I have a very long, possibly book-length take on LLMs that has been brewing since May 2015 but basically: wow humans love to take something that works extremely well in a certain narrow domain and then bend over backwards to insist it will solve every ...

blaine

@darius so much this. I would read that book.

Yesterday I had a conversation that concluded, "yes, you _could_ replace an entire product/dev team with bots, but you would also recapitulate all of the complicated bits of having a team in order to do it."

I wonder if God feels this way when looking at the creation he made in his image...

Random Geek

@darius I feel like it's the only tech culture book I ever talk about, but I gotta be me.

Have you read "The Religion of Technology" by David F Noble? I read it during the ferry ride commute to my first dot-com startup job, and goodness so much of it stuck in my head. A light read, but had some nice historical context for tech as expression of divine ascendance / eternal wrath.

Darius Kazemi

@randomgeek added to the list!

Evan Prodromou

@blaine @darius so, I don't think technical people realize how empowering LLMs are.

People who have ideas about how to make technology work normally have to either learn how to code, or pay a rare, expensive and recalcitrant programmer to make the technology for them.

Some systems have simple macro languages, but most don't. So learning to code means years of study from app basics on up.

Evan Prodromou

@blaine @darius using an LLM, a nontechnical person can assemble a mostly working app. They can debug it. They can add to it.

I think that's part of the exuberance. If you can finally get technology to do what you want, it's got to feel like magic. No wonder people have such high expectations.

Darius Kazemi

@evan @blaine @evan @blaine the use case you are describing is inside the very narrow band domain that I feel pretty positive about

Although I don't think knowing how to code is any more empowering than knowing how to say, verbally persuade people. The fact that it feels like magic and that verbal persuasion (as one example) doesn't is... a problem imo

Chris Mabry

@darius is it a natural human tendency or an effect of capitalism?

Put differently: if we weren't all focused on squeezing more profit than the last quarter out of everything, would this phenomena exist or not?

Darius Kazemi

@evan @blaine your response is a bit of what I'm railing against here. We all agree we've made a machine that makes excellent pancakes. Where I make a sour face is the claim of empowerment through automated excellent pancakes

blaine

@evan @darius I'm super here for it! ️

In my experience, the coding (though less so software architecture) part of LLMs works pretty well, but my point is really that the hard parts of building software aren't really about the code.

Evan Prodromou

@blaine @darius tl;dr LLMs can do one thing well, code generation. But that one thing lets people do a lot of other things they want to do.

Darius Kazemi

@chrismabry I think pre capitalism we also saw the tendency towards wanting easy totalizing solutions. It feels lazy to even point this out but look at religion, politics, and so on. Which all predate capitalism by millennia

Darius Kazemi

"LLMs are like magic"

I agree on the grounds that basically everything is magical if you think about it hard enough.

I'm probably more literal and serious about this statement than the reader imagines

Evan Prodromou

@darius @blaine I would hypothesise that software has more emergent properties than pancakes, but I'm probably not being creative enough with my pancake usage.

blaine

@evan @darius my reference point for this is every non-profit that's interacted with a tech person who's built a tool that "helps" the non-profit. The first pass is easy, trivial even. LLMs are great at technology at that level. It's the long-term social stuff that's hard; "The Team is the Unit of Delivery" and all that.

"sudo make me a magical 500,000 cell excel spreadsheet but no way to manage the complexity"

Kathe Todd-Brown

@darius "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

Really should say any technology not currently within your understanding... just 'cause YOU can't explain/understand it doesn't mean that it is not understandable.

Darius Kazemi

@ktoddbrown I'm actually being more literal than that!

morgan

@darius not to mention folks ready to profit on another 'cure-all'. I don't know enough about AI but that's the general feeling I get...

Darius Kazemi

@blaine @evan yup. This stuff is basically optimized for demoware

What do they famously say... "The last 10% of a project is the easy part"? Something like that

But also contextual autocomplete is truly a wonderful, time saving thing that has changed how I write code

Dan Bruno

@darius [approaching a server farm] Wait…do you feel that? The higher elements are active here

Darius Kazemi

@danbruno just another day in the Geofront!!!