hansmayer

We all use them at some point, given how much effort the big tech is investing to make the shitty LLMs un-avoidable, from search to cramming them into support processes etc. The issue is whether people like them. And they mostly do not. (apart from the Office Idiot, who absolutely loves them).

I don't need to ask an educator - I can just ask my kids, and they and their friends absolutely hate it.

+1 - the Office Bullshit Worker is the one upholding this shit these days- adding some of those creepy unnecessary images to their slide-decks, writing those godawful oververbose e-mails and fucking not being able to take notes without their AI. Why the fuck are you even in the meeting if you cannot note down the key points afterwards.

TL;DR:

A great technology drives its own adoption, its usage is pioneered by the tweens and young adults, it requires minimum effort and investment to hop on board, and it does not need explaining. It grows organically. Examples: internet bubble.

A bad technology: despised by the young adults and tweens, needs trillion of investments and marketing to drive market penetration, every day some boomer (=not in terms of age, but in terms of mentality) explains how you are holding it wrong and it needs a fuckton of explanation. The Pope himself issues an Encyclica warning on the dangers of it, spurning the greatest popular interest in Catholicism since the dark ages. Examples: LLMs.

> The linter rules is just about lowering the amount of mistakes you have to catch at code review time.

Aren't they, in the modern context, mostly used for code formatting and such? I don't recall anyone using them today for "catching errors". Unless you count code formatting style violations as 'errors'.

> Not letting them cheat. They still will at times, but like, resd their code,

Well then, if they "still will", your effort kind of misses the point. Sure maybe, you'll catch it every time and maybe that one time you did not catch it, it was no critical mistake...But it only needs to make that critical mistake once, and all of this effort was in vain.

> But if you’re the kind of developer who uses agents to write multi-hundred-line PRs that you barely understand yourself, I’d invite you to slow down a bit and try this other, slower style of “vibe coding.” Ask an agent how your PR works and how it might fail. Have it write Markdown docs with Mermaid charts if necessary. Use Matt Pocock’s /grill-me skill until you understand the entire PR front-to-back.

Man so much work to retrofit something that obviously, simply, plainly - just does not work. How about just writing the code yourself? You can even consult AI on the libraries or whatever, but how about just building that model in your head YOURSELF and not loading up on AI slop and trying to memorise that crap. The names of the functions will ring different in your memory once you spend some time thinking over whether you picked the right and clear name vs. just going with whatever statistical median the slop machine picked for you.

Like everything else with LLMs, it works...until it doesn´t. We swear so much at them that they eventually start producing results like "I found what the fuck was wrong with this shit!" etc. Which of course they did not, because they don´t really know shit...

Well, isn't that swell - good that meanwhile countless MBA cretins have "adopted" enterprise-wide Copilot integrations, to make their companies "AI native" or whatever the word is on LinkedinLunatics street these days.

The question was, what did they solve FOR YOU.

> And they have been shown to develop emergent properties that weren't in their training set time and again.

Ah yes, the famous emergent properties - like suggesting that we should walk to the car wash?

It abstracts shit mate. How many Rs in the strawberry and if you want to go to a car wash, should you walk, run or drive? They're just fucking text generators, which happen to spit out something half-usable about 60% of the time.

> Because the agents can do so much toil you can add things like formal verification, fuzzing, and other feedback mechanisms and quality gates to your projects cheaply

Works great until they sweep you a test under the rug which always passes because the condition is something like if(true) .

A linter won't prevent your idiot LLM from going bonkers and suddenly switching to GQL instead of REST just for that one endpoint, because it confabulated something or putting your stripe secret into your react frontend - all cases of slop I've seen happen.

> I have to start adding more and more constraints, style guides, corner cases, error handling, optimization guidelines and all this good stuff to my Markdown specifications, rules and skills

So kind of like maintaining a growing codebase? But this time around you cannot guarantee what the outputs will be?

> have an actual math degree, alongside a physics degree and a PhD in astrophysics from a strong department

Good for you, I suppose, but all it tells me is that you have probably not developed software professionally - after all, PhDs in astrophysics "from a strong department" rarely end up in commercial software development...

> This sounds like the experience I would mostly expect from a small company adopting Claude

Who said it was a small company? You're making too many assumptions buddy :)

> will genuinely explain a bit because this isn't as trivial and obvious as you make it sound

It is literally the same technology developed in the 1940s mate, adding more GPUs will not magically make it become a god-in-the-box. How fucking innovative can you still claim it to be?

> I think you overestimate the capability of human beings and underestimate the asymptotic capabilities of these systems

Right, remember when LLMs constructed the rockets and modules for landing on the moon, using practically just the logarithmic tables? Or when they invented the vaccine? How about X-rays? Cars? Aeroplanes? You don't? Oh right, me neither! We must be downplaying their nonexistent "capabilities". And the use of word "asymptotic" - is absolutely not conveying the meaning you think it does.

> Do you have like a quote or something that you can point at?

Well, how about the CEOs of companies claiming to be worth 1T and upwards, stating that their products have almost superhuman intelligence? PhDs in the pocket etc?

> cold, calculating technology

And if at least they were able to calculate properly at least...

Well it's AI generated crap, AI-slop, so it's behaving exactly as intended

The dude just posted some AI slop.

> Sit in Thiel's whirlpool?

Hands down the funniest comment on HN in a while. Love it:)

Feel free to be optimistic about AI, but please don't serve us AI slop as your own authorship.

To the author - please don't post AI-generated slop, even if you edited it to look less like slop. It not only insults the reader's intelligence, it takes out the fun out of reading. If I wanted to read slop, I'd have generated it myself.

Are you telling me, it did not make them "productive" in ways most of (us non-AI-boosters) "cannot even begin to imagine"? Who could've thought - a lot of average stuff, still ends up producing average result?

> an engineer and a mathematician

An engineer with an engineering degree, which as it may still be known to some, requires a fairly stringent mathematical underpinning. So yes, I know a thing or two - read up on Erdos and his problems, I am not here to enlighten every vibecoding PM that shows up.

> And this means agentic code is inherently inferior to human code? Howso?

Again, I am not here to explain the world to some clueless PM. You have your LLMs for that :) But for the sake of bringing you closer, the "agentic" code is often very inferior, implementing happy paths or just bluntly exposing secrets in clear texts, etc. Probably a consequence of it being trained on, as you put it "p50 engineering code".

> Maybe you work in a really talented engineering team,

Running my own company and been paying the LLM-Shit-Generators for my whole team for a long time, in the hope they would bring the advertised benefits. Guess what - for serious use-cases, they bring shit and more shit.

> Thank you for the advice to read a book on programming as if that somehow would have any bearing on this at all?

Oh yeah obviously not, I mean, its not like understanding software development would help you understand how LLMs are not similar to a "p50 engineer" at all:). I'd take the latter over the former every time.

> Why is this statement obviously absurd

Well for one, LLMs are not humans, but it should be obvious to even to most cretinous of the e/acc crowd. It's not like they can think in abstract terms or come up with completely new concepts. But then again, don't mind me - if you can live with below average AI slop - go for it.

+1 - So many times you can avoid the meeting by simply asking the person to specify the topic. Then often it turns out you can clarify their big topic either directly over chat or its not a topic for you at all..

> to the same derisive comment of these models being, in your words "stochastic code extruder"

So many excited and insulted LLM adopters on this thread. There is nothing derisive in that comment, it is simply the purest possible definition of how they work. Stochastics is a branch of maths you know.

> can solve Erdos problems is sort of the proof in the pudding

For the non-engineer, non-mathematician it may sound authoritative, but you'd probably be surprised to learn that most of Erdos problems are not at all complex - they are just not very interesting or relevant. So it is a proof in the pudding, provided the pudding is made of shit - the kind of stuff LLMs produce most of the time.

> I just don't quite understand this, is it that: (1) agentic code is inherently inferior to human code and thus (2) shipping agentic code is actively harmful?

Yes and yes - have you not heard of that AWS incident with Kiro when the "agentic" shit deleted an entire infrastructure environment, complete with data, config, etc.?

> Also I wonder how many folks honestly look in the mirror and think: how does the median programmer differ from an LLM

Apart from the obvious absurdity of this statement - I know a lot of you non-engineer types feel "empowered" by the LLMs, in the sense of how they immediately seem a genius when you ask them on a topic you are not expert in, but you may want to read a book on programming first - maybe you'll get a clue then.

No buddy, not me. Dario Amodei however, keeps announcing it every about 6 months, on the dot. Last time i January this year. So I just want them held acccountable to their own statements. Otherwise if they would be untrue, that is at best incompetence, and at worst investor fraud. Both should draw serious consequences, given the ungodly sums which are burnt into these pipe dreams.

> But it seems everyone is arguing about whether LLMs can be perfect software engineers

That's just those of us with longer memory holding the AI companies to the standards they declared themselves. Nobody forced Sam Altman to blab about a team of pocket PhDs, did they? I don't want the crap that does it correct 60℅ of the time - where is the god damn nation of PhDs in a datacemter already? Where is the AI doing all the SWE work "in 3-6 months"?

You took it too literally. It means, the f*ing tool should do one thing well and f*off with its crappy "suggestions". Why is my washing machine trying to do talk to me nowadays? Once its done washing my clothes, it should just shut the f*up and turn itself off. I"ll tend to the clothes when I have time. Not when the machine tells me to. We are overwhelmed with the machines designed by morons in product management who think they are designing futuristic tech when they ask engineers to build a beeping washing machine.

Such fantastic writing. I particularly love the last passage - not only it is reminiscent of how great op-eds used to close, but also for it's clear and un-ambigious call to action - you have the agency and no, you don't have to "deal with it", i.e. deal with lazy morons pasting you LLM-generated walls of text for discussion.