Comment by Jensson
6 months ago
> Developers haven't even started extracting the value of LLMs with agent architectures yet
There are thousands of startups doing exactly that right now, why do you think this will work when all evidence points towards it not working? Or why else would it not already have revolutionized everything a year or two ago when everyone started doing this?
Most of them are a bunch of prompts and don't even have actual developers. For the good reason that there is no training system yet and the wording of how you call the people that build these system isn't even there or clearly defined. Local companies haven't even setup a proper internal LLM or at least a contract with a provider. I am in France so probably lagging behind USA a bit especially NY/SF but the word "LLM developer" is just arriving now and mostly under the pressure of isolated developers and companies like me. This feel really really early stage.
The smartest and most well funded people on the planet have been trying and failing to get value out of this technology for years and the best we've come up with so far is some statistically unreliable coding assistants. Hardly the revolution its proponents keep eagerly insisting we're seeing.
They try to get value at their scale, which is tough. Your local SME definitely sees value in an embedding-based semantic search engine over their 20 years of weird unstructured data.
The best they've come up with is the LLM chatbot, which both OpenAI and Anthropic have as their flagship product because many people find it extremely valuable. Many people I know routinely use ChatGPT to help them write things, even those who were already good at writing, and if you don't think that's true at your workplace I strongly suspect it's because people aren't telling you about it.
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my company has already fired a bunch of people in favor of LLMs so they are realizing all kinds of value
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Between the ridiculously optimistic and the cynically nihilistic I personally believe there is some value that extremely talented people at huge companies can't really provide because they're not in the right environment (too big a scale) but neither can grifters packaging a prompt in a vibecoded app.
In the last few months the building blocks for something useful for small companies (think less than 100 employees) have appeared, now it's time for developers or catch-all IT at those companies and freelancers serving small local companies to "up-skill".
Why do I believe this? Well for a start OCR became much more accessible this year cutting down on manual data entry compared to tesseract of yesteryear.
is there a non-prompt way to interact with LLMs?
In an agentic setup the value is half the prompts half how you plug them together. I am opposing for instance a big prompt that is supposed to write a dissertation vs a smart web scraper that builds a knowledge graph out of sources and outputs a specialized search engine for your task. The former is a free funny intern, the latter is growth percentage visible in the economy.
>Or why else would it not already have revolutionized everything a year or two ago when everyone started doing this?
The internet needed 20 years to take over the world. All of the companies of the first dot com bust are in the past. The tech is solid.