I Don't Like LLMs

itanium

Well llms are imperfect tools that provide a lot of value (they offer leverage in form of agents to put it in Naval Ravikant words). They are here to stay.

atulatul

Reminded me of someone saying that taste will become an important factor wrt AI tools/ things built with AI. Something like that. edit: Not exactly as I remembered, but it's a PG tweet: Prediction: In the AI age, taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make. https://x.com/paulg/status/2022604692178522562

artemonster

Modern internet ruined forums and google search sucks hairy balls, and most of the content is SEO optimised ad ridden crap. Its literally impossible to find anything meaningful on the internet nowadays. What else can we do besides asking an LLM these days?

serf

>One of my most successful life-hacks is to avoid people I don’t like or don’t trust. following this advice would have made most of my professional life impossible, what a luxury it would have been to be able to.

tonymet

> I don’t like them. They talk to me in this grating LLM-voice, an uncanny valley of talking to a real human. This takes about 30 seconds to fix permanently. You can prompt them to use any tone , be as concise or verbose as you like. > They confidently bullshit me - often giving me useful, helpful answers. But also just making stuff up with the same assurance - and with only a veneer of fake remorse when I call them out on it. Only people with flimsy epistemological underpinnings feel threatened in this way. Everyone makes mistakes, and gets fooled by AI (as we’ve been fooled by historians and scientists), but to write off AI because you feel it’s constantly misleading you means you lack proper foundations. Most of my fun conversations with AI are bending it back into proper grounded truth.

deburo

What is the Silicon Valley brogrammer subculture? Is it the same as the Silicon Valley subculture? What defines both? Are LLMs really the product of brogrammers?

moomoo11

maybe use the LLM to help you keep your site working under load? it is a tool after all.

droidjj

In some ways I miss the early LLM days before RL and system prompts (I assume this is the difference) made them all sound the same. They would say weird stuff. They got better at being useful and worse at being fun.* *This sadly also describes me as a 31 year old man.

heavensteeth

hugged. https://archive.is/LahHs

acedTrex

yes they are incredibly unpleasant to work with. Like the most annoying coworker you ever had. For my own sanity ive wrapped my pi setup in some strict bubble wrap and it is basically exclusively an LOC generator. I have no need nor desire to "converse" with the LLM, it is there to do exactly what i need when i need it.

techblueberry

One of the I dunno, weird things about LLMs, is that their search space feels exceptionally constrained. I'm sure I can sort of prompt it to try to give the answer I want but some people talk about "I don't want an LLM with a political perspective, just provide all the perspectives equally and without bias." And to a certain extent they have to be constrained. Anything more than a 500 word response I'm probably not going to read, particularly if I want to go deeper on something I want to navigate the conversation. But it means that tuning things like sycophancy just create sort of extremely simple mitigations. Even when I say "May" or "slight chance of" I'm often corrected "Be careful to make too blanket of a statement." I wonder if part of this has been the move towards optimizing towards the agent experience. Likewise a bias towards "Say things equally without bias" is an exceptionally poor way to actually explore the nuances of an idea, with this sort of regression to the mean. I don't know if they'll be able to solve this problem broadly. I mean, LLMs probably shouldn't be therapists/coaches/philosophical gurus. But I could anticipate a growth in sort of groupthink and regression to the mean in terms of perspectives broadly speaking as a society. I find them useful. Maybe it's better I find them distasteful to talk to as well.

Omicron18

https://archive.ph/LahHs

saadn92

LLMs have helped me a ton and have allowed me to replace all my apps that I was paying for. They're internal, so they don't have to be perfect, but man they've saved me money. That's just my experience.

phendrenad2

I don't like hammers, either. But I wouldn't try to build a house without one, now that they've been invented.

hybrid_study

Reasonable stance, though not sure it will remain viable.

seaucre

I think this is a very even-handed, reasonable position. and it's true - LLMs can be unpleasant to talk to. the day it feels like a magical delightful experience is the day we'll probably be out of jobs, though.

llm_nerd

While the article is fairly broad (it talks about "our profession", which ostensibly is coding, but then talks more about LLMs and their conversational style which is something that everyone has opinions on), it's worth pondering what his professional relationship with coding is today. Is he actively coding...anything? Any projects? And engagements? Or is he a coding influencer now, giving hot takes and opinions, and riding on the XP inertia as a relevant authority? Because if it's the latter, and I strongly suspect it is, his opinions on LLMs and coding are close to worthless. There are loads of "I'm now an influencer" giving these sorts of hot takes now, and they all seem...detached and irrational with the real world.

mmooss

> Fundamentally I don’t think we have a choice about riding on the AI technology train. It's amazing how effectively tech leaders have indoctrinated people to give up their power and give the tech people free reign. The same thing has happened in the socio-political realm. Assertions of powerlessness are seen as wisdom.

AIiscoming

It surprises me a little bit that we still don't have a personalized agent. I def want to finetune my llm responses and yes sure Claude has some type of memory but its too early to just bet on one horse and while i use claude at home through claude.ai i also use claude through an api at my company. It might start feeling better when they solve the issue of forgetting things they already got right before.

binlog

Kinda funny that one of the biggest software engineering “influencers” of all time can’t host a blog that survives HN front page traffic. Maybe try LLMs Martin. He is of course entitled to his opinion on the topic, but I’m personally not going to put too much weight on it considering he hasn’t written software for a living in probably decades.