Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

These metaphors all suck. Well, ok, yours is funny. But anyway, LLMs are just very different from any human.

They are extremely shallow, even compared to a junior developer. But extremely broad, even compared to the most experienced developer. They type real fuckin fast compared to anyone on earth, but they need to be told what to do much more carefully than anyone on earth.

No, they're like a completely nontechnical marketing person who has a big library of papers on related subjects and who's been asked to generate a whitepaper by pulling phrases. What comes out will probably have proper grammar and seem perfectly reasonable to another person with no knowledge of the field, but if actually read by someone knowledgeable may be complete gibberish taken as a whole.

Individual sentences and paragraphs may mostly work, but it's an edifice built on sand out of poorly constructed bricks plus mortar with the wrong proportions (or entirely wrong ingredients).

LLM output is "truthy" - it looks like it might be true, and sometimes it will even be accurate (see also, "stopped clock") but depending on it is foolish because what's generating the output doesn't actually understand what it's putting out - it's just generating output that looks like the kind of thing you've requested.

Overconfident, but also easy to sway their opinion.

They follow directions for maybe an hour and then go off and fix random shit because they forgot what their main task was.

They'll tell you to your face how great your ideas were, and that you're absolutely right about something, then go implement it completely incorrectly.

They add comments to literally everything even when you ask them to stop. But they also ignore said comments sometimes.

Maybe they are kinda like us lol.

My analogy is a cursed monkey paw with unlimited wishes. It's actually really really powerful but you have to be careful of leaving any possible ambiguity in your wishes.

> Overconfident, forgetful, sloppy, easily distracted

And constantly microdosing, sometimes a bit too much.

> who drinks heavily on the job

Yes, that's why you should add "... and answer in the style of a drunkard" to every prompt. Makes it easier to not forget what you are dealing with.

> and they don't get mad when you fire them!

No, typically __you__ are mad when you fire them ...

Experienced and knowledgeable and they also believe in the technical equivalent of flat-Earthism in many, many non-trivial corners.

And if you push back on that insanity, they'll smile and nod and agree with you and in the next sentence, go right back to pushing that nonsense.

Part of what got me into software was this: no matter how complex or impressive the operation, with enough time and determination, you could trace each step and learn how a tap on a joystick lead to the specific pixels on a screen changing.

There’s a beautiful invitation to learn and contribute baked into a world where each command is fully deterministic and spec-ed out.

Yes, there have always been poorly documented black boxes, but I thought the goal was to minimize those.

People don’t understand how much is going to be lost if that goal is abandoned.

As pertaining to software development, I agree. I've been hearing accounting (online and from coworkers) of using LLMs to do deterministic stuff. And yet, instead of at least prompting once to "write a script to do X," they just keep prompting "do X" over and over again. Seems incredibly wasteful. It feels like there is this thought of "We are not making progress if we aren't getting the LLM to do everything. Having it write a script we can review and tweak is anti-progress." No one has said that outright, but it's a gut feeling (and it wouldn't surprise me if people have said this out loud).

'potatolicious says we're going forwards: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44978319

I would rather say it like this: Very good, very hardworking engineers spent years of their lives building the machine that raised us from the non-determinism of messy physical reality. The technology that brought us perfect, replicable, and reliable math from sending electrons through rocks has been deeply underappreciated in the "software revolution".

The engineers at TSMC, Intel, Global Foundries, Samsung, and others have done us an amazing service, and we are throwing all that hard work away.

It was forward when Newton discovered the beautiful simple determinism of physics.

Was it going backwards when the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics emerged?

I'd rather say that LLMs live in a world that consists entirely of stories, nothing but words and their combinations. Thy have no other reality. So they are good at generating more stories that would sit well with the stories they already know. But the stories are often imprecise, and sometimes contradictory, so they have to guess. Also, LLMs don't know how to count, but they know that two usually follows one, and three is usually said to be larger than two, so they can speak in a way that mostly does not contradict this knowledge. They can use tools to count, like a human who knows digits would use a calculator.

But much more than an arithmetic engine, the current crop of AI needs an epistemic engine, something that would help follow logic and avoid contradictions, to determine what is a well-established fact, and what is a shaky conjecture. Then we might start trusting the AI.

In that framing, you can look at an agent as simply a filter on those hallucinations.

Isn’t that why people argue against calling them hallucinations?

It implies that some parts of the output aren’t hallucinations, when the reality is that none of it has any thought behind it.

I've prefered to riff off of the other quote:

"All (large language) model outputs are hallucinations, but some are useful."

Some astonishingly large proportion of them, actually. Hence the AI boom.

I have a very similar (probably unoriginal) thought about some human mental illnesses.

So, we VALUE creativity, we claim that it helps us solve problems, improves our understanding of the universe, etc.

BUT people with some mental illnesses, their brain is so creative that they lose the understanding of where reality is and where their imagination/creativity takes over.

eg. Hearing voices? That's the brain conjuring up a voice - auditory and visual hallucinations are the easy example.

But it goes further, depression is where people's brains create scenarios where there is no hope, and there's no escape. Anxiety too, the brain is conjuring up fears of what's to come

Nah I don't agree with this characterization. The problem is, the majority of those hallucinations are true. What was said would make more sense if the majority of the responses were, in fact, false, but this is not the case.

> written code is no longer a time sink

It still is, and should be. It’s highly unlikely that you provided all the required info to the agent at first try. The only way to fix that is to read and understand the code thoroughly and suspiciously, and reshaping it until we’re sure it reflects the requirements as we understand them.

> We are headed in a direction where written code is no longer a time sink.

Written code has never been a time sink. The actual time that software developers have spent actually writing code has always been a very low percentage of total time.

Figuring out what code to write is a bigger deal. LLMs can help with part of this. Figuring out what's wrong with written code, and figuring out how to change and fix the code, is also a big deal. LLMs can help with a smaller part of this.

> Juniors can onboard faster and more independently with LLMs,

Color me very, very skeptical of this. Juniors previously spent a lot more of their time writing code, and they don't have to do that anymore. On the other hand, that's how they became not-juniors; the feedback loop from writing code and seeing what happened as a result is the point. Skipping part of that breaks the loop. "What the computer wrote didn't work" or "what the computer wrote is too slow" or even to some extent "what the computer wrote was the wrong thing" is so much harder to learn from.

Juniors are screwed.

> LLMs have the ability to lighten cognitive loads and increase productivity,

I'm fascinated to find out where this is true and where it's false. I think it'll be very unevenly distributed. I've seen a lot of silver bullets fired and disintegrate mid-flight, and I'm very doubtful of the latest one in the form of LLMs. I'm guessing LLMs will ratchet forward part of the software world, will remove support for other parts that will fall back, and it'll take us way too long to recognize which part is which and how to build a new system atop the shifted foundation.

Triple modular redundancy. I remember reading that's how Nasa space shuttles calculate things because a processor / memory might have been affected by space radiation https://llis.nasa.gov/lesson/18803

> This works on people as well!

Only within certain conditions or thresholds that we're still figuring out. There are many cases where the more someone recalls and communicates their memory, the more details get corrupted.

> Cops do this when interrogating.

Sometimes that's not to "get sense of the variation" but to deliberately encourage a contradiction to pounce upon it. Ask me my own birthday enough times in enough ways and formats, and eventually I'll say something incorrect.

Care must also be taken to ensure that the questioner doesn't change the details, such as by encouraging (or sometimes forcing) the witness/suspect to imagine things which didn't happen.

Who remembers that scene on Better Call Saul between Lalo, Saul, and Kim?

Reminds me of the classic Yogi Berra, “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future”.

Predicting the future isn't about being correct tomorrow, rather it’s about selling something to someone today.

An insight I picked up along the way…

To me, it is more specific to say that many futurists don't take into account the social and economic network effects of changes taking place. Many just act as if the future will continue on completely unchallenged in this current state. But if you look at someone like Kurzweil, you can see the very narrow and specific focus of a prediction, which has proved to be more informative to me as a high bar of futurism.

"but quality is definitely taking a hit now that no-one is able to keep up."

And its going to get worse! So please explain to me how in the net, you are going to be better off? You're not.

I think most people haven't taken a decent economics class and don't deeply understand the notion of trade offs and the fact there is no free lunch.

As Fowler himself states, there's a need to learn to use these tools properly.

In any case poor work quality is a failure of tech leadership and culture, it's not AI's fault.

What would such a workflow look like? I have Alfred but mainly just use the clipboard feature. I've tried to get into automation but struggled for inspiration. This one seems good!

Are you just opening a browser tab?

It feels like Tdd/llm connection is implied — “and also generate tests”. Thought it’s not cannonical tdd of course. I wonder if it’ll turn the tide towards tech that’s easier to test automatically, like maybe ssr instead of react.