Talk Is Cheap: The Operational Impact of LLM Use

gtirloni

People are still figuring things out, there's a lot of wasted tokens, etc. This is like complaining a student isn't as productive as a senior engineering. I think we as an industry haven't even graduated to junior level when it comes to figuring our how to use AI to improve things.

ian_j_butler

Hah, since it's open in another tab: Talk Isn’t Always Cheap: Understanding Failure Modes in Multi-Agent Debate @ https://arxiv.org/html/2509.05396v2 To actually engage more with the substance of TFA.. very refreshing to see someone bringing numbers. To me this shows we (still) need something somewhere between the numbers and the anecdata. It's annoying to hear claims of "1000x productivity" or claims of negative/neutral productivity without any extra context whatsoever. So you brought data? Great! But still no context. Boring CRUD? Complex UI? A rewrite/port of legacy? What industry, language, how many human collaborators, and what baseline for SLOC?? We need to get rigorous about this stuff and actually aim for a decent framework which can answer "Are LLMs a value add for this project? How much value? How much cost?" Such a thing might be information-theoretical, complexity-based, or counting integration touchpoints / info boundaries / sources of ground-truth? We could even try to implement that framework with LLMs and probably should! But the default answer of "Yes definitely, always useful, just token-maxx it since LLMs are the future" is (still) only marketing, not engineering

sublinear

More tasks get "done" while rework is sky high and overall throughput to production drops. First, I'd like to thank all the people working on testing and doing the lord's work. Anyway, this isn't even a unique pattern to LLM use. We've all seen this exact same thing when more devs are added a project running late, teams are siloed, outsourcing to contractors, etc.

deadbabe

I'm curious, LLMs have been around for a while now... How many of you would say you need LLMs now for work? Not that you want it because it's nice to have, but rather you would literally not be able to do your job at all because you don't have an LLM to use? If your company said "We're not paying for LLMs anymore.", would you begrudgingly pay for or host your own LLM that complies with company policies, or just go back to writing everything by hand? I feel like companies could definitely just push the cost of LLMs back onto the engineers themselves (much like how people have to pay for their own gas to go to work), and engineers would have no choice but to either buy their own subscriptions or be very good at writing code by hand just to stay competitive. This kind of shift is coming, partly because costs of LLMs are to unsustainable for companies, but also because it sounds like the kind of diabolical idea some upper management thinks they can get away with, as peer pressure will naturally do its thing. Paying for your own token usage is a small price to pay for job security isn't it?

6stringmerc

“It’s hard for me to put into words how bad this is.” AHAHAHAHA! I genuinely laughed out loud, filled the room. This is the “citation needed” rebuttal most REASONABLE people in the software industry have been looking for, and the sample size is only going to get bigger! Does anyone really think - not believe, logically conclude based on evidence at hand - that there will be any contrary outcomes at scale? Honestly, this is going to put a lot of software pros into a “sabbatical” where cleaning up the mess should be billed like that old joke at auto mechanics’ shops: $150 an hour to fix it $500 an hour if you tried to fix it before bringing it here Seriously laughing out loud. I needed this. Hahaha Edit: no wonder he’s so astute - came up in construction. In that industry cost versus benefit and safety concerns are often a matter of life or death. Real consequences. A lot more educational than staring at a glowing box for most of one’s career. Disclosure: I did risk management for construction projects, like the Alabama MB plant.

vgordon

The activity-vs-outcome distinction feels like the most interesting part of this discussion. Curious what metrics people have found most useful for separating the two.

jdpigeon

This effect is likely be excarcebated in teams which are suffering layoffs this year. Even less people to clear the in-flight queue of partially complete tasks