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The next decade will be interesting, when the chatgpt babies hit the market, having done 100% of their homework with AI, passed their interviews thanks to AI, then enter code bases written by AI.

The other problem is that unless we hit AGI real fast the quality can go nowhere but down, there will be less and less non polluted data to train from, the code bases will become more and more bloated because let's be real LLMs don't produce very good code, &c.

In the meantime we're left with AI generated scams, AI generated cooking recipes which don't work, AI generated art that look like ass, AI bots flooding social media, &c.

> But my impression right now is that a large percentage of LLM use is for spamming, scamming, and cheating on homework.

LLMs as we have them now are the application which makes a computer be able to understand a non-programmer and to communicate to a non-programmer, it is the new eyes, ears and mouth of computers.

This works so well, that it can already pretend to be a human. This is like realizing: Yes, in fact, this mouse allows me to move a cursor in the computer with which I can click on an application, as if it were my finger in the computer.

But I guess it will ultimately be agents what will show the true power of this new interface. Agents which assist you with your memory by properly reminding you of things, by allowing you to ask it things while you are leaving the house and so on, it even contacting other agents or even persons in order to answer your questions or execute what you asked it to.

How can this not be world-changing?

Its funny how back in the day there were people who were CLI elitist, and forwent using a mouse for as long as possible because "the CLI is just better at everything". People like this still exist to some extent, and man can they ever wield a keyboard, but if computer development was left to them, we would all be regular people slogging through a command line everyday to do everything.

And now kids can't use desktops because they only understand "apps", is this a win too ?

The difference is that both CLIs and GUIs are deterministic.

Gatekeeping is not always bad. Most people, including many members of this forum, have not seen their happiness and value to society increase because of ubiquitous personal computing. Perhaps the CLI interfaces should have prevailed and compute should have remained the domain of the educational, research, industrial and financial sectors.

Perhaps more people should heed the 'AI' skeptics. Just because we can do something doesn't mean we should.

It isn't even a specifically nerd thing for terminal tools to be more efficient as a whole. Pharmacies here until very recently used MS DOS based software (probably running on an emulator) to type your data, ordered drugs etc and the efficiency was much greater than your average mouse bumbler. I cringe every time I see a point of sale device with a touchscreen. Absolute abominations.

I've actually seen much more of the opposite since I got into the industry a decade ago, with some developers absolutely terrified of touching a CLI. That approach can work out fine for some roles but man I think it's unnecessarily limiting. I'm far from a CLI guru but find some basic knowledge there pretty useful from time to time. Most of the CLI experts I've personally met are experts at much newer tools as well.

>How can this not be world-changing?

For one, the principal-agent problem. Who's building, running, and maintaining these agents? I doubt that these are running locally and tweaked by the user themselves. The business model is to sell these things as a service running in the cloud. That means the operator has final say on how these systems are implemented. Sure, your helpful AI agent today may remind you to pick up some soda at the store. But if the last decade+ of "enshittification" has shown, it's only a matter of time before your helpful AI agent will remind you to pick up some delicious Mountain Dew (TM) at the Piggly Wiggly (TM) and use your American Express (TM) card to earn Roblox (TM) points.

And even if we assume these agents don't eventually come to serve masters other than the end-user, the internet is already a user-hostile place. It's entirely reasonable to believe it'll be agent-hostile too, where APIs and UI designs adapt to trick AI agents with "dark patterns" to do things that aren't necessarily in their users' best interests.

Techno-utopianism might feel good, but economics and money-making will drive how these things actually play out.

FWIW when I buy groceries online using Instacart I appreciate the box that pops up after I click "Check out" and asks me if I want to add anything purchased previously, and if I want to see my most recent orders: almost always there's something I DID want to order today but forgot.

You are not wrong, just ignore the comments here. Current day LLMs are a "deep seek" mechanism. For every task that had little or no equivalent in the internet, they were miserably bad (from O1 to deepseek to claude). We clearly need a different paradigm for "intelligence" and a sort of "consciousness" that gets a "handle" of reality. LLMs are very inefficient because they are trying to implement these mechanisms within a "predict the next token" environment.

All advancements in "AI" in the last year or so were in smaller models becoming more powerful, more companies reaching openai levels and a bit more accuracy. I think this is the plateau for the current theoretical tech.

+: one case I bumped into today: socks5 with the latest hyper version to proxy https requests. All models were completely off-track. None was able to make any functioning implementation. This is just a few lines of code.

The things LLMs can actually be put to good use for either are bad for society (spam, scams, cheating on homework) or do not justify the massive investment. Better emails is great, but its just not worth billions of dollars.

I want to be clear, from an academic perspective these things are fascinating and very very cool! You can teach a computer to talk like a person might simply by having it read all the books! But there is not a business reason to have this. Not at the current costs. Maybe LLMs are a step we need to get actually useful AI tools, but as currently constituted its just not there.

The killer app of LLMs is how its gonna kill the industry when the investments fail to make the expected return. A lot of people are gonna lose their jobs when managers try to replace them with AI, and even more are gonna lose their jobs when that doesn't work and all those companies go under, and there's another tech bubble burst

>Better emails is great, but its just not worth billions of dollars.

I mean lets just say your premise is right, how much time is spent worldwide writing emails that could be automated? Just on a pure man hour basis it's surely worth billions if it did nothing else.

>But there is not a business reason to have this. Not at the current costs.

ChatGPT Pro tier is $200/mo, if you can't find ways to get that value I'm sorry but it's a skill issue and you're ngmi. The API tier is like $/million tokens. It's a joke to complain about the cost at this point...

I’m waiting too because people around me are ecstatic (without them knowing the technical details and limitations) but I don’t see the point.

The internet, email, Gmail, smartphones were some kind of revolution because it would help me. AI is only here to prevents me from thinking instead of improving my life one way or another.

All is see is preventing me from doing what I do, potential hallucinations that can harm work and relationships, and decreasing the quality of that work (especially SWE which is lowering every decade). That’s a bad kind of revolution.

>On the plus side, some software engineers save a couple minutes here and there with a slightly nicer autocomplete, white collar workers can get some advice on email style, and maybe it helps with sifting through millions of pages of legal discovery.

Lol get a grip. Jeff Dean just said 25% of the code being checked into Google's internal codebase is now AI generated. If you think it's just kids using it for homework and engineers saving a few minutes here and there you're kidding yourself.

https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/jeff-dean-and-noam-shazeer

>I am hopeful for some of the more advanced applications, e.g. proof assistance in math,

"I expect, say, 2026-level AI, when used properly, will be a trustworthy co-author in mathematical research, and in many other fields as well." You just aren't in the same universe as what the top experts are saying about this tech.

https://unlocked.microsoft.com/ai-anthology/terence-tao/

You seem like one of those people that used GPT3.5 once and hasn't updated at all since then. You're criticizing the wright flyer and we're already at turboprops.

> Jeff Dean just said 25% of the code being checked into Google's internal codebase is now AI generated.

This assertion feels misleading. When I worked at a FAANG, 10% of our codebase was generated Protobuf. Obviously, this was highly repetitive boilerplate that was equivalent to maybe a few thousand actual lines of code. What does the 25% of LLM-generated code actually look like? I'm guessing it's doing nothing particularly novel or interesting. (Also, I have to wonder if a large chunk of that 25% could be encapsulated as a more reliable and deterministic abstraction.)

I feel like that's people not yet knowing how to use them. With just a little bit of context-setting, they can be force multipliers. I do agree with you that you need the underlying skills. Frequently I use them to do something I've done before, bypassing the time for me to look up syntax, etc.

> they can be force multipliers.

Like phones can be, but give that to an unsupervised 10 years old and it's not a given that the outcome will be a net positive

That's true of any tool, and is such a general statement that it borders on being a non sequitur.

Sure, but then again nobody is literally asking for $7t to develop a hammer, a phone or anything really...

I've used them for syntax too, and gotten genuine benefit from that. I just don't think it was all that hard before, and the risk that people feel they no longer need to actually understand their tools looms large in my mind.

Perhaps, but once upon a time you'd either memorize syntax or work with a reference book in front of you. Over time we came to use various syntax completion and introspection tools, as well as Internet references, and overall I'd say we aren't dumber than we were then.

Even if advances in LLMs stop right now, we still would probably see 5-10 years of integration.

Keep in mind also that it's in vogue to talk about AI bad, and taboo to talk about how much you use it in your job or life.

It's taboo to talk about how much you use it? Tell that to my LinkedIn feed. Everyone is desperate to tell me how desperately I need to use AI or I will fall behind in the rat race. Every app has an animated glowing starry "use our new AI features!" thingy that I mentally block out, no matter how much it (often literally) jumps up and down and waves at me. There is no question in my mind how badly the powerful want me to use AI and get others to use it.

how many of the people on your linkedin feed have a financial incentive to talk up AI and LLMs? LinkedIn is truly a fascinatingly weird social media

There is a difference between being told to use AI and telling others you use AI.

"Our app leverages AI to make you better!"

versus

"Our app written by AI makes you better!"

The first one catches eyes, the second one is just a turn off.

The invention of the chainsaw didn't make the knowledge of how to fell a tree obsolete, but it sure made the process a whole lot faster.

If you're writing software and not using LLMs, you're working at a fraction of the pace of those that do. While it's not going to create some world-changing algo today, it completely eliminates most of the boiler plate you need to type out, makes implementing tests much, much faster. At least that has been my experience in Golang at work.

> At least that has been my experience in Golang at work.

Maybe so for you, but you might want to think about why your work involved so much boilerplate and routine content in the first place. If so much of it is easily completed by an LLM already, was your employer really paying you some large share of your 5-6 digits of compensation for every year? Do you think most of your value to the company has just been in typing boilerplate and mindlessly generating tests until now?

Personally, I'd feel pretty insecure in my career and underdeveloped in my trade if I could answer yes to that.

If it does apply to you (or others reading this), hopefully you can exploit this brief window of gained personal productivity to develop more valuable skills and get your tasked to more valuable roles asap. Software engineering as a profession isn't going anywhere, but the people most helped by today's fairly primitive LLM coding assistants are the ones that are actually vulnerable to be squeezed out of the trade because it means they're the not actually contributing very much specific expertise.

The productivity change you've experienced should be taken as a bright red warning flag that you've unwittingly settled into a role as an technician getting paid highly because of ephemeral demand bubble rather than the valuable engineer you might imagine yourself to be.

Most of what I do at work is not necessarily the same thing as the value that I add. I solve business problems with software. A very good portion of that is just boiler plate and lines of code that anyone can write. Someone has to write the main.go, read in the cli args, the environment args, define and initialize the API clients, define the server api spec, and then finally, you write the business logic. Then you write the tests to validate the business logic.

Many of those tasks can be completed via normal copy and paste. It's much faster to have the LLM do it. When you're initializing a client for a database in go, you can refer to the library on how to do it, or you can just let the LLM do it.

Maybe you have a photographic memory and you don't need to reference docs for other people's libraries, I don't have that ability. But the LLMs do, so I use them.

I just want to add that many desk jobs do the equivalent of writing boilerplate code. Copying from calendar A to calendar B is a real 70k/yr job I’ve seen. And from what I can tell, being a human shell script + representing that function (responsible face and name) characterizes lower tier white collar jobs.

So the mere existence of “worthless” churn in your job isn’t evidence that you aren’t solving business problems that are worthy of pay.

To put it another way. Most jobs exist to make a problem go away for an executive.

I understand you are also getting at the ethos of good engineering and encouraging this person to take pride in their work.

> you've unwittingly settled into a role as an technician getting paid highly because of ephemeral demand bubble rather than the valuable engineer you might imagine yourself to be.

I have not seen this put so succinctly and this cannot be repeated enough.

Replace "LLMs" by "the internet", go back in time 20 years, and you have the type of comment from back then...oops

I was an early adopter of the Internet and never doubted its potential. I was also an early adopter of LLMs and have been much less impressed.

Why not talk about the other side of the coin - things that have been predicted to be amazing and fell flat, like Pets.com and Alexa?

Assuming the mean the popular definition of "the internet", it wasn't new 20 years ago. If you want to relate the current state of LLMs, you'd have to go back 30.

And now look at how politically divided most western countries are, how everything is some kind of ad delivery mechanism, how brains get fried by constant attention traps... yeah I'm not sure these people were 100% wrong

Honestly, each year it seems like the value that the internet offers goes down while the harm that it causes goes up.

The enshittification of search and Quora means that outside of Wikipedia and sometimes Reddit, the Internet's offer of "access to all of the world's information" is mostly dead.

With social media becoming a hellscape, people have mostly retreated to semi-private Discord servers; which severely damages the Internet's offer of "participate in a global commons".

There are a few bright spots like easy video sharing. However, I'm not sure I trust them not to get enshittified next.

The internet was revolutionary 40 years ago. You could go from no communication to communicating with the whole world.

LLMs goes from coding by myself to shutting down my brain and generating bad code. I don’t see how you can compare both.

The internet and smartphones was so revolutionary that growth skyrocketed...oops

autocomplete in IDEs was better fifteen years ago, in my opinion