Paul CantrellAug 13, 2024

In most cases, LLMs will not replace humans or reduce labor costs as companies hope. They will •increase• labor costs, in the form of tedious clean-up and rebuilding customer trust.

After a brief sugar high in which LLMs rapidly and easily create messes that look like successes, a whole lot of orgs are going to find themselves climbing out of deep holes of their own digging.

Example from @Joshsharp:
https://aus.social/@Joshsharp/112646263257692603

j# (@[email protected])

Yesterday we had another example of LLMs creating support issues for us. User: "hi, how do I do this thing? Your docs say I can go here and change some options, but there's no settings there" Me: "that's right, we don't have such a feature, but also we don't say you can do it in the docs, where did you read that?" User: "oh I didn't actually read the docs, I asked 'AI' and it hallucinated this answer. Sorry!" At this rate I'm looking forward to 2025 when I'll be spending 100% of my time doing support to correct falsehoods about our app made up by LLMs

Aus.Social
Show threadPaul CantrellAug 13, 2024

Those who’ve worked in software will immediate recognize the phenomenon of “messes that look like successes.”

One of my old Paulisms is that the real purpose of a whole lot of software processes is to make large-scale failure look like a string of small successes.

Show threadCameron WattersAug 13, 2024
@inthehands A problem exacerbated by the fact that many software systems use "was implemented" as their de facto criteria for success, with only the thinnest and most tenuous connection to any meaningful outcome.
Show threadPaul Cantrell
@watters Well said.
Aug 13, 2024 at 7:18pmWeb