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Comment by lipowitz | Hacker News Reader

I've seen this cycle play out quite a few times long before LLMs. What scares me this time is the wide ranging possible consequences of the automatic assistant in terms of how far they can lead us down the garden path and how hard people are pushed to become BSers.

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The advent of LLMs is kind of brilliant, because now instead of the chain-of-responsibility landing on some lowly engineer who might get fired, it can be brickwalled into some LLM. Good guy LLM doesn't care who's pointing their finger at it. Good guy LLM doesn't have their job on the line.

No. LLMs are not some new moral beacon that leadership will be happy to have a finger pointed at.

Historically, "leadership" at organizations haven't cared about objective truths when those truths conflict with their desires. So why would they care about what a hyped up gradient descent has to say?

Let me just provide a bit of hope.

I'm not a huge fan of AI stuff, but the output quality is (usually) above that of what BSers were putting out.

While I still need to double check my BS team members, the problems with the code they are pushing is lower than what it was pre-AI everywhere. To me, that's a win.

I guess what I'm saying is I'd rather have mediocre AI code written than the low quality code I say before LLMs became as popular as they are.

On a code level I'm inclined to agree that it will do better line-by-line.

On more abstract things I think it has to have intentional filters to not follow you down a rathole like flat earth doctrine if you match the bulk of opinion in verbose authors in a subject. I don't see the priority for adding those filters being recognized on apolitical STEM oriented topics.

The quality of any individual part of the code might be better, but the architecture is way worse and unsustainable long term.

Yes. However, frankly, BSers weren't maintaining a good architecture anyways (in my experience). Code simply landed where it could rather than addressing the overarching problem.

It's why code reviews remain important.

A BSer is about pushing for things that don't make sense but sound like they solve more constraints than anything possible to implement could. It is very unlikely they are giving you code that could compile. (Though if so there's a little bug or todo in it that just happens to be Turing award's material.)

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