Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

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> Verifying the accuracy of its statements is easy.

For single statements, sometimes, but not always. For all of the many statements, no. Having the human attention and discipline to mindfully verify every single one without fail? Impossible.

Every software product/process that assumes the user has superhuman vigilance is doomed to fail badly.

> Automation centaurs are great: they relieve humans of drudgework and let them focus on the creative and satisfying parts of their jobs. That's how AI-assisted coding is pitched [...]

> But a hallucinating AI is a terrible co-pilot. It's just good enough to get the job done much of the time, but it also sneakily inserts booby-traps that are statistically guaranteed to look as plausible as the good code (that's what a next-word-guessing program does: guesses the statistically most likely word).

> This turns AI-"assisted" coders into reverse centaurs. The AI can churn out code at superhuman speed, and you, the human in the loop, must maintain perfect vigilance and attention as you review that code, spotting the cleverly disguised hooks for malicious code that the AI can't be prevented from inserting into its code. As qntm writes, "code review [is] difficult relative to writing new code":

-- https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/

> Having the human attention and discipline to mindfully verify every single one without fail? Impossible.

I mean, how do you live life?

The people you talk to in your life say factually wrong things all the time.

How do you deal with it?

With common sense, a decent bullshit detector, and a healthy level of skepticism.

LLM's aren't calculators. You're not supposed to rely on them to give perfect answers. That would be crazy.

And I don't need to verify "every single statement". I just need to verify whichever part I need to use for something else. I can run the code it produces to see if it works. I can look up the reference to see if it exists. I can Google the particular fact to see if it's real. It's really very little effort. And the verification is orders of magnitude easier and faster than coming up with the information in the first place. Which is what makes LLM's so incredibly helpful.

It's really funny how most anecdotes and comments about the utility and value of interacting with LLM's can be applied to anecdotes and comments about human beings themselves. Majority of people havent realized yet that consciousness is assumed by our society, and that we, in fact, don't know what it is or if we have it. Let alone prescribing another entity with it.

> I just need to verify whichever part I need to use for something else. I can run the code it produces to see if it works. I can look up the reference to see if it exists. I can Google the particular fact to see if it's real. It's really very little effort. And the verification is orders of magnitude easier and faster than coming up with the information in the first place. Which is what makes LLM's so incredibly helpful.

Well put.

Especially this:

> I can run the code it produces to see if it works.

You can get it to generate tests (and easy ways for you to verify correctness).

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