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 ...

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!!!

jcoglan

@blaine @evan @darius the fallacy at the core of a lot of this stuff is the idea that the hard part of making software is writing the first draft of it. which... it's not that programming isn't difficult and making it more accessible isn't good, but once you become passably ok at it you just start finding lots of other problems you previously weren't aware of

infinite love ⴳ

@darius everything is magic if you don't understand it

jcoglan

@blaine @evan @darius part of this is that programming, like a lot of other things, has the property that if you get good at it, the scope and complexity of your ideas for what to do with it grow

you also find out that growing and maintaining programs is a different sort of problem that writing the first draft

you also find out that a lot of the effort of making software is not in writing code, it's in thinking and talking to other people about it

Darius Kazemi

@jcoglan @blaine @evan agreed. there's a reason I picked "verbal persuasion" as my example of a thing that should be seen as every bit as magical as genAI

Darius Kazemi

@trwnh I'm being more literal than that here. Personally I think it goes: thing seems magical. Then you understand it and it seems banal. Then you understand it more and it's like "wait this is fucking magic". Cycle continues with infinite regression, which is itself magic

John Francis

@darius wow! Pattern recognition and random nonsense filtered and mediated by pattern recognition! Let's replace thinking!

blaine

@darius @jcoglan @evan totally, strong agreement from me.

I'm not a very good programmer in the sense of making types line up and typing the text for functions, but I'm alright at other bits.

The LLMs are transformative for the former, but they're still comically bad at the latter. Which is fun, because now I'm a pretty good rust programmer!

But it's honestly more of a "I have a stutter that makes verbal persuasion hard for dumb reasons" sort of assistance.

blaine

@darius @jcoglan @evan _maybe_ there are a bunch of people who are really good at systems and product design and the sorts of things that and just need help getting over the "typing in code into a text editor" part, but my intuition and experience working with many very smart people suggests to me that that's unlikely.

jcoglan

@blaine @darius @evan right, product development does not consist of someone having an idea and giving the blueprints to a developer, it is conversational and both parties push it in different directions, can both tell each other they're solving the XY problem, etc

Evan Prodromou

@jcoglan @blaine @darius I guess I feel like it's a call to action for making our technology more hackable. More macro languages, more visual programming, more Greasemonkey, more Yahoo! Pipes and IFTTT. Less learn-to-code, more learn-to-be-coded.

Evan Prodromou

@blaine @darius I honestly haven't seen good examples of doing component architecture using LLMs. It would be a cool application.