Comment by teiferer
5 hours ago
The right tool for the job. There are tasks for which LLMs are unbelievably helpful. In programming, used well, it can 10x your productivity. (Well maybe not literally, but Nx for non-trivial N.) I've seen really good programmers become even faster since the LLM is doing the grunt work for them and the code produced in the end is just as top notch quality as they produced before, just that now they are much faster.
Of course you can misuse it. Produce mountains of unmaintainable slop, full of issues. But that's true for every tool. Before LLMs already, and there will be future tools too.
So, careful with generalizations please. It's not all just dumb.
>just as top notch quality as they produced before, just that now they are much faster.
No, they are not. There write programs like they write prose. There is 100% adherence to grammar and spelling when they write prose, but yet what they write is unintelligible and needlessly verbose.
When they write computer programs there is 100% adherence to good practices, but eventually the program becomes so unintelligible and verbose that only an LLM can make any sense of it going forward. But even then, changes result in more things breaking than they fix. But the number of bugs slashed goes through the roof. Management is happy!
>Of course you can misuse it.
I think the proper way to use it is to use it as a better search tool. But I don't think AI marketing and valuation is going to be sated by such a use case.
> > just as top notch quality as they produced before, just that now they are much faster.
> No, they are not.
It fascinates me with what conviction you are writing this. You don't know any of the people involved nor how they work or the code they produce. Yet you are certain that what I wrote is false.
I'm speculating now, but you are likely imagining that the LLM-produced code is used as-is, producing a growing slop pile. The cases I'm describing are not like that. Those folks know exactly what they want, how the architecture and the code should look like, and they are getting the LLM to produce it like that. There are quite a few iterations and manual polishing steps too. In the end, the code looks like as if they had written it themselves, just that the whole process was 5x as fast because there is so much quite standard stuff automatically added which would just have been slower by hand.
If you have not experienced this yourself then I understand your attitude, but rest assured, this is possible and I'd caution you to dismiss this.
Many will disagree and say that anything done by humans is by far superior to anything done by machines. You don't want to correct them, do you?
Of course I disagree because this generalized statement is quite obviously false. Have you used electronics made by hand? Versus made by a machine? You can't possibly claim that a PCB assembly by hand has higher quality than done by a machine. That the transmission of a message by hand from Berlin to Paris is higher quality than if communictations electronics was involved.
Of course you didn't mean that (but you wrote it). You probably mean a creative process. The process I descibed is still having the creative human in the loop. Just that the machine is filling in the gaps that are qualite mechanically fillable. Nothing strange with that.
Machines are extensions of man, it’s not man vs machine but man with machines vs man without.
Well at least as long as they don’t develop consciousness of their own.
The problem is when people ignore or dismiss developments in AI purely out of insecurity or a sense of human superiority. Machines don’t have to be superior to humans to dramatically amplify what humans can do.
Well, it's different "man" as well - lowering the barrier to entry means people with less skill but with a machine, and maybe the gift of the gab, can commercially surpass the previous people, whether or not they have a machine available.
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Yes I agree. AI has fundamental problems but a lot of "AI sucks" is the huge, trivial capability for misuse.