Comment by purplesyringa
3 hours ago
I'll take your claim that I'm capable of writing a psyop piece as compliment :) Truth be told I'd rather be writing a psyop arguing the opposite point than dealing with these emotions.
To your main argument: I absolutely agree that LLMs are terrible at producing working code, or efficient code, and that they're incapable of solving lots of important problems. I've seen LLMs make embarrassing typos, patch vulnerabilities with differently vulnerable code, and go through the motions of optimization as if blindfolded.
That is, however, not the central matter here. IMO, at present what management thinks LLMs are capable off has a larger impact than what LLMs are actually capable off, and while I'm hoping that the market will regulate itself once more and more slop projects break down, that'll take time, and I'm not confident that LLMs won't improve sufficiently by that point that the most glaring mistakes will be fixed. Of course, new and non-obvious issues may still be present, and they may cause trouble at a later point, but again, that won't happen immediately and I think we'll just end up in this infinite loop for the time being.
I will also add that AI companies' claims affect the general public's perception of the acceptable level of software quality. If Anthropic says 1000ms is great, and other companies follow the same approach, people will consider that the norm and not demand better software. This enshittification has started a long time ago -- just look at how bloated Windows and the web are -- and I don't think it's going to end just because we know things can work better.
Taking a step back, I think it's really a question of how many people will understand the value of what people like you and I can deliver. That number has been falling bit by bit before the LLMpocalypse, but now it's just becoming abysmal.
I understand the fear that perception matters, and it does, which is why I take issue with articles like this and use terminology like 'psyop'. You are effectively harming your own cause when you write things like this:
> If anyone can point an LLM at slow code and it automatically finds a hot loop and uses a trick it found somewhere on the 'net to vectorize it, there is little point in hiring someone with a focus on that.
If you yourself are saying there is no point to hiring you because an LLM can do what you can do, when it actually can't, you are actively contributing to the perception you don't want to proliferate. And although I am financially set from my own work, I am also opposed to that perception proliferating because it is wrong, and the discourse around blatantly untrue things is extremely tiring. We need to bring perception closer to reality, not perpetuate the divergence of perception from reality. OpenAI and Anthropic have an extremely vested interest in influencing both industry and consumers to believe things about their products that are not true, because their dubious financial future is staked on people believing those things, but we don't need to help them along.
Yes, that's a good argument, thank you. You bring up a good point and I'll try to avoid making such claims in the future.