Comment by llm_nerd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by llm_nerd | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>What do you mean by that?

Varied and novel to the programmer. If you're doing the same thing day in and day out it probably isn't much use. If you're like many programmers and you're jumping between libraries and languages and platforms and APIs and domains and spheres, it's immensely helpful.

>doing mainstream, well-trodden work for which a company’s/project’s/domain’s inside knowledge isn’t needed

A core disconnect in this discussion is that many people seem to be arguing from the position of "I tried to generate whole solutions with these tools and it failed, so it's useless".

Everything is well-trodden. One of the commentators in here, who declares themselves a unique snowflake where these tools are useless, does "sockets with encryption and messaging", which is some of the most well-trodden ground in this domain. Everything is glue. Everything is a lot of relatively simple things strung together. And for all of those, portions are helped and accelerated with these tools.

It's alright that you like LLMs but you don't need to name-call ("luddites", "snowflakes") those who don't find them as useful as you do.

Neither case are name-calling, and I don't think pearl clutching for effect is useful here.

Everyone is working in unique domains and spaces with weird rules and restrictions and needs. The whole point of the special snowflake comment is specifically that people aren't remotely unique in being a special snowflake.

And the Luddism argument isn't "name-calling", it's an observation of an absolute truth on here.

Everything isn’t well-trodden. I’m mostly doing non-glue, heavily domain knowledge-based work. The main issue I’m running into is that explaining the domain and context to the LLM will take significantly more time than just doing the work myself, and also that parts of the necessary knowledge and most of the source code are NDA-protected, so only a local LLM would do.

Sigh.

Everything is extremely well-trodden at the code level. You're taking some inputs and generating some outputs. You're calling some functions. You're manipulating some strings or lists or sets. You're sorting some things or filtering things. You're building a client to a given API. You're doing some messaging and some encryption.

I guarantee that your code isn't remotely as unique or novel as you think it is. Of course on here everyone is 240lbs, 6'2" and benches 350, and their magically novel, super unique code is just too secret. So everyone's special.

If you had to explain the domain and context to these tools, you might be using them wrong.

"It's all just code, how hard can it be, and your NDAs don't apply" is certainly a take, but some people do actually solve problems whose solutions aren't already on the Internet and are forbidden from exfiltrating code! The fact that you don't solve such problems and are not bound by such NDAs is not a huge piece of evidence, to be honest.

Can you imagine even in principle a piece of evidence that would convince you otherwise?

Who said that NDAs don't apply? If you need to strawman to make an argument, just save the bits and skip doing it.

And yes, in the end all code distills down to shit that is very similar to the countless billions of lines of code on the internet. Everything -- every single project that anyone on this site is working on -- is a bunch of glued together shit where 90% (more like 99% Probably 99.9%) of it is in common with code seen in countless other projects. Utterly regardless of domain or business or project specific uniqueness. Someone would have to be profoundly incompetent to not realize this.

Again, I seem to arguing with people who think that using a tool means feeding it their whole projects and having it rewrite it in Rust or something. In reality a programmer could yield immense value from such tools having a) given it zero lines of their code, b) used zero lines of the code it generated. This isn't a difficult concept, but I'm going to continue getting insane responses by all of the unique people who work on the amazingly unique situations where instead of sorting from A-Z, they sort from Z-A!

You certainly strongly implied that NDAs don't apply with the phrase "their magically novel, super unique code is just too secret". You used the words "is just too secret" sarcastically, which led me to believe you think in fact the work is not too secret to exfiltrate to the LLMs on the Internet: that is, that NDAs don't apply.

> In reality a programmer could yield immense value from such tools having a) given it zero lines of their code, b) used zero lines of the code it generated.

We simply have different experiences of life! I think with the advent of Claude 3.5 Sonnet the LLMs have just about edged out ahead in terms of time saved vs time wasted, for me, but before Sonnet I'm fairly confident they were moderately net negative for me.

Can you give some concrete examples of where they've helped you this dramatically? With links to chat logs? I still don't understand how people are finding them so useful, and I keep asking people and they keep not providing chat logs so I can see what they're doing.

I did not imply that. I implied that people who have projects for whom these tools are purportedly useless can never tell you anything about the project even remotely because it makes it impossible to note that it, like most projects is likely overwhelmingly well-trodden ground with a mild remix. Loads and loads of super proprietary projects working in very unique domain spaces have code that is overwhelmingly common with very different domains and spaces. Medical, financial, ballistic, gaming, data, etc -- loads and loads of the code we build for these domains is common.

If someone can't use these tools for security or propriety reasons, that's an obvious hard restriction. But saying "oh my code is just too unique, my skills too advanced" is self-deluding nonsense.

>I think with the advent of Claude 3.5 Sonnet the LLMs

We are talking about now. The present. I'm stating the value of these tools now. Their state in the past is irrelevant.

>Can you give some concrete examples

Sorry, NDAs, secret code, secret projects, et al

If you want something concrete: I have never yet seen any even slightly competent code come out of an LLM when it's writing in F#, Mathematica, or POSIX sh, which are broadly the languages I write in. (It's possible Wolfram's very new LLM does better on Mathematica because it's been trained on it specifically, but I haven't tried it.) I've only had Sonnet for a day (having been burned too many times by other LLMs, but decided yesterday it was time to try again), so am not in a great position to comment on Sonnet's abilities with those languages specifically. My preliminary guess is that we've gone from 4o's "20% correct" to Sonnet's "50% correct".

> Their state in the past is irrelevant.

Apparently also their state in the present? I said "just about edged out ahead", whereas you say "immense value".

>Apparently also their state in the present?

I find a number of models fantastically useful in the present. I'm not sure why your one day evaluation of them is relevant to how I utilize them.

It was inevitable that someone was going to do the "but I insist upon writing in some fringe language" bit (when the "my project and domain is too unique" bit faltered), but many models actually have excellent F# abilities. Eh.

I'm not sure why your use of them is relevant to how I can use them; resolving that question is why I asked you for chat logs! I genuinely want to make these things work! I try again every few months in case anything has changed, and I keep asking people how they're getting value so that I can also get value, and nobody ever tells me!

> many models actually have excellent F# abilities

Name three? As I said, I badly want this stuff to work!

Claude has been pretty good at F# so far. Sometimes it makes mistakes as if it was OCaml but other than that I found the output actually better than C#. That is - the C# output has higher likelihood of being correct, but because there is so much absolutely terrible code out there - you have to coerce it to give you good output, which you don't need to do with F#.

And of course Github Copilot autocomplete works well just as it does for most other languages.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com