the need
| for external validation.
|
| Yeah, only I care whether the solution I found to a problem
| today was elegant, or whether my kitchen was pristine and
| well organized after I prepped for next week's lunches, but
| so what? I care and it injects more than enough meaning into
| my life to be worth it.
| thendrill wrote:
| Yeh cool story. But being passionate about a hobby is not
| gonna pay my bills...
|
| When I charge a customer for a solution they don't care
| about how elegant my code is. They just care if it works
| for solving their problem...
| qsera wrote:
| >does it work, is it fast enough..
|
| Isn't the problem right now the vibe coded sotware does not
| appear to meet these requirements?
| firmretention wrote:
| You didn't write this post. Your LLM did. Are you proud of
| yourself for copy and pasting "thoughts" that aren't yours?
| Nursie wrote:
| I accepted this years ago. In fact I go a step further - code
| is a liability.
|
| It's certainly intellectually stimulating to create it, but
| I've learned to take joy in discarding vast swathes of it when
| it's no longer required.
| cmiles74 wrote:
| I think it varies. Most enterprise software is good enough if
| it just works. In the consumer space quality and polish is way
| more important. Then there are things like modeling and video
| where performance is a much bigger deal.
|
| Sure, no one really cares about the code but the quality of the
| code matters more for some products (and in different ways)
| than others.
| not_the_fda wrote:
| They don't care until the whole thing collapses in on itself
| from the technical debt. Then they have surprised pikachu face
| when it takes an insane about of effort to add a simple
| feature.
| jjice wrote:
| I agree, but nothing about LLM assisted coding is by
| neccessity "technical debt". Tons of developers will use it
| to spit out shitty code they don't even review themselves,
| but the concept at it's core doesn't always mean a lower
| quality end product.
|
| I like Simon Willison's take on this: "Your job is to deliver
| code you have proven to work". If someone is spitting out LLM
| trash and shipping it, that means the job isn't being done
| properly. That can be done with and without an LLM.
|
| https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/code-proven-to-work/
| noemit wrote:
| Many people don't know this, but the Luddites were right. I
| studied Art History and this particular movement. One of the
| claims of the Luddites is that quality would go down, because
| their craft took half a lifetime to master (it was passed down
| from parent to chile.)
|
| I was able to feel wool scarves made in europe from the middle
| ages. (In museum storage, under the guidance of a curator) They
| are a fundamentally different product than what is produced in
| woolen mills. A handmade (in the old traditiona) woolen scarf can
| be pulled through a ring, because it is so thin and fine. Not so
| for a modern mill-made scarf.
|
| Another interesting thing is that we do not know how they made
| them so fine. The technique was never recorded or documented in
| detail, as it was passed down from parent to child. So the
| knowledge is actually lost forever.
|
| Weavers in Kashmir work a similar level of quality, but their
| wool is different, their needs and techniques are different, so
| while we still have craftsman that can produce wool by hand, most
| of the traditions and techniques are lost.
|
| Is it a tragedy? I go back and forth. Obviously the heritage
| fabrics are phenomenal and luxurious. Part of me wishes that the
| tradition could have been maintained through a luxury sector.
|
| Automation is never a 1:1 improvement. It's not just about the
| speed or process. The process itself changes the product. I don't
| know where we will net out on software, and I do think the
| complaints are justified - but the Luddites were also justified.
| They were *Right*. Their whole argument was that the mills could
| not product fabric of the same quality. But being right is not
| enough.
|
| I'm already seeing vibe-coded internal tools at an org I consult
| at saving employees hundreds of hours a month, because a non-
| technical person was empowered to build their own solution. It
| was a mess, and I stepped in to help optimize it, but I only
| optimized it partially, making it faster. I let it be the
| spaghetti mess it was for the most part - why? because it was
| making an impact already. The product was succeeding. And it was
| a fundamentally different product than what internal tools were
| 10 years ago.
| stanko wrote:
| I think you are going to enjoy this talk by Jonathan Blow -
| Preventing the Collapse of Civilization:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
| sph wrote:
| I've had this talk in mind during the past 2/3 years of AI
| boom, and it feels like rewatching a video from the 80s about
| the dangers of global warming. Prescient, and perhaps a bit
| quaint in its optimism that somehow we won't make things even
| worse for ourselves.
|
| Now we're way past the point of no return.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > One of the claims of the Luddites is that quality would go
| down, because their craft took half a lifetime to master (it
| was passed down from parent to chile.)
|
| Sounds like a tautology. If you deliberately hoard knowledge of
| course it's going to be hard to obtain.
| ulbu wrote:
| closed source
| recursive wrote:
| You talking about the billion dollar model training efforts
| done in secret?
| hermannj314 wrote:
| only code anyone will be touching in a museum in 800 years will
| be the good code. I hope they don't talk about what great
| craftsmen we all were because someone saw an original Fabrice
| Bellard at the Louvre.
|
| Survivor bias plays a role in glorifying the past.
| salad-tycoon wrote:
| Agreed, I think the good gained by wool mills is greater in
| that little Timmy is less likely to lose a leg to frostbite
| than the bad loss of my scarf not passing through a ring.
|
| Long term though, I've always wondered if the Amish turn out
| to be the only survivors.
| kevstev wrote:
| I am kind of lost here on this whole scarf through a ring
| thing as well. This is just a function of the thickness of
| the scarf? My wife went through a scarf phase about a
| decade ago, and I am pretty sure a Pucci scarf could easily
| fit through a typical sized ring meant to go on a finger?
|
| Its entirely possible that old manufacturing methods
| produced things that are different, but I would be entirely
| surprised if they are entirely _better_ overall. If the
| defining metric for scarves is how well they fit through
| rings, I am sure they would all be made so you could fit 3
| through a ring if people were willing to pony up for that.
| If you look at a lot of old clothes, they are generally a
| lot heavier, but I am not sure I would really want to wear
| them, they look quite uncomfortable. I also think its
| wonderful that today you can get a set of clothes for a few
| hours of minimum wage work while in the past this was a
| major investment. You can also choose to pay thousands for
| a shirt if you wish, but from 10 feet away its going to be
| hard to tell the difference.
| noemit wrote:
| A full size wool scarf cannot go thorough a ring. You are
| probably thinking of a silk scarf. I have a wool scarf
| next to me from Kashmir and it went down about 25 cm. The
| full scarf is a bit over a meter.
|
| Looked up Pucci - looks like a designer that makes silk
| scarves. Silk is a totally different material. The
| Luddites were wool and cotton weavers.
|
| Making wool thin enough for a meter long scarf to go
| thorough a ring requires the individual strand of wool to
| be very thin. Both making it thin and weaving that thin
| strand is the craft that was lost. Go look at wool yarn
| next time you are at a store and see how thin they can
| get it.
|
| As for "Are they better?" Yes. Thinner wool is
| incredible, soft. High quality merino wool is one of the
| most expensive fabrics. Look up this brand "Made in Rosia
| Montana" if you are curious. It's not like what the
| Luddites made, but its as good as it gets in the modern
| world. Getting stuff from the Kashmir region is difficult
| - I got mine because I knew someone who ran a school in
| the area. Most "Cashmere" stuff in department stores is
| fake/chemically processed for fake softness which makes
| it nice but it doesn't last. Real quality wool lasts a
| lifetime. The chemically processed stuff is ok if you
| want to see how it "feels"
|
| EDIT: also, wool is naturally waterproof! I can walk in
| the rain with my scarf from kashmir on my head, its
| pretty thin but absolutely no water goes through even in
| heavy rain. it has to do with the springiness of the
| fibers and its natural oils. I will stop nerding out on
| fibers now!!
| kevstev wrote:
| Appreciate the clarification. I guess its a case of I
| don't know what I don't know, but the choice of metric
| around quality was just an odd one. And yeah I assumed
| silk because I can't imagine a wool scarf going through a
| ring.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| oh man wait until you find out what happened to little
| timmy in the textile mills...
| noemit wrote:
| You're right in that we kept the best examples (as coding
| museums will do in the future) but the best of something is a
| benchmark. It is striking that modern automation, even
| hundreds of years later, can't touch what a skilled craftsman
| could do in the past.
|
| With programming, we documented a lot of it, so it's unlikely
| to go the way of fine weaving. People will always be able to
| learn to think and be great programmers.
|
| Maybe if the wool weavers had internet, they could have
| blogged, made youtube videos, and cataloged their profession
| so it could last Millenia.
| spicyusername wrote:
| luddites were right
|
| And yet in the 200 years since human civilization has improved
| by every imaginable metric, in most cases by orders of
| magnitude. The difference between 2026 and 1826 is nearly
| incomprehensible. I suspect most people scarcely imagine how
| horrific the average life was in 1826, relatively speaking. And
| between then and now were the industrial revolution, multiple
| world wars, and generally some of the most terrible events,
| crooked politicians, and life changing technological forces.
| And here we are, mostly fine in most places.
|
| I get there are many things happening today that are
| frustrating or moving some element of human life in negative or
| ambiguous directions, but we really have to keep perspective on
| these things.
|
| Nearly every problem today is a problem with a solution.
|
| The feelings of panic we have that things are going wrong are
| useful signals to help guide and motivate us to implement those
| solutions, but we really must avoid letting the doomerism
| dominate. Just because we hear constant negative news doesn't
| mean things are lost. Doesn't even mean things are bad.
|
| It just means we have been hearing a lot of negative news.
|
| This is what it looks like for progress to not be monotonically
| increasing.
| boesboes wrote:
| try reading :)
| lopis wrote:
| If progress had been limited to solving people's problems, we
| would be fine.
|
| > The feelings of panic > It just means we have been hearing
| a lot of negative news.
|
| This is part of the problem at hand, not just a footnote.
| forinti wrote:
| Your comment made me think of the Japanese. They have a highly
| industrialised society, but they also value greatly hand-made
| products from food and clothes to woodwork and houses.
|
| And they also like to emphasise how long it takes for someone
| to become a master at a given trade.
| aosnsbbz wrote:
| It was really eye opening seeing they're able to eat raw eggs
| and (to maybe a lesser degree of safety) raw chicken because
| their society requires high standards of cleanliness in food
| production. We are literal cattle over here in the states.
|
| Though, given Amodei and Altman's behavior (along with the
| rest of the billionaire class) that shouldn't be a surprise
| to anyone.
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| Eggs in the UK are safe to eat raw (and I presume the EU as
| well [but please verify before doing so!]).
| Ekaros wrote:
| Finland too. Fundamentally it is putting food safety over
| profits. Eggs being salmonella free is based on regular
| testing and culling infected flocks. It is a process that
| need constant work.
| raincole wrote:
| Germans even eat raw pork. Plus it has nothing to do with
| the parent comment.
| Aurornis wrote:
| You could eat raw eggs in most modern countries and be
| mostly fine. It's not as uncommon as you would think. There
| are many drink recipes with raw eggs as an ingredient. You
| just happened to be exposed to it in Japan.
|
| Eating raw chicken is risky even in Japan. There are
| cultures that eat raw chicken, pork, and other meat
| products by choice but it's always a risk. There are
| outbreaks of serious food borne illness in Japan from raw
| chicken: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18406474/
| layer8 wrote:
| Japan is struggling to get new blood into the traditional
| crafts, unfortunately. They are slowly losing that as well.
| imiric wrote:
| You're right. Automation often trades quality for speed and
| quantity.
|
| The difference between automating the creation of software and
| automating the creation of physical products is that software
| is _everywhere_. It is relied on for most tools and processes
| that keep our civilization alive. Cutting corners on that
| front, and deciding to entrust our collective future to tech
| bros and VC firms fiending for their next payout, seems like an
| incredibly dumb and risky proposition.
| whazor wrote:
| I found that it normally takes one prompt early-on to go from
| 'vibe-coded spaghetti' to something having a decent
| architecture.
| noemit wrote:
| I cap my effort at 2-3 prompts. One to investigate obvious
| mistakes with a top model, 1-2 to try to fix them.
| aosnsbbz wrote:
| A big difference is cutting quality for the sake of mass
| production when it enables creating more necessities for people
| to live is a good thing. It is a good tradeoff. Cutting quality
| to make previously deterministic software more non
| deterministic does not improve anyones life except Sam Altman,
| Dario Amodei and the rest of the billionaire class.
|
| I have no doubt in the future there will be a class of vibe
| software and it will be known as distinctly lower quality than
| human understood software. I do think the example you describe
| is a good use of vibing. I also think tech orgs mandating 100%
| LLM code generation are short sighted and stupid.
|
| A lot of this push for "slop" is downstream of our K shaped
| economy. Give the people more money and quality becomes a lot
| more important. Give them less, and you're selling to their
| boss who is often insulated from the effects of low quality.
| adeelk93 wrote:
| Was software authorship ever deterministic? Whether it be
| human or AI, the output can vary wildly, and is constrained
| by the finite specifications provided.
| aosnsbbz wrote:
| Sure, technically nothing is. Adding AI reduces the level
| of determinism is my primary point.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Agreed. Those expensive silk scarves are worth exactly zilch
| to the average person if they'll never see one in their
| entire life. They might as well not exist.
|
| Mass production makes things accesible, and if the handmade
| product cannot compete relative to it, then it's clearly not
| that much better or some people would still pay that premium
| to keep it around.
|
| With programming that's very much the case, nobody's gonna
| vibe code a self driving car stack or a production grade
| DBMS. Even the cheapest scarf still works as a scarf in 99.9%
| of use cases though, if maybe not for as long.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| Before mass production, the women of the household would be
| forced to spend every free moment of their day, outside of
| their other work, making fabric.
|
| Before mechanised farming, the men were forced to spend all day
| in the fields.
|
| Never again.
| vips7L wrote:
| And yet many of us would prefer to be in a field instead of
| behind a laptop screen all day.
| nayroclade wrote:
| There's a big difference between _being_ in a field versus
| _working_ in a field, from dawn to dusk, every day,
| regardless of the weather or sickness, in order to produce
| just enough food to feed you and your family, knowing that
| a single failed harvest (due to conditions like weather and
| pests that you have no control over) will leave you
| starving, watching helplessly as your children, spouse,
| friends and neighbours slowly weaken and die, knowing that
| even if you survive, you will face the same thing again the
| next year, and the next, for the rest of your lives, which
| will likely be short, due to the constant, exhausting
| labour, frequent bouts of malnutrition, and nonexistent
| medical care.
| mritterhoff wrote:
| No one is stopping you, and maybe it's worth trying out!
| moffkalast wrote:
| Have you ever tried it? I did, and sure as hell wouldn't.
|
| Nobody's really stopping you from studying agriculture and
| working in that proverbial field either.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| This is just unrealistic day dreaming. You can go be in a
| field picking produce for work - we have a shortage of
| these laborers. Most people don't actually want to do that,
| they want a cushy office job that doesn't wear down their
| body and that offers them the ability to increase their
| skill and value over time.
|
| The software engineer who thinks they'd be happier working
| in a field is largely just a grass is always greener
| phenomenon. It turns out that for most people, they don't
| like work whatever it is, because work is done not by
| choice but by necessity.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| >the Luddites were right
|
| The Luddites were right in the sense that the social order had
| changed in a negative way. In a careless way.
|
| In the same way that we look at America now that has
| effectively put a plutocracy in absolute control of the
| country, at the same time that there is going to be a massive
| devaluing of labour. Elon Musk likes to talk about the coming
| golden age of automation, but I hope Americans realize that
| unless they happen to be a billionaire, they will enjoy zero
| fruits of that advance. Quite contrary, plump yourself up to be
| Soylent Green because _it turns out_ that giving a bunch of
| psychopaths /sociopaths absolute control of government isn't
| good for the average person.
|
| >One of the claims of the Luddites is that quality would go
| down
|
| Then people will choose the better quality items and it will be
| easy for them to compete? Right?
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Another interesting thing is that we do not know how they
| made them so fine. The technique was never recorded or
| documented in detail, as it was passed down from parent to
| child. So the knowledge is actually lost forever.
|
| This is a rather extreme failure on their part. There's nothing
| admirable about hoarding knowledge and forcing it to only be
| passed down in person.
|
| I don't see this as the Luddites being right at all because
| they were clearly incredibly wrong about their chosen method of
| knowledge storage. This was a highly predictable and
| preventable outcome. If we were talking about a company today
| that forgot how to manage their servers because they refused to
| document anything and only passed it down from person to person
| we wouldn't be speaking in awe and wonder, we'd be rightly
| criticizing their terrible decision making.
|
| That aside, every time I hear that knowledge has been lost
| forever it turns out to be an exaggeration from those trying to
| amplify the mystique of the past. If we wanted to make ultra-
| thin scarves we could do it. We could study those ultra thin
| museum pieces with our endless array of modern tools and then
| use our vast quantities of modern wool to experiment until we
| got something similar.
|
| But you missed the reason why we wouldn't want to: An ultra-
| thin scarf isn't going to work as well as a thicker one for
| keeping someone warm. It will be less durable. It would be a
| fundamentally inferior product. It's interesting to see as a
| museum antique that has to be treated with utmost delicacy, but
| not so much as a practical garment.
| aszen wrote:
| If you buy real handcrafted scarves they are both thinner and
| warmer than anything factory made bcz of their choice of
| pashmina wool.
| jamesjolliffe wrote:
| I love this comment. Thank you for your provocative first
| sentence, esoteric historical anecdote, and nuanced take.
| Goddamn Hacker News rules.
| angry_octet wrote:
| A set of clothing used to cost a month's wages. Yearning for
| the pre-industrialised era is an unintended pean to
| aristocracy, whitewashed by fiction and movies to be clean and
| virtuous.
|
| At the moment, a single line of production code costs hundreds
| of dollars. I'm not talking about the bedrock of technology,
| like compilers, mysql, the Linux kernel, which represent
| hundreds of billions of value. I'm talking about the shitty
| code that powers Salesforce and ERP integration, Drupal
| modules, intranet customisation, insurance company call centre
| agent policy workflows, the thrice cursed apps that ship with
| cheap Chinese android phones, the putrid code to analyse our
| shopping loyalty card purchases and turn it into business
| insights.
|
| All that code is shit, and it costs a fortune. Meanwhile
| regular people have no code. Even I run my life on almost no
| code, I have to use SaaS (like Gmail and Docs). If I want
| something like a financial analysis to be understood by my
| family I don't code it in python, I use Excel. I use whatever
| automation comes in my car. But once simple code becomes a
| process of _thinking about what you want_ rather than knowing
| esoterica like calling conventions, allocation lifetimes etc,
| then we have made custom software accessible to billions of
| people, people who are clever and industrious.
|
| So stay in your cathedral and illuminate your manuscript if you
| like, there is a need for excellent code, and tooling like Lean
| that can define what correct means, but let the people eat.
| oxag3n wrote:
| Software engineers are anything but Luddites.
|
| This labeling tactic became pretty common and tries to build a
| narrative that software engineers are going away. Artisan
| coders, craftsmen,
|
| First and foremost, wool craftsmen are not engineers (which
| doesn't make their work less valuable).
|
| Second, most software engineers, especially not in FAANG-like
| companies, don't engineer a shit. My spouse worked at a large
| telecom company in US and employees with "software engineer"
| title were doing mechanical tasks following some scripts, like
| daily system reload - run the script, verify status, open a
| ticket for a sub-contractor if anything is wrong, support the
| contractor via the ticket system until it's resolved. To be
| fair, two of my close family members work in FAANG and say
| COVID over-hire created a similar landscape there too.
|
| My point is, creating CRUD internal tools was not an
| engineering to begin with, it was a craft, matching most
| craftsmen features such as small-scale, bespoke work, hands-on
| practice, tacit knowledge, apprenticeship-like learning (even
| if it's SO or tutorial), iterative refinement, tool mastery,
| adaptation during build.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| > Engineers who know their craft can still smell the slop from
| miles away when reviewing it, despite the "advances" made. It
| comes in the form of overly repetitive code, unnecessary
| complexity, and a reluctance to really refactor anything at all,
| even when it's clearly stale and overdue.
|
| I've seen reluctance to refactor even 10+-year-old garbage long
| before LLMs were first made available to the broader public.
| reedlaw wrote:
| LLM-generated snippets of code are a breath of fresh air
| compared with much legacy code. Since models learn probability
| distributions they gravitate to the most common ways of doing
| things. Almost like having a linter built in. On the other
| hand, legacy code often does things in novel ways that leave
| you scratching your head--the premise behind sites like
| https://thedailywtf.com/
| lesam wrote:
| If it's lasted 10 years and someone is still using it after all
| that time, that seems like a pretty good signal there's a lot
| of value in the 'garbage'?
|
| I've seen a lot of 'fixes' for 10 year old 'garbage' that
| turned out to be regressions for important use cases that the
| author of the 'fix' wasn't aware of.
| liampulles wrote:
| I see a future where I program at work less, which is sad but
| c'est la vie. I think the challenge of the job will be heralding
| and managing my own context for larger codebases managed by
| smaller teams, and finding ways to allow for more
| experimental/less verified code in prod. And plenty of consulting
| work for companies which have vibe coded their business and who
| are left with a totally fucked data model (if not codebase).
|
| A Private (system) Investigator. :)
| nathias wrote:
| I'm selling hand-crafted template code if anoyne is interested.
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| I am bit tired of such discussions.
|
| I don't care if LLMs are good at coding or bad at it (in my
| experience the answer is "it depends"). I don't care how good are
| they at anything else. What matters in the end is that this tech
| is not to empower a common person (although it could). It is not
| here to make our lives better, more worthwhile, more satisfying
| (it could do these as well). It is there to reduce our agency, to
| make it easier to fire us, to put us in even more precarious
| position, to suck even more wealth from those that have little to
| those that have a lot.
|
| Yet what I see are pigs discussing the usefulness of bacon-making
| machine just because it also happens to be able to produce tasty
| soybean feed. They forget that it is not soybean feed that their
| owner bought this machine for, and that their owner expects a
| return from such investment.
| simmerup wrote:
| I guess you didn't read the article?
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| Keep guessing
| spacecadet wrote:
| Demand full automation. Demand universal basic income. Notice
| how the later is nearly absent from the conversation.
|
| Another distraction is AGI that which is a danger to humanity-
| the only danger is people...
| pixl97 wrote:
| > the only danger is people...
|
| Simply put, no it is not.
|
| But on the reverse, the first danger with AI _is_ people.
|
| Over the longer term it will look like this. The rich 'win'
| the world by using AI to enslave the rest of mankind and
| claim ownership over everything. This will suck and a lot of
| us will die.
|
| The problem is this doesn't solve the greed that cause the
| problem in the first place. The world will still be limited
| in a resources of something which will end with the rich in a
| dick measuring contest and to win that contest they will put
| more and more power in AI and they connive and fight each
| other. Eventually the AI has enough power that it kills us
| all, intentionally or not.
|
| We'll achieve nearly unlimited capability long before we
| solve the problem of unlimited greed and that will spell our
| end.
| spacecadet wrote:
| This is entirely assumptions about a future that has not
| happened.
|
| Ive worked in "AI" for 20 years, through 2 winters, and run
| an alignment shop and AIRT... The problem is people. People
| will use the problem as a scapegoat.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Dinosaurs lived 100 million years, before they didn't.
|
| And walls between France and Germany were effective,
| until they weren't.
|
| Hell, even the 'people' is the problem doesn't work well
| for things like Moloch problems. Which people? The
| problem can no longer be pointed at any individual but a
| super-organizational response. Once you have an issue
| that is abstracted from it's base components, then any
| agent capable of parsing the abstraction can be part of
| influencing it and becoming part of Moloch.
| spacecadet wrote:
| Im familiar. Our group employs game theory in our
| research... In practice, if you are at the point of
| blame- yes you have failed.
| wepple wrote:
| > It is there to reduce our agency, to make it easier to fire
| us, to put us in even more precarious position
|
| Could be. It could also end up freeing us from every commercial
| dependency we have. Write your own OS, your own mail app,
| design your own machinery to farm with.
|
| It's here, so I don't know where you're going with "I'm unhappy
| this is happening and someone should do something"
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| > It could also end up freeing us from every commercial
| dependency we have
|
| Yeah, companies that develop and push this tech definitely
| have this in mind.
|
| > I don't know where you're going with "I'm unhappy this is
| happening and someone should do something
|
| I am not surprised because I didn't write anything like it.
| margalabargala wrote:
| > > I don't know where you're going with "I'm unhappy this
| is happening and someone should do something
|
| > I am not surprised because I didn't write anything like
| it.
|
| You're right, there was no "someone should do something"
| call to action in your original comment.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| It's also worth nothing that the "our" in that sentence is
| just SWEs, who are a pretty small group in the grand scheme
| of things. I recognize that's a lot of HN, but still bears
| considering in terms of the broader impact outside of that
| group.
|
| I'm a small business owner, and AI has drastically increased
| my agency. I can do so much more - I've built so many
| internal tools and automated so many processes that allow me
| to spend my time on things I care about (both within the
| business but also spending time with my kids).
|
| It is, fortunately, and unfortunately, the nature of a lot of
| technology to disempower some people while making lives
| better for others. The internet disempowered librarians.
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| > It's also worth nothing that the "our" in that sentence
| is just SWEs
|
| It isn't, it just a matter of seeing ahead of the curve.
| Delegating stuff to AI and agents by necessity leads to
| atrophy of skills that are being delegated. Using AI to
| write code leads to reduced capability to write code (among
| people). Using AI for decision-making reduces capability
| for making decisions. Using AI for math reduces capability
| for doing math. Using AI to formulate opinions reduces
| capability to formulate opinions. Using AI to write
| summaries reduces capability to summarize. And so on. And,
| by nature, less capability means less agency.
|
| _Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the
| hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted
| other men with machines to enslave them_
|
| Not to mention utilizing AI for control, spying,
| invigilation and coercion. Do I need to explain how
| _control_ is opposed to _agency_?
| idopmstuff wrote:
| I'll grant that it does extend beyond SWEs, but whether
| AI atrophies skills is entirely up to the user.
|
| I used to use a bookkeeper, but I got Claude a QuickBooks
| API key and have had it doing my books since then. I give
| it the same inputs and it generates all the various
| journal entries, etc. that I need. The difference between
| using it and my bookkeeper is I can ask it all kinds of
| questions about why it's doing things and how bookkeeping
| conventions work. It's much better at explaining than my
| bookkeeper and also doesn't charge me by the hour to
| answer. I've learned more about bookkeeping in the past
| month than in my entire life prior - very much the
| opposite of skill atrophy.
|
| Claude does a bunch of low-skill tasks in my business,
| like copying numbers from reports into different systems
| into a centralized Google Sheet. My muscle memory at
| running reports and pulling out the info I want has
| certainly atrophied, but who cares? It was a skill I used
| because I needed the outcome, not because the skill was
| useful.
|
| You say that using AI reduces all these skills as though
| that's an unavoidable outcome over which people have no
| control, but it's not. You can mindlessly hand tasks off
| to AI, or you can engage with it as an expert and learn
| something. In many cases the former is fine. Before AI
| ever existed, you saw the same thing as people progressed
| in their careers. The investment banking analyst gets
| promoted a few times and suddenly her skill at making
| slide decks has atrophied, because she's delegating that
| to analysts. That's a desirable outcome, not a tragedy.
|
| Less capability doesn't necessarily mean less agency. If
| you choose to delegate a task you don't want to do so you
| can focus on other things, then you are becoming less
| capable at that skill precisely because you are
| exercising agency.
|
| Now in fairness I get that I am very lucky in that I have
| full control of when and how I use AI, while others are
| going to be forced to use it in order to keep up with
| peers. But that's the way technology has always been -
| people who decided they didn't want to move from a
| typewriter to a word processor couldn't keep up and got
| left behind. The world changes, and we're forced to adapt
| to it. You can't go back, but within the current
| technological paradigm there remains plenty of agency to
| be had.
| LetsGetTechnicl wrote:
| It could also end up freeing us from every commercial
| dependency we have. Write your own OS, your own mail app,
| design your own machinery to farm with.
|
| Lmfao LLM's can barely count rows in a spreadsheet
| accurately, this is just batshit crazy.
|
| edit: also the solution here isn't that every one writes
| their own software (based on open source code available on
| the internet no doubt) we just use that open source software,
| and people learn to code and improve it themselves instead of
| off-loading it to a machine
| margalabargala wrote:
| This is one of those things where people who don't know how
| to use tools think they're bad, like people who would write
| whole sentences into search engines in the 90s.
|
| LLMs are bad at counting the number of rows in a
| spreadsheet. LLMs are _great_ at "write a Python script
| that counts the number of rows in this spreadsheet".
| teolandon wrote:
| Do you think asking any LLM in the next 100 years to
| "write a Python script that generates an OS" will work?
| antonyh wrote:
| Yes, for some definition of OS. It could build a DOS-like
| or other TUI, or a list of installed apps that you pick
| from. Devices are built on specifications, so that's all
| possible. System API it could define and refine as it
| goes. General utilities like file management are
| basically a list of objects with actions attached. And so
| on... the more that is rigidly specified, the better it
| will do.
|
| It'll fail miserably at making it human-friendly though,
| and attempt to pilfer existing popular designs. If it
| builds a GUI, it's be a horrible mashup of Windows
| 7/8/10/11, various versions of OSX / MacOS, iOS, and
| Android. It won't 'get' the difference between desktop,
| laptop, mobile, or tablet. It might apply HIG rules, but
| that would end up with a clone at best.
|
| In short, it would most likely make something technically
| passable but nightmareish to use.
| margalabargala wrote:
| Given 100 years though? 100 years ago we barely had
| vacuum tubes and airplanes.
|
| Given a century the only unreasonable part is oneshotting
| with no details, context, or follow up questions. If you
| tell Linus Torvalds "write a python script that generates
| and OS", his response won't be the script, it'll be "who
| are you and how did you get into my house".
| margalabargala wrote:
| Considering how simple "an OS" can be, yes, and in the
| 2020s.
|
| If you're expecting OSX, AI will certainly be able to
| make that and better "in the next 100 years". Though
| perhaps not oneshotting off something as vague as "make
| an OS" without followup questions about target
| architecture and desired features.
| wepple wrote:
| Batshit crazy?
|
| 3 years ago LLMs couldn't solve 7x8.
|
| Now they're building complex applications in one shot,
| solving previously unsolved math and science problems.
|
| Heck, one company built a (prototype but functional) _web
| browser_
|
| And you say it's crazy that in the future it'll be able to
| build a mail app or OS?
| ModernMech wrote:
| What happens when they decide it's a national security threat
| and an act of domestic terrorism to use AI to undermine
| commercial dependencies? We're all acting like AI isn't being
| invented within the context of and used by a fascist regime.
| phyzix5761 wrote:
| At some point, if most people lose their jobs, you have no
| market to sell your services to. So, either, new jobs have to
| be created in order to keep the capitalism machine running, or
| you have to provide for the needs of every human being from
| whatever you're doing with your AI. Otherwise, a lot of hungry
| people revolt and you have violence against these businesses.
|
| I think new jobs will be created because AI is always limited
| by hardware and its current capabilities. Businesses, in order
| to compete, want to do things their competitors aren't
| currently doing. Those business needs always go beyond the
| current technological capabilities until the tech catches up
| and then they lather, rinse, repeat.
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| > Otherwise, a lot of hungry people revolt and you have
| violence against these businesses.
|
| With shrinking and aging population?
| nerdyadventurer wrote:
| Economy is going to collapse with the war anyways.
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ql24Z8SIeE&t=247s)
| slibhb wrote:
| > What matters in the end is that this tech is not to empower a
| common person (although it could).
|
| How do you figure? 20 dollars/month is insanely cheap for what
| OpenAI/Anthropic/Google offer. That absolutely qualifies as
| "empowering a common person". It lowers barriers!
|
| A lot of the anti-AI sentiment on HN concerns people losing
| their jobs. I don't think this will happen: programmers who
| know what they're doing are going to be way, way more effective
| at using AIs to generate code than others.
|
| But even if it is true and we do see job losses in tech: are
| software devs really "in a precarious position"? Do they really
| qualify as "those that have little"? Seems like a fantasy to
| me. Computer programmers have done great over the past 30
| years.
|
| More broadly, anti-AI sentiment comes from people who dislike
| change. It's hard to argue someone out of that position. You're
| allowed to prefer stasis. But the world moves on and I think
| it's best to remain optimistic, keep an open mind, and make the
| most of it.
| vips7L wrote:
| > I don't think this will happen
|
| Block just laid off 40% of their company citing AI.
| CPLX wrote:
| > Block just laid off 40% of their company
|
| Because the company was being horribly run and over hired
| and "pivoted to blockchain" for no fucking reason.
|
| > citing AI.
|
| Because it's 2026 and they thought that would work to
| bullshit a few people about point one, which apparently it
| did.
| slibhb wrote:
| Tech companies have been laying off employees for a while
| now. I think it's mostly due to pandemic overhiring and
| higher interest rates but I suppose we'll see.
| vips7L wrote:
| I agree that AI was not the _actual_ reason, however, it
| did allow them to do massive layoffs without admitting
| they are doing poorly and not taking a massive hit to
| their stock price.
| miyoji wrote:
| > I think it's mostly due to pandemic overhiring and
| higher interest rates
|
| It's not because of pandemic overhiring, and if that were
| true, the layoffs in 2021-2022 would have handled it.
| It's 2026. The people getting laid off (on average)
| haven't worked at these companies since before the
| pandemic, they got hired in ~2023 (average tenure at a
| tech company is ~3 years).
|
| It's not because of AI either. Nobody is replacing jobs
| with AI, AI can't do anyone's job.
|
| It's not because of interest rates. People hired like
| crazy when interest rates were this high in the oughts.
|
| It's because Elon Musk's Twitter purchase and subsequent
| management convinced every executive in tech that you can
| cut to the bone, fuck your product's quality completely,
| and be totally fine. It's not true, but the downsides
| come later and the cash influx comes now, so they're
| doing it anyway.
| glitch13 wrote:
| > It's because Elon Musk's Twitter purchase and
| subsequent management convinced every executive in tech
| that you can cut to the bone, fuck your product's quality
| completely, and be totally fine.
|
| I agreed with you up to this point. Twitter largely
| operated in the red for its entire existence prior to his
| "restructuring" to make it leaner and profitable. In my
| opinion, twitter went to shit when the incentive for
| creating engagement switched from gaining social capital
| to gaining... erm... actual capital. The laissez-faire
| attitude about allowing fairly terrible behavior on there
| gave it a PR black eye that probably didn't help either
| in the eyes of advertisers.
|
| If I had to guess what happened with Block (and that's
| what we're all doing, guessing): a CEO's job is to make
| the line go up, and saying you introduced tools to
| increase productivity with half the staff (especially if
| you're overstaffed) seems to me a pretty easy way to do
| that. I saw someone on here refer to it as "Vibe CEOing",
| which I think is pretty on point. Again, just my
| opinion/guess.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| It's also, for example, the studies finding that when
| companies adopt AI employees' jobs get worse. More
| multitasking, more overtime, more burnout, more skills you're
| expected to learn (on your own time if necessary), more
| interpersonal conflict among colleagues. And this is _not_
| being offset by anything tangible like an increase in pay.
|
| $20/month in return for measurable reductions in quality of
| life is not an amazing deal. It's "Heads I win, tails you
| lose."
|
| Or maybe, if you're thinking of it as an enabler for a side
| hustle or some other project with a low probability of a high
| payoff, it can slightly more optimistically be regarded as a
| moderately expensive lottery ticket.
|
| That's not pessimism; it's just a realistic understanding of
| how the tech industry actually works, informed by decades'
| worth of experience.
| slibhb wrote:
| > It's also, for example, the studies finding that when
| companies adopt AI employees' jobs get worse. More
| multitasking, more overtime, more burnout, more skills
| you're expected to learn (on your own time if necessary),
| more interpersonal conflict among colleagues. And this is
| not being offset by anything tangible like an increase in
| pay.
|
| Can you share those studies? I'm pretty skeptical of this
| effect. I find that AI has made my job easier and less
| stressful.
|
| In general, I think your atittude is not realistic, it's
| just general pessimism about the world ("everything new is
| bad") that is basically unfounded.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-
| intensifies...
| henryaj wrote:
| Paywalled, and HBR articles are famously not a good
| source
| tptacek wrote:
| This argument can be used, and has been used, about every
| innovation in automation since the dawn of the industrial
| revolution.
| ducttapecrown wrote:
| It is not the technology that sucks ever more money out of
| the populace, it's the people at the top!
| Gagarin1917 wrote:
| >It is there to reduce our agency
|
| Complete bullshit.
|
| The individual has never had as much ability to take on large
| projects as they do now. They've never been able to learn as
| easily as they can now.
|
| >to make it easier to fire us
|
| As of now, the technology increases productivity in the average
| user. The companies that take advantage of that and expand
| their offering will outperform the ones that simply replace
| workers and don't expand or improve offerings.
|
| More capable employees make companies more money in general.
| Productivity increases lead to richer societies and yes, even
| more jobs, just as it always has.
| visarga wrote:
| > It is there to reduce our agency, to make it easier to fire
| us, to put us in even more precarious position, to suck even
| more wealth from those that have little to those that have a
| lot.
|
| You could say this is the story of society, it makes us
| dependent on each other, reduces our agency, puts us in
| precarious positions (like WW2). But nobody would argue against
| society like that.
|
| What happens here is that we become empowered by AI and gain
| some advantages which we immediately use and become dependent
| on, eventually not being able to function without them - like
| computers and even thermostats.
|
| Does anyone think how would economy operate without
| thermostats? No fridges, no data centers, no engines... they
| all need thermostats. We have lost some freedom by depending on
| them. But also gained.
| spacecadet wrote:
| The authors logic only works for software engineers and as I have
| said time and time again- software engineers have been automating
| people out of their passions for decades and now it has come for
| yours... The lying here is LYING TO YOURSELVES.
| dostick wrote:
| It seems like with time hallucinations and lying increased, it's
| very different now from what it was 2 years ago. is this because
| of training bias ? Is there any research data on dynamics over
| past years ?
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| The framing of an LLM's response as truth vs lie is in itself
| incorrect.
|
| In order to lie, one needs to understand what truth and objective
| reality are.
|
| Even with people, when a flat-earther tells you the earth is
| flat, they're not lying, they're just wrong.
|
| All LLM output is speculation. All speculation, by definition,
| has some probability of being incorrect.
|
| ---
|
| We can go even deeper in a philosophical sense. If I made the
| audacious claim that 2 +2 = 4, I may think it's true, but I'm
| still speculating that the objective reality I experience is the
| same one others also experience, and that my senses and mental
| faculties, and therefore the qualia making up my reality, are
| indeed intact, correct, and functional. So is there a degree of
| speculation when I made that claim?
|
| Regardless, I am able to agree upon a shared reality with the
| rest of the world, and I also share a common understanding of
| truth and untruth. If I lied, it can only be caused by an
| intention to mislead others. For example, if I claimed to be the
| president of the united states, of course that would be incorrect
| (thankfully!), but since we all agree that no one reading this
| post would actually be mislead into thinking I am the POTUS, then
| it isn't a lie. Perhaps sarcasm, a failed attempt at humor, or
| just trolling. it is untruth, but it isn't a lie, no one was
| mislead. You need intent (LLM isn't capable of one), and that
| intent needs to be at least in part, an intent to mislead.
| wnevets wrote:
| > Even with people, when a flat-earther tells you the earth is
| flat, they're not lying, they're just wrong.
|
| Atleast some of them know they're wrong and are thus lying.
| topaz0 wrote:
| They're not saying the LLM is lying; they're saying the human
| user is lying by using the counterfeit as though it were the
| genuine artifact.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| I dunno if counterfeit is the right word here, a lab grown
| diamond is still a diamond.
| vips7L wrote:
| I'm not sure you're viewing this correctly. No one is
| claiming a counterfeit painting is not a painting. It's
| just not a Rembrandt.
| Extasia785 wrote:
| I don't agree with many statements in the article. It almost
| seems like an article from about a year ago, despite it being
| posted yesterday. Not sure if the author had the idea a long time
| ago and just took his time to finish it up, but the "vibe-coding"
| he describes surely isn't the current way of using LLMs in a
| codebase.
|
| While LLMs are surely used to generate a lot of slop-code and
| overwhelm (open source) code bases, this surely isn't the _only_
| thing they can do. I dislike discussing the potential of a
| technology exclusively by looking at its negative impact.
|
| LLMs in proper hands don't create code which is "stolen", they
| also shouldn't create unnecessary code and definitely don't
| remove any of the ownership of the programmer, at least not any
| more than using a mighty IDE does.
|
| The problem seems to be in the usage of LLMs. These effects
| definitely do happen when just releasing an agent on a codebase
| without any oversight. But they can also largely be mitigated by
| using frameworks such as Openspec or Spec-Kit, properly designing
| a spec, plan, granular tasks and manually reviewing all code
| yourself. The LLM should not be responsible for any creative
| idea, it should at most verify the practicality against the
| codebase. When doing that, the entire creative control is in the
| hands of the programmer and so is the mechanical execution. The
| LLM is reduced to a very powerful autocomplete with a strict
| harness around it. Obviously this also doesn't lead to 10x or
| even 100x improvements in speed like some AI merchants promise,
| but in my personal experience the speedup is still significant
| enough to make LLMs a very, very useful technology.
| butILoveLife wrote:
| lol at OP.
|
| This has upvotes?
|
| Anyway, as I train people in LLMs/AI. I unapologetically will say
| "DONT LISTEN TO IT, IT LIES!" and send commands like "Try again,
| try harder"
| cess11 wrote:
| What weirds me out is that it seems few US corporations care that
| they don't have copyright to their synthesised code, if the
| rumours regarding this are correct.
|
| If you don't have the copyright, then you can't license or
| litigate it under the common rules of software. If someone
| 'steals' it you can at best go after them with some trade secret
| case, and I suspect this would be limited if you had already
| shared the code with them, e.g. because they helped you
| synthesise it.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Sorry to say this feels like cope from someone who is a talented
| developer in more niche areas finally seeing AI start to solve
| problems in those areas.
| incomingpain wrote:
| I find these criticisms to be similar to those low context brain
| teasers.
|
| If a woman gets married at 25 and her kid is 25, how old is she?
|
| This is what LLMs are dealing with. You dont tell them everything
| they need to know and they are left to fill in the gaps. Which
| may, and sometimes often means they lie.
|
| That's what Agentic does differently, it'll go find the gaps
| before answering.
|
| Agentic is AGI. You can hire many minimum wage workers who are
| generally intelligent who dont even go to that level.
| gabrieledarrigo wrote:
| > You can hire many minimum wage workers who are generally
| intelligent who dont even go to that level.
|
| That's pretty rude to say, at minimum.
| simonw wrote:
| Wait for the header animation to run and then hit the "play"
| button on the about page, it's _very_ cool:
| https://acko.net/about
|
| (Worked in Firefox on macOS, doesn't seem to work in Mobile
| Safari)
| fwlr wrote:
| Wow, you weren't kidding. I spent some time seeing if I could
| spot where the transition from page to video was hidden, until
| I realized.
| aeon_ai wrote:
| This is such a comically bad take.
|
| The use of loaded and pejorative language like "forgery"
| emphasizes that this is not a logical argument, but a moral one.
| The repeated comparisons to "true craft" reveals the author would
| prefer that code be regarded like artisanal cheese.
|
| Beyond the pretension, it's head in the sand to imply that the
| technology hasn't progressed. It's just very clearly not true to
| anyone who is paying attention - longer tasks, better code, less
| errors. I'm somebody who actively _despises_ the hype bullshit-
| machine that SV has turned into, but technology is an industry
| for pragmatists that can leverage what works. And LLMs do.
|
| If you don't like the technology, you have every right to scream
| that from the mountaintops. As it stands, this just serves as no
| more than a rallying cry to the ignorant.
| rglover wrote:
| This is the most rational take. I'm a quality guy (Deming,
| Juran, etc), but nothing about incorporating an LLM into my own
| work has lowered its quality. That isn't to say that I haven't
| encountered slop. The difference is that, self-identifying as a
| craftsman, I have the ability to decide whether or not
| something stays or goes on the scrap heap. It seems a lot of
| people are missing that point: just because you can churn out
| shit doesn't mean you have to (and sorry, sunk-cost bias re:
| tokens isn't an excuse--that's the cost of doing business).
| It's a choice. AI-assisted coding is a tremendous boon on
| productivity, if (and I'd argue only if) you treat it like a
| power tool and not a genie lamp.
|
| No, you won't be rewarded magic beans for churning out crappy
| dashboards any more. But if you're serious about shipping
| quality, nothing is stopping you here.
| aeon_ai wrote:
| > you won't be rewarded magic beans for churning out crappy
| dashboards any more
|
| The days of being treated like a wizard for making buttons
| and widgets hit an endpoint were good while they lasted.
| bhekanik wrote:
| I think the framing as "lying" is emotionally accurate for users
| but technically misleading for builders. Most failures I see in
| production aren't intentional deception, they're confidence
| calibration failures: the model sounds certain when it should
| sound tentative.
|
| What helped us most was treating outputs like untrusted input:
| retrieval + citations for factual claims, strict tool
| permissions, and an explicit "I don't know" path that's rewarded
| instead of punished. That doesn't make LLMs truthful, but it does
| make them a lot less brittle.
|
| So to me the key question isn't "are models liars?" but "what
| product and engineering constraints make wrong answers cheap and
| detectable?"
| uriahlight wrote:
| Ironic article considering this website's 3D parallax effect with
| music and animation was all made with AI. /s
| fwlr wrote:
| My apologies if this is a joke I'm not understanding, but as
| far as I can tell with the wayback machine, this animation
| predates not just coding/generative AI, but the Attention paper
| and the founding of OpenAI too.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20150314221334/http://acko.net/
| aakresearch wrote:
| I think you are mistaken. I remember landing upon that website
| some time before 2023 and being greatly impressed by that very
| 3D parallax effect. To my knowledge there were no AI tools
| available in 2022 capable of producing effects like that. There
| are barely now. To my understanding it was made possible by
| another project of the same author [0] - check the date. Also
| check this [1] - dated 2003.
|
| Is it so hard to accept that humans are more capable of doing
| intricate and impressive work than any LLM will ever be?
|
| - [0] https://github.com/unconed/CSS3D.js
|
| - [1] https://acko.net/blog/avs/
| adamtaylor_13 wrote:
| This argument falls apart on the very first bullet point. The
| author claims:
|
| > If someone produces a painting in the style of Van Gogh, and
| passes it off as being made by Van Gogh, by putting his signature
| on it, that painting is a forgery.
|
| Which is true. But the implication that follows is false.
|
| Van Gogh's artwork is valuable specifically because of _his
| identity_. I find much of his artwork particularly hideous. That
| 's fine! Someone else finds value in it specifically because of
| _who_ wrote it.
|
| This metaphor doesn't appear to apply to code at all. The entire
| value of code is _what it does_ not _who wrote it_.
|
| Honestly, I stopped reading after the first bullet point because
| these types of arguments feel lazy and the attitude of the people
| writing these articles frequently comes across as holier than
| thou.
|
| You don't like LLMs? Great, don't use them. Using Van Gogh's
| paintbrush doesn't mean I'm making a forgery. I'm just painting,
| my friend.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Which of the two Ls?
| teleforce wrote:
| Whether we like it or not, the only constant in life is change.
|
| >What's the Excel of JSON
|
| Ever heard of CUE that's compatible with JSON and YAML introduced
| by ex-Googlers? It seamlessly support both types and values,
| whereas Excel supports ephemeral values [1].
|
| Both CUE and original Excel are non-Turing complete so they don't
| have the notorious and tricky halting problem.
|
| Someone need to seamlessly integrate LLM with CUE, its NLP
| deterministic distant cousin based on lattice-valued logic
| [2],[3].
|
| Truth be told LLM are like the automated loom machine during 19th
| CE Britain that kick started the industrial revolution. Heck the
| Toyota conglomerate was once the pioneer of the modern automated
| loom manufacturer, and looks where they are now after embracing
| change and pivoted to vehicle manufacturing.
|
| The automated loom machine commoditize the manual looming
| industry (not unlike modern software engineering) to its oblivion
| in India, that turned the rich Moghul India with the highest GDP
| in the whole wide world into the lowest GDP for India during
| colonial time (include Indian sub-continent namely Afghanistan,
| Pakistan and Bangladesh here if you want apple to apple
| comparison) [4].
|
| Ignore LLM at your peril in the name of so-called moral
| authenticity/forgery/lie/etc, and you can go the way of 20th CE
| India and its sub-continent, settling only at a fraction of its
| Moghul empire in term of GDP at its very peak.
|
| > Is there a standard CRDT-like protocol for syncing editable
| graphs yet?
|
| It's for other HN comments but spoiler alert it's called D4M by
| the nice folks from MIT [5]. We probably don't need full CRDT,
| local-first capability with eventual consistency will be more
| than suffice for most things that are of importance.
|
| [1] CUE lang:
|
| https://cuelang.org/
|
| [2] The Logic of CUE:
|
| https://cuelang.org/docs/concept/the-logic-of-cue/
|
| [3] Guardrailing Intuition: Towards Reliable AI:
|
| https://cue.dev/blog/guardrailing-intuition-towards-reliable...
|
| [4] Economy of the Mughal Empire:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Mughal_Empire
|
| [5] D4M: Dynamic Distributed Dimensional Data Model:
|
| https://d4m.mit.edu/
| nerdyadventurer wrote:
| Problems is these likes can be sophisticated which can eat up
| hours of our time.
| chmod775 wrote:
| Content aside, that website is very nice. It goes a bit crazy
| with animations in places (header, switching articles), but that
| does not taint the experience of reading something on it in the
| slightest.
|
| It's feels like a modern twist on a bygone time of the web.
| stuaxo wrote:
| I've been thinking this for a while. Attribution is sorely
| needed, I believe there was a recent paper on this so maybe it
| will happen.
|
| In the meantime the only way to really sort this is to have
| models that have only been trained on some particular kind of
| license - there is quite a big corpus of GPL'd code out there so
| a GPL based model could potentially be one of the first, and of
| course the output could only be GPL.
| youknownothing wrote:
| which of the two L's?
| Retr0id wrote:
| > Classic procedural generation is noteworthy here as a
| precedent, which gamers were already familiar with, because by
| and large it has failed to deliver.
|
| With the notable exception of Minecraft terrain generation, which
| I think most would say was successful in what it set out to
| achieve.
| tylervigen wrote:
| There are tons of examples of this. Heck, even Tetris has
| procedural generation. I think this argument was a mistake.
| hoherd wrote:
| Minecraft terrain generation produces invalid states, such as
| empty spaces within water, where once you interact with it the
| boundary collapses into a valid state. I don't think Mojang
| planned to have those invalid states.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Minecraft has (had?*) a lot of bugs but I don't really see
| how that's relevant.
|
| *I haven't played it for many years so I have no idea what
| things are like these days.
| visarga wrote:
| Stochastic Parrots hits back! another author thinks LLMs only
| reproduce. If that were so we could have used `cp` for free
| geldedus wrote:
| Yet another cognitive dissonance AI-bashing post
| RS-232 wrote:
| More desperate virtue signaling and gatekeeping.
|
| "Look at me and the code that took me eons to perfect. It's
| handcrafted and genuine."
|
| Newsflash: nobody cares, especially if it's expensive, time
| consuming, or doesn't work. They also don't care about
| "artisanal" PDO cheese with a 30% tariff that still tastes like
| shit.
|
| "The posers are stealing our thunder. Forgery!! They terk r
| jerbs!"
|
| Sink or swim. You decide.
| sowbug wrote:
| This is just the TTP metric[1] all over again, isn't it?
|
| [1] https://knowyourmeme.com/sensitive/memes/time-to-penis-ttp
| fredgrott wrote:
| There are reasons why I measure code quote input unquote via
| testing and static code analysis:
|
| 1. re-establishes mind mapping of the code base 2. separates out
| noise from signal. 3. makes it a breeze to refactor to reduce
| code complexity.
|
| Notice anything yet?
|
| If I replace the AI code input with my own curated techniques
| from known and measured code sources in long-term I save more
| time than those who rely upon AI vibe coding.
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