Bodil12h ago

People keep assuring me that LLMs writing code is a revolution, that as long as we maintain sound engineering practices and tight code review they're actually extruding code fit for purpose in a fraction of the time it would take a human.

And every damned time, every damned time any of that code surfaces, like Anthropic's flagship offering just did, somehow it's exactly the pile of steaming technical debt and fifteen year old Stack Overflow snippets we were assured your careful oversight made sure it isn't.

Can someone please explain this to me? Is everyone but you simply prompting it wrong?

It's a good thing programmers aren't susceptible to hubris in any way, or this would have been so much worse.

Show threadPapageier

@bodil Indeed. Its good programmers are not susceptible to hubris.

Otherwise, they'd probably react to a concept like AI by claiming that programming is a form of art that can never be managed by AI, that AI is crap and anything produced by it must also be crap - proven by the fact that AI uses the crap from crappy websites where crappy - eh - programmers have posted it, and they'd utterly fail to make any distinction as to where AI can be a useful tool and what should better be done manually.

First and foremost, they'd scream defiance about the code quality of AI itself, amusingly ignoring the fact that this code has very obviously been written by programmers. But they'd be AI programmers, and therefore obviously worthless bastards.

My, am I happy that programmers are so absolutely immune to hubris.

10:51amWeb
Show threadAtomic Fox10h ago

@papageier @bodil

I am not a computer programmer if I can help it, but I find the following line of argument very interesting :

The generative LLM is a machine for producing the "most probable message", which according to information theory is the message we should discard.

https://man-and-atom.tumblr.com/post/812029038295187456/now-this-might-be-considered-a-theological

Man and Atom

Now, this might be considered a theological objection — A large language model or similar “generative AI” produces the most probable message. That is, in fact, the only thing it can do¹. If you have...

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