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 ...

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.

blaine

@evan @jcoglan @darius yes! It's e.g. notable that (at least the last time I looked) Mastodon totally lacks a plugin system (front- or back-end, much less an "ActivityPub filter proxy"); such a thing would be amazing for the sort of play and experimentation you're pointing to.

@geoffreylitt has been doing a ton of work in the direction you're pointing, in case you haven't come across his work already!

Evan Prodromou

@blaine @jcoglan @darius @geoffreylitt Followed!

blaine

@evan @jcoglan @darius @geoffreylitt in conclusion, something we should keep in mine when we give everyone souped-up cars for the mind:

"It's easy to floor the accelerator. Steering is the hard bit."

(but also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q-TSfqUk5Y, 🦾 ‍️)

Rigo Wenning

@evan @blaine @darius Evan, while I agree (& benefit) from your view on LLMs, the development is fueled by executives dreaming they can fire 90% of their workforce while maintaining the same income. #idiocracy
Meanwhile we dream that we finally have a good interface for knowledge graphs

MrCopilot

@evan @blaine @darius

All of what you say is true, but I need to ask why do you want a proliferation of apps made by people who do not understand how they work or what the app actually is doing?

Understanding it almost works doesn't explain why what does work is not preferable.

Lack of education cannot be resolved in this manner. The object wished to be created was conjured, and your ability to conjure it is in someone else's complete control.

The technology is not a problem. Its usage is.