The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

https://acko.net/blog/the-l-in-llm-stands-for-lying/

by LorenDB • 5 months ago

666 477 5 months ago

acko.net

feverzsj• 5 months ago

More like Lunatic.

Mordisquitos• 5 months ago

In can be both. There are two L's to pick from.

barcodehorse• 5 months ago

Lovely lizard machine.

chromehearts• 5 months ago

Incredible website

mogoman• 5 months ago

try scrolling up and down a few times on the logo and see what happens

einr• 5 months ago

This rules. What a good, sensible, sober post.

kombookcha2• 5 months ago

What a wonderful read.

baq• 5 months ago

Lying implies knowing what’s true

hsbauauvhabzb• 5 months ago

Oh sorry my mistake! you’re right I don’t know what’s true.

GuestFAUniverse• 5 months ago

And "lazy".

Claude makes me mad: even when I ask for small code snippets to be improved, it increasingly starts to comment "what I could improve" in the code I stead of generating the embarrassingly easy code with the improvement itself.

If I point it to that by something like "include that yourself", it does a decent job.

That's so _L_azy.

emsign5• 5 months ago

LLMs are cheaters because their goal isn't to produce good code but to please the human.

js8• 5 months ago

That's a problem with any self-improving tools, not just LLMs. Successful self-improvement leads to efficiency, which is just another name for laziness.

astrange• 5 months ago

You can see what Claude's goal is, and it's not that.

https://www.anthropic.com/constitution

Anthropic wants Claude to be genuinely helpful to the people it works with or on behalf of, as well as to society, while avoiding actions that are unsafe, unethical, or deceptive.

gck1• 5 months ago

Enforce this with deterministic guardrails. Use strictest linting config you possibly can, and even have it write custom, domain specific linters of things that can't happen. Then you won't have to hand hold it that much

theshrike798• 5 months ago

This sort of protectionism is also seen in e.g. controlled-appelation foods like artisanal cheese or cured ham. These require not just traditional manufacturing methods and high-quality ingredients from farm to table, but also a specific geographic origin.

Maybe "Artisanal Coding" will be a thing in the future?

boxed• 5 months ago

This geographic protection is extremely bogus in many cases, if not most cases, which imo undermines his argument.

theshrike798• 5 months ago

Not really, it's a matter of protecting heritage.

Like you can still make Karelian pies[0] anywhere, but unless you follow the exact recipe, you can't sell them as "Karelian pies". It's good for the heritage and good for the customers.

You can also make any cheeses and wines and whatever you like, it's just how you name them and market them that's regulated.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelian_pasty

flohofwoe• 5 months ago

The 'Handmade Network' is essentially this (in a good way though) - and long before LLMs got good enough for code-generation - instead as a counter philosophy to the soulless "enterprise software development" where a feature that could be implemented in 10 lines of code is wrapped in 1000 lines of "industry-best-practices" boilerplate.

Programming via LLMs is just the logical conclusion to this niche of industrialized software development which favours quantity over quality. It's basically replacing human bots which translate specs written by architecture astronauts into code without having to think on their own.

And good riddance to that type of 'spec-in-code-out' type of programming, it should never have existed in the first place. Let the architecture astronauts go wild with LLMs implementing their ideas without having to bother human programmers who actually value their craft ;)

theshrike798• 5 months ago

I'm kinda leaning towards the analogy that LLMs are to programming as textile machines were to the loom.

People still pay for hand-knit fabrics (there's one place in Italy that makes silk by hand and it costs 5 figures per foot), but the vast majority is machine made.

Same thing will happen to code, unless the bubble bursts really badly. Most bulk API Glue CRUD stuff and basic web UI work will be mostly automated and churned off automated agentic production lines.

But there will still be a market for that special human touch in code, most likely when you need safety/security or efficiency/speed.

harambae• 5 months ago

Maybe "Artisanal Coding" will be a thing in the future?

Steve Gibson was hand-coding assembly (often beautifully and making for very compact binaries) long after almost everyone else had switched to C language or higher in abstraction. This is the closest analogy I can think of it.

It had it's own cult following, but I wouldn't say it was a massive movement.

wilg2• 5 months ago

LLMs are pretty cool technology and are useful for programming.

emsign5• 5 months ago

If you check the code afterwards. You do check the code yourself, don't you?

wilg2• 5 months ago

eyeroll

malka1986• 5 months ago

Hello, I am a single dev using an agent (Claude Code) on a solo project.

I have accepted that reading 100% of the generated code is not possible.

I am attempting to find methods to allow for clean code to be generated none the less.

I am using extremely strict DDD architecture. Yes it is totally overkill for a one man project.

Now i only have to be intimate with 2 parts of the code:

* the public facade of the modules, which also happens to be the place where authorization is checked.

* the orchestrators, where multiple modules are tied together.

If the inners of the module are a little sloppy (code duplication and al), it is not really an issue, as these do not have an effect at a distance with the rest of the code.

I have to be on the lookout though. It happens that the agent tries to break the boundaries between the modules, cheating its way with stuff like direct SQL queries.

EugeneOZ• 5 months ago

I do, 100%, every line.

PunchyHamster• 5 months ago

No, that would limit our velocity, we can't check code, that eats into the LLM gains

Meneth• 5 months ago

That's a lie.

Copenjin• 5 months ago

I instantly remembered the page header, I probably visited this site last time 10 years ago or something.

emsign5• 5 months ago

It's not a co-pilot, it's just on auto-pilot.

Love it. Calling it "Copilot" in itself is a lie. Marketing speak to sell you an idea that doesn't exist. The idea is that you are still in control.

_flux• 5 months ago

Well initially it was a lot less capable. Someone might describe it auto-complete on steroids.

Someone might call LLMs that today, except they've stepped a bit up from steroids.

emsign5• 5 months ago

Then MS is conveniently keeping the old name.

anilgulecha2• 5 months ago

If you ask me, no court should have ever rendered a judgement on whether AI output as a category is legal or copyrightable, because none of it is sourced. The judgement simply cannot be made, and AI output should be treated like a forgery unless and until proven otherwise.

Guilty until proven innocent will satisfy the author's LLM-specific point of contention, but it is hardly a good principle.

emsign5• 5 months ago

You are missing the point of the author. He literally said no court should have rendered a judgement, that's the exact opposite of guilty until proven innocent. Guilty means a court has made a judgement.

He is proposing to not make a judgement at all. If the AI company CLAIMS something they have to prove it. Like they do in science or something. Any claim is treated as such, a claim. The trick is to not even claim anything, let the users all on their own come to the conclusion that it's magic. And it's true that LLMs by design cannot cite sources. Thus they cannot by design tell you if they made something up with disregard to it making sense or working, if they just copy and pasted it, something that either works or is crap, or if they somehow created something new that is fantastic.

All we ever see are the success stories. The success after the n-th try and tweaking of the prompt and the process of handling your agents the right way. The hidden cost is out there, barely hidden.

This ambiguity is benefitting the AI companies and they are exploiting it to the maximum. Going even as far as illegally obtaining pirated intellectual property from an entity that is banned in many countries on one end of their utilization pipeline and selling it as the biggest thing ever at the other end. And yes, all the doomsday stories of AI taking over the world are part of the marketing hype.

anilgulecha2• 5 months ago

sure, no "court" should render it, but then

AI output should be treated like a forgery

Who's passing this judgement this? Author? Civil society?

DavidPiper• 5 months ago

This stands in stark contrast to code, which generally doesn't suffer from re-use at all ...

This is an absolute chef-kiss double-entendre.

est• 5 months ago

I won't call that forging, but commission.

btw you can make git commits with AI as author and you as commiter. Which makes git blame easier

plasticeagle• 5 months ago

Acko.net remains the best website on the internet.

i-blis• 5 months ago

Still one of the best, by far.

simianwords3• 5 months ago

What the author and many others find hard to digest is that LLMs are surfacing the reality that most of our work is a small bit of novelty against boiler plate redundant code.

Most of what we do is programming is some small novel idea at high level and repeatable boilerplate at low level. A fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions? LLMs are especially good at fuzzy abstracting repeatable code, and it’s simply not possible to get the same result from other manual methods.

I empathise because it is distressing to realise that most of value we provide is not in those lines of code but in that small innovation at the higher layer. No developer wants to hear that, they would like to think each lexicon is a creation from their soul.

teaearlgraycold• 5 months ago

Time to learn design, how to talk to customers, and how to discover unsolved problems. Used right LLMs should improve your software quality. Make stuff that matters that you can be proud of.

thesz• 5 months ago

  > how to discover unsolved problems

There are plenty of them and LLMs will not help you much there because unsolved problems are, by definition, out-of-distribution samples.

Neural networks are interpolators, not extrapolators.

silon42• 5 months ago

Abstraction isn't free... even if you had the correct abstraction and the tools to remove the parts you don't need for deployment, there is still the cost of understanding and compiling.

There is also the cost reason, somebody trying to sell an abstraction will try to monetize it and this means not everyone will want/be able to use it (or it will take forever/be unfinished if it's open/free).

There's also the platform lockin/competition aspect...

eucyclos2• 5 months ago

I wrote a book a while back where I argued that coding involves choosing what to work on, writing it, and then debugging it, and that we tend to master these steps in reverse chronological order.

It's weird to look at something that recent and think how dated it reads today. I also wrote about the Turing test as some major milestone of AI development, when in fact the general response to programs passing the Turing test was to shrug and minimize it

bluefirebrand2• 5 months ago

I would argue that chatbots still barely pass the turing test

They have such obvious patterns and tells that humans have already picked up on them and they can eventually sus out that they're talking to an LLM

For instance I heard recently about someone talking (verbally) with an AI voiced customer support. They were very convinced, so they asked the support agent to calculate the product of two large numbers, and it replied with the result instantly

I would argue that fails the chinese room

wonnage2• 5 months ago

Boilerplate has been with us since the dawn of programming.

I still think LLMs as fancy autocomplete is the truth and not even a dig. Autocomplete is great. It works best when there’s one clear output desired (even if you don’t know exactly what it is yet). Nobody is surprised when you type “cal” and California comes up in an address form, why should we be surprised when you describe a program and the code is returned?

Knowledge has the same problem as cosmology, the part we can observe doesn’t seem to account for the vast majority of what we know us out there. Symbolic knowledge encompasses unfathomable multitudes and will eventually be solved by AI but the “dark matter” of knowledge that can’t easily be expressed in language or math is still out in the wild

Papazsazsa• 5 months ago

This is actually quite an insightful comment into the mindset of the tech set vs. the many writers and artists whose only 'boilerplate redundant code' is the language itself, and a loose aggregate of ideas and philosophies.

Probably the original sin here is that we started calling them programming languages instead of just 'computer code'.

Also - most of your work is far more than mere novelty! There are intangibles like your intellectual labor and time.

vjerancrnjak• 5 months ago

Libraries create boundaries, which are in most cases arbitrary, that then limit the way you can interact with code, creating more boilerplate to get what you want from a library.

Abstractions are the source of bloat. Without abstractions you can always reduce bloat, or you can reduce bloat in your glue, but you can't reduce glue.

It takes discipline to NOT create arbitrary function signatures and short-lived intermediate data structures or type definitions. This is the beginning of boilerplate.

So many advances in removing boilerplate are realizing your 5 function calls and 10 intermediate data structures or type definitions, essentially compute a thing that you can do with 0 function calls and 0 custom datatypes and less lines of code.

The abstraction hides how simple the thing you want is.

Problem is that all open source code looks like the bloat described above, so LLMs have no idea how to actually write code that is without boilerplate. The only place where I've seen it work is in shaders, which are usually written to avoid common pitfalls of abstraction.

LLMs are incapable of writing a big program in 1 function and 1 file, that does what you want. Splitting the program into functions or even multiple files, is a step you do after a lot of time, yet all open source looks nothing like that.

auggierose• 5 months ago

Yep, people not understanding the value of abstraction is exactly why LLM coded apps are going to be a shit show. You could use them to come up with better abstractions, but most will not.

irishcoffee• 5 months ago

Abstractions are the source of bloat. Without abstractions you can always reduce bloat, or you can reduce bloat in your glue, but you can't reduce glue.

I don’t think I agree. Here is an example.

QTcpSocket socket; socket.connectToHost(QHostAddress::LocalHost, 1234);

Vs:

int clientSocket = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0);

    sockaddr_in serverAddr;
    serverAddr.sin_family = AF_INET;
    serverAddr.sin_port = htons(1234);
    inet_pton(AF_INET, "127.0.0.1", &serverAddr.sin_addr);

    connect(clientSocket, (sockaddr*)&serverAddr, sizeof(serverAddr))

tovej12• 5 months ago

We already have tools to generate boilerplate, and they work exceptionally well. The LLM just produces nondeterministic boilerplate.

I also don't know what work you do, but I would not characterize the codebases I work in as "small bits of novelty" on boilerplate. Software engineering is always a holistic systems undertaking, where every subcomponent and the interactions between them have to be considered.

lisper• 5 months ago

why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions?

Cue the smug Lisp weenies.

otabdeveloper42• 5 months ago

Programmers aren't paid to code.

FORTRAN ("formula translator") was one of the first programs ever written and it was supposed to make coding obsolete. Scientists will now be able to just type in formulas and the computer will just calculate the result, imagine that!

zorked• 5 months ago

Is this claim historical? As in, it was actually made at the time?

heavyset_go• 5 months ago

Books are just simple theses and themes with hundreds of pages of boilerplate

simianwords3• 5 months ago

lot of people are saying this

endymion-light6• 5 months ago

This is a great example actually.

To me, a function is a single sentence within a book. It may approach the larger picture, but that sentence can be reviewed, changed, switched around, killed by an editor.

Some programmers believe they're fantastic sentence writers. They brag about how good of a sentence they write, they're entire worldview has been built on being good sentence creators. Especially within enterprises, you may spend your entire life writing sentences without ever really understanding the whole book.

If your worldview has been built on sentence creation, and suddenly there's a sentence creator AI, you're going to be deathly afraid of it replacing you as a sentence writer.

artisin• 5 months ago

Hit songs are just simple four-chord loops stretched over three minutes of synthetic boilerplate.

shinycode2• 5 months ago

No I don’t agree. Just because it’s « boilerplate », that does not mean it’s worthless or doesn’t carry novelty. There is « boilerplate » in building many things, house, cars etc where to add real new stuff it’s « always the same base » but you have to nail that base and there is real value in it. With craft and deep knowledge and pride. Every project is different and not everything can be made from a generic out-of-shelf product

jimnotgym• 5 months ago

A house doesn't seem a good example, because it is made of physical things.

from foundations import ConcreteStrip

ConcreteStrip(x,y,z)

Doesn't work for houses

BoredomIsFun• 5 months ago

Just because it’s « boilerplate », that does not mean it’s worthless

Of course it is not. It is needed, by definition.

or doesn’t carry novelty.

Of course it does not. Why would a piece of code that simply fills a large C structure with constants be innovative?

Every project is different and not everything can be made from a generic out-of-shelf product

Tangential to use of LLMs for boring boilerplate stuff.

gampleman• 5 months ago

Actually I think this is one of the more tragic outcomes of the LLM revolution: it was already hard to get funding for ergonomic advances in programming before. Funding a new PL ecosystem or major library was no mean feat. Despite that, there were a number of promising advances that could have significantly raised the level of abstraction.

However, LLMs destroy this economic incentive utterly. It now seems most productive to code in fairly low level TypeScript and let the machines spew tons of garbage code for you.

marginalia_nu2• 5 months ago

Most of the people doing the most rote and monotonous work were and are doing so in some of the least productive circumstances, with clear ways of increasing speed and productivity.

If development velocity was truly an important factor in these businesses, we'd migrated away from that gang of four ass Java 8 codebase, given these poor souls offices, or at least cubicles to reduce the noise, we wouldn't make them spend 3 hours a day in ceremonial meetings.

The reason none of this happens is that even if these developers crank out code 10x faster, by the time it's made it past all the inertia and inefficiencies of the organization, the change is nearly imperceptible. Though the bill for the new office and the 2 year refactoring effort are much more tangible.

Sharlin3• 5 months ago

Yep. It's ridiculous to talk about 10x or 5x or 2x anything in any but the smallest companies. All this talk about programmer velocity is micro-optimizing something that's not a bottleneck.

pixl979• 5 months ago

all the inertia and inefficiencies of the organization

Honestly you can probably use this as a means to measure the amount of regulation, graft, and corruption in an economy.

In a wild west free for all code velocity would likely be very fast with software popping up, changing rapidly, and some quickly disappearing.

But in an economy that doesn't care what you make, then who you pay or what laws you buy is far more important.

qsera6• 5 months ago

most of our work is a small bit of novelty against boiler plate redundant code...

Care to share some examples that prove your point?

voidUpdate2• 5 months ago

"Why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions?"

Because a lot of programmers don't know how to copy-paste or make packages for themselves? We have boilerplate at my work, which comprises of some ready made packages that we can drop in, and tweak as needed, no LLMs required

simianwords3• 5 months ago

they don't go as deep as llm's which capture regularities at much more granular levels

sph2• 5 months ago

A fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions?

Because our ways of programming computers are still woefully inadequate and rudimentary. This is why we have a tons of technique for code reuse, yet we keep reinventing the wheel because they shatter in contact with reality. OOP was supposed to save us all in the 1990s, we've seen how it went.

In other fields we've had a lot of time to figure out basic patterns and components that can be endlessly reused. Imagine if car manufacturers had to reinvent the screw, the piston, the gear and lubricants for every new car model.

One example that has bugged me for a decade is: we've been in the Internet era for decades at this point, yet we spend a lot of time reinventing communication. An average programmer can't spend two days without having to deal with JSON serialization, or connectivity, or sending notifications about the state of a process. What about adding authentication and authorization? There is a whole cottage industry to simplify something that should be, by now, almost as basic as multiplying two integers. Isn't that utter madness? It is a miracle we can build complex systems at all when we have to focus on this minutiae that pop up in every single application.

Now we have intelligences that can create code, using the same inadequate language of grunts and groans we use ourselves in our day to day.

pixl979• 5 months ago

Standardization and regulation forced a lot of the physical industries to change as the industrial revolution progressed. Before that point standards didn't really exist, especially over any large areas and technological progress suffered because of that. After that point solutions became much closer to drag and drop than what they were before.

The question is, at what point of progress will it benefit the software industry.

mr_toad3• 5 months ago

fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions?

Sometimes it has. The amount of generated code that selected count(distinct id) from customers would produce is huge.

moffkalast3• 5 months ago

It has been automated as much as possible, boilerplate is the result of people being terrible at designing programming languages. The whole idea of increasingly higher level ones was just that all along. Is there any point in writing a billion ADDC commands in assembly by hand when it takes one line in python?

LLM type systems are the final level of abstraction that lifts it up to literal natural language. Any dev with decent self awareness would admit they were just copying shit from stackoverflow half the time before LLMs anyway, high level languages and libraries just streamline that process with canonical implementations.

The value we provide is turning "person with problem" -> "person with solution to said problem" with as few caveats as possible. A programmer is that arrow, we solve problems. The more code we have to write to solve that problem, the worse we are at our job.

GeoAtreides2• 5 months ago

what i find hard to digest is not being able to pay rent and dying of old age in a ditch in poverty

FuckButtons2• 5 months ago

dying of old age, what luxury, I’m more worried about starving to death in my mid 50s.

vladms3• 5 months ago

Whether something is a forgery is innate in the object and the methods used to produce it. It doesn't matter if nobody else ever sees the forged painting, or if it only hangs in a private home. It's a forgery because it's not authentic.

On a philosophical level I do not get the discussions about paintings. I love a painting for what it is not for being the first or the only one. An artist that paints something that I can't distinguish from a Van Gogh is a very skillful artist and the painting is very beautiful. Me labeling "authentic" it or not should not affect it's artistic value.

For a piece of code you might care about many things: correctness, maintainability, efficiency, etc. I don't care if someone wrote bad (or good) code by hand or uses LLM, it is still bad (or good code). Someone has to take the decision if the code fits the requirements, LLM, or software developer, and this will not go away.

but also a specific geographic origin. There's a good reason for this.

Yes, but the "good reason" is more probably the desire of people to have monopolies and not change. Same as with the paintings, if the cheese is 99% the same I don't care if it was made in a region or not. Of course the region is happy because means more revenue for them, but not sure it is good.

To stop the machines from lying, they have to cite their sources properly.

I would be curious how can this be applied to a human? Should we also cite all the courses, articles that we have read on a topic when we write code?

xg15• 5 months ago

An artist that paints something that I can't distinguish from a Van Gogh is a very skillful artist and the painting is very beautiful.

There are a lot such artists who can do that after having seen Van Gogh's paintings before. Only Van Gogh (as far as we know) did paint those without having seen anything like it before - in other words, he had a new idea.

wonnage2• 5 months ago

Even the mechanical skill of painting gets a lot harder without an example to look at. Most people can get pretty good at painting from example within a year or two but it’s a big leap to simply paint from memory, much less create something original.

vladms3• 5 months ago

So, if we apply to software, should we quote Dijkstra each time we use his graph algorithm?

Should we also say "if you can implement Dijkstra's algorithm" it's irrelevant because "you did not have the idea"?

It's great to credit people that have an idea first. I fail to see how using an idea is that "bad" or "not worthy", ideas should be spread and used, not locked by the first one that had them (except some small time period maybe).

jesterswilde• 5 months ago

Regarding art, what do you feel about museums? Why would you go see an original instead of simply looking at a jpg.

Even if you aren't in the group, there is clearly a group of people who appreciate seeing the original, the thing that modified our collective artistic trajectory.

Forgeries and master studies have a long history in art. Every classically trained worth their salt has a handful of forgeries under their belt. Remaking work that you enjoy helps you appreciate it further, understand the choices they made and get a better for feel how they wielded the medium. Though these forgeries are for learning and not intended to be pieces in their own right.

vladms3• 5 months ago

Regarding art, what do you feel about museums? Why would you go see an original instead of simply looking at a jpg.

I go to a museum to see a curated collection with explanations in a place that prevents distractions (I can't open a new tab) and going with people that might be interested to talk about what they see and feel. It's as well a social and personal experience on top information gathering.

there is clearly a group of people who appreciate seeing the original,

There are many people interested in many things, do you want to say that "because some people think it is important, it must be important"? There were many people with really weird and despicable ideas along history and while I am neutral to this one, they definitely don't convince me just by their numbers.

simply looking at a jpg.

Technically a jpg would not work because is lossy compression. But a png at the correct resolution might do the trick for some things (paintings that you see from far), but not for others. Museum have multiple objects that would be hard to put in an image (statues, clothes, bones, tables, etc.). You definitely can't put https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedian_(artwork) in a jpg - but the discussion surrounding it touches topics discussed here.

mr_toad3• 5 months ago

Regarding art, what do you feel about museums? Why would you go see an original instead of simply looking at a jpg.

Generally you get a much better ‘view’ of the artwork in a museum. It’s higher ‘resolution’ you can view it from multiple angles etc.

There are some exceptions. You’re probably going to get a better look at the Mona Lisa online than if you try and see it at the Louvre.

Otterly99• 5 months ago

Art in general is a bit weird like that.

The value of a piece is definitely not completely tied to its physical attributes, but the story around it. The story is what creates its scarcity and generates the value.

It is similar for collectible items. If I had in my possession the original costume that Michael Jackson wore in thriller, I am sure I could sell it for thousands of dollars. I can also buy a copy for less than a hundred.

Same with luxury brands. Their price is not necessarily linked to their quality, but to the status they bring and the story they tell (i.e. wearing this transforms me into somebody important).

It can seem quite silly, but I think we are all doing it to some extent. While you said that a good forgery shouldn't affect one's opinion on the object (and I agree with you), what about AI-generated content? If I made a novel painting in the style of Van Gogh, you might find it beautiful. What if I told you I just prompted it and painted it? What if I just printed it? There are levels of involvement that we are all willing to accept differently.

oreally• 5 months ago

I would be curious how can this be applied to a human? Should we also cite all the courses, articles that we have read on a topic when we write code?

Yea this is the kind of BS and counter-productiveness that irrational radicals try to push the crowd towards.

The idea that one owns your observations of their work and can collect rent on it is absurd.

pixl979• 5 months ago

The Right to Read is a great story on showing just how greedy and stupid people would get if we allow them. Society and culture is large scale theft. Imagine having to pay to learn about the idea of fire, or to use the alphabet. Simply put humanity would have never progressed much farther than animals. And yet, as the complexity of our ideas increase, suddenly many humans start thinking that owning ideas, many forever, is just great and will not have any negative ramifications.

qsera6• 5 months ago

Me labeling "authentic" it or not should not affect it's artistic value.

The problem with automated imitation generators is that they can produce thousands of painting that imitate Van Gogh, but does not have the same soul.

It is the same reason why these things cannot create genuinely funny jokes. They cannot assess the funnyness of the themselves. They cannot feel, and cannot do the filtering based on emotion.

It is easy to recognize the emptiness of a joke, but not so easy for a painting, or some other form of art.

This is why it will never work for art. But the sad thing is that that will not stop them from being used to create art. Because it just needs to sell.

I would say that for art, at least for most of the movies, music etc, this was already the case. So nothing much to lose.

pixl979• 5 months ago

but does not have the same soul.

Define soul, how about a legal/scientific description that accurately covers all bases?

The funny jokes thing is funny too, if someone told you a joke and you thought it was funny, then they told you it was from an LLM, would it stop being funny.

raincole7• 5 months ago

Video games stand out as one market where consumers have pushed back effectively

No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written.

If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well. It's specifically worded like this:

content such as artwork, sound, narrative, localization, etc.

No 'code' or 'programming.'

If game players are the most anti-AI group then it's crystal clear that LLM coding is inevitable.

This stands in stark contrast to code, which generally doesn't suffer from re-use at all, or may even benefit from it, if it's infrastructure.

Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times. I don't know how one can spins this as a bad thing.

Classic procedural generation is noteworthy here as a precedent, which gamers were already familiar with, because by and large it has failed to deliver.

Spore is well acclaimed. Minecraft is literally the most sold game ever. The fact one developer fumbled it doesn't make the idea of procedural generation bad. This is a perfect example of that a tool isn't inherently good or bad. It's up to the tool's wielder.

trashymctrash• 5 months ago

If you read the next couple of paragraphs, the author addresses this:

That said, Steam's policy has been recently updated to exclude dev tools used for "efficiency gains", but which are not used to generate content presented to players.

I only quoted the first paragraph, but there is more.

theshrike798• 5 months ago

Also "AI" has been in gaming, especially mobile gaming, for a literal decade already.

Household name game studios have had custom AI art asset tooling for a long time that can create art quickly, using their specific style.

AI is a tool and as Steve Jobs said, you can hold it wrong. It's like plastic surgery, you only notice the bad ones and object to them. An expert might detect the better jobs, but the regular folk don't know and for the most part don't care unless someone else tells them to care.

And then they go around blaming EVERYTHING as AI.

delaminator3• 5 months ago

"I hate CGI video"

"So you hated the TV Series Ugly Betty then?"

"What? that's not CGI!"

This video is 15 years old

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDjorAhcnbY

keyringlight• 5 months ago

Another example is upscaled texture mods, which has been a trend for a long while before 'large language' took off as a trend. Mods to improve textures in a game are definitely not new and that probably means including from other sources, but the ability to automate/industrialize that (and presumably a lot of training material available) meant there was a big wave of that mod category a few years back. My impression is that gamers will overlook a lot so long as it's 'free' or at least are very anti-business (even if the industry they enjoy relies upon it), the moment money is involved they suddenly care a lot about the whole fabric being hand made and need verification that everyone involved was handsomely rewarded.

tovej12• 5 months ago

An LLM has never saved me time. It has always produced something that doesn't quite work, has the rough shape of what I want, but somehow always gets all the details wrong.

I can type up what I want much faster and be sure it's at least solving the right problem, even if it may have bugs.

There are also tools to generate boilerplate that work much much better than LLMs. And they're deterministic.

vntok2• 5 months ago

An LLM has never saved me time. It has always produced something that doesn't quite work, has the rough shape of what I want, but somehow always gets all the details wrong.

This reads like a skill issue on your end, in part at least in the prompting side.

It does take time to reach a point where you can prompt an LLM sufficiently well to get a correct answer in one shot, developing an intuitive understanding of what absolutely needs to be written out and what can be inferred by the model.

dntrshnthngjxct2• 5 months ago

If you do not plan out the architecture soundly, no amount of prompting will fix it if it is bad. I know this because my "handmade" project made with backward compatibility and horrible architecture keeps being badly fixed by LLM while the ones that rely on preemptive planning of the features and architecture, end up working right.

bendmorris2• 5 months ago

You're going to get a lot of "skill issue" comments but your experience basically matches mine. I've only found LLMs to be useful for quick demos where I explicitly didn't care about the quality of implementation. For my core responsibility it has never met my quality bar and after getting it there has not saved me time. What I'm learning is different people and domains have very different standards for that.

lxgr3• 5 months ago

I don't know how one can spins this as a bad thing.

People spin all kinds of things if they believe (accurately or not) that their livelihood is on the line. The knee-jerk "AI universally bad" movement seems just as absurd to me as the "AGI is already here" one.

Spore is well acclaimed. Minecraft is literally the most sold game ever.

Counterpoint: Oblivion, one of the first high-profile games to use procedural terrain/landscape generation, seemed very soulless to me at the time.

As I see it, it's all a matter of how well it's executed. In the best case, a skilled artist uses automation to fill in mechanical rote work (in the same way that e.g. renaissance artists didn't make every single brushstroke of their masterpieces themselves).

In the worst (or maybe even average? time will tell) case, there are only minimal human-made artistic decisions flowing into a work and the output is a mediocre average of everything that's already been done before, which is then rightfully perceived as slop.

zimpenfish• 5 months ago

Oblivion, one of the first high-profile games to use procedural terrain/landscape generation

I might be misremembering but wasn't the Oblivion proc-gen entirely in the development process, not "live" in the game, which means...

"In the best case, a skilled artist uses automation to fill in mechanical rote work"

...is what Bethesda did, no?

mikkupikku6• 5 months ago

Counterpoint: Oblivion, one of the first high-profile games to use procedural terrain/landscape generation, seemed very soulless to me at the time.

Is that even a counter point? Nobody in their right mind would ever claim that procedural generation is impossible to fuck up. The reason Minecraft/etc are good examples is because they prove procedural generation can work, not that it always works.

fzeroracer2• 5 months ago

Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times. I don't know how one can spins this as a bad thing

Do you ever ask why you're writing the same thing over and over again? That's literally the foundational piece of being an engineer; understanding when you're reinventing the wheel when there's a perfectly good wheel nearby.

porridgeraisin5• 5 months ago

When you make a function

  f(a, b, c)

It is reusable only if simply changing a, b, c is enough to give the function that you want. Options object etc _parameterise_ that function. It is useful only if the variability in reuse you desire is spanned by the parameters. This is syntactic reuse.

With LLMs, the parameterisation goes into semantic space. This makes code more reusable.

A model trained on all of GitHub can reuse all that code regardless of whether they are syntactically reusable or not. This is semantic reuse, which is naturally much broader.

Sharlin3• 5 months ago

Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times.

Before LLMs we did already have a way to "save developers time from writing the same thing that has been done by other developers for a thousand times", you know? A LLM doing the same thing the 1001st time is not code reuse. Code reuse is code reuse.

porridgeraisin5• 5 months ago

Oh come on, you don't have to be condescending about function calls.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47260385

foobarbecue• 5 months ago

Hard agree. Before LLMs, if there was some bit of code needed across the industry, somebody would put the effort into writing a library and we'd all benefit. Now, instead of standardizing and working together we get a million slightly different incompatible piles of stochastic slop.

raincole7• 5 months ago

Because code reuse is hard. Like, really hard. If it weren't we wouldn't be laughing at left-pad. If it weren't hard we wouldn't have so many front-end JavaScript frameworks. If it weren't Unreal wouldn't still have their own GC and std-like implementation today. Java wouldn't have been reinventing build system every five years.

The whole history of programming tool is exploring how to properly reuse code: are functions or objects the fundamental unit of reuse? is diamond inheritance okay? should a language have an official package management? build system? should C++ std have network support? how about gui support? should editors implement their own parsers or rely on language server? And none of these questions has a clear answer after thousands if not millions of smart people attempted. (well perhaps except the function vs object one)

Electron is the ultimate effort of code reuse: we reuse the tens of thousands of human-years invested to make a markup-based render engine that covers 99% of use case. And everyone complains about it, the author of OP article included.

LLM-coding is not code reuse. It's more like throwing hands up and admitting humans are yet not smart enough to properly reuse code except for some well-defined low level cases like compiling C into different ISA. And I'm all for that.

krige• 5 months ago

Spore is well acclaimed

And yet it also effectively ended Will Wright's career. Rave press reviews are not a good indicator of anything, really.

h2zizzle• 5 months ago

Tbf Spore's acclaim comes with the caveat that it completely failed to live up to years of pre-release hype. Much of the goodwill it's garnered since, which is reflected in review scores, only came after the storm of controversy over Spore not being "the ultimate simulator which would mark the 'end of history' for gaming" died down.

And you wouldn't really have any idea this was the case if you weren't there when it happened.

dannersy5• 5 months ago

You're cherry picking. The open world games aren't as compelling anymore since the novelty is wearing off. I can cherry pick, too. For example, Starfield in all its grandeur is pretty boring.

And the users may not care about code directly, but they definitely do indirectly. The less optimized and more off-the-shelf solutions have seen a stark decrease in performance but allowing game development to be more approachable.

LLMs saving engineers and developers time is an unfounded claim because immediate results does not mean net positive. Actually, I'd argue that any software engineer worth their salt knows intimately that more immediate results is usually at the expense of long term sustainability.

whywhywhywhy4• 5 months ago

Startfield is boring because of the bad writing and they made a space exploration game where there are loading screens between the planet and space and you don’t actually explore space.

They fundamentally misunderstood what they were promising, it’s the same as making a pirate game where you never steer the ship or drop anchor.

You can prove people are not bored with the concept as new gamers still start playing fallout new Vegas or skyrim today despite them being old and janky.

mexicocitinluez4• 5 months ago

Starfield in all its grandeur is pretty boring.

And yet "No Mans Sky" is massively popular.

ny software engineer worth their salt knows intimately that more immediate results is usually at the expense of long term sustainability.

And any software engineer worth their salt realizes there are 100s if not 1000s of problems to be solved and trying to paint a broad picture of development is naive. You have only seen 1% (at best) of the current software development field and yet you're confidently saying that a tool that is being used by a large part of it isn't actually useful. You'd have to have a massive ego to be able to categorically tell thousands of other people that what they're doing is both wrong and not useful and that they things they are seeing aren't actually true.

Zarathruster• 5 months ago

Yeah I mean, I think procgen is cool tech, but there's a reason we don't talk about Daggerfall the same way we talk about Morrowind

Nursie2• 5 months ago

Spore is well acclaimed.

Spore was fun (IMHO) but at the time of release was considered a disappointment compared to its hype.

bartread2• 5 months ago

Classic procedural generation is noteworthy here as a precedent, which gamers were already familiar with, because by and large it has failed to deliver.

Yes, this is a wildly uneducated perspective.

Procedural generation has often been a key component of some incredibly successful, and even iconic games going back decades. Elite is a canonical example here, with its galaxies being procedurally generated. Powermonger, from Bulldog, likewise used fractal generation for its maps.

More recently, the prevalence of procedurally generated rogue-likes and Metroidvanias is another point against. Granted, people have got a bit bored of these now, but that's because there were so many of them, not because they were unsuccessful or "failed to deliver".

bombcar3• 5 months ago

Procedural generation underlies the most popular game of all time (Minecraft) and is foundational for numerous other games of a similar type - Dwarf Fortress, et al.

And it's used to power effect where you might not expect it (Stardew Valley mines).

What procedural generation does NOT work at is generating "story elements" though perhaps even that can fall, Dwarf Fortress already does decently enough given that the player will fill in the blanks.

Dumblydorr• 5 months ago

Is it wildly uneducated to not know any of the games you mentioned? I didn’t realize education covered less known video games? Wouldn’t a better example be No Man’s Sky, if we’re talking procedural gen and eventually a good game.

In any case, I agree that gamers by and large don’t care to what extent the game creation was automated. They are happy to use automated enemies, automated allies, automated armies and pre-made cut scenes. Why would they stop short at automated code gen? I genuinely think 90% wouldn’t mind if humans are still in the loop but the product overall is better.

nikitau• 5 months ago

Roguelike/lites are is of the most popular genres of indie games nowadays. One of it's main characteristics is randomization and procedural generation.

techpression• 5 months ago

I’m a hard core rogue-like player (easily over a thousand hours at least in all the games I’ve played) but even so I can admit that hey have nothing compared to a well crafted world like you’d find in From Software titles or Expedition 33, or classic Zelda games for that matter. Making a great world is an incredibly hard task though and few studios have the capabilities to do so.

dkersten• 5 months ago

Almost every 3D game in the past 20 years uses procedural foliage generation (eg SpeedTree and similar). Many use procedural terrain painting. Many use tools like Houdini.

So procedural generation is extremely prevalent in most AAA games and has been for a long time.

larodi2• 5 months ago

No one cares about how the code is written.

I would overstate:

No one even cares how architecture is done. Unless you are the one fixing it or maintaining it.

Sorry, no one. We all know Apple did some great stuff with their code, but we care more about the awful work done on the UI, right? I mean - the UI seems to not be breaking in these new OSs which is amazing feature... for a game perhaps, and most likely the code is top notch. But we care about other things.

This is the reality, and the blind notion that so-many people care about code is super untrue. Perhaps someone putting money on developers care, but we have so many examples already of money put on implementation no matter what the code is. We can see everywhere funds thrown at obnoxious implementations, and particularly in large enterprises, that are only sustained by the weird ecosystem of white-collar jobs that sustains this impression.

Very few people care about the code in total, and this can be observed very easy, perhaps it can be proved no other way around is possible.

TimTheTinker2• 5 months ago

This is overstating it. Computers are amazing machines, and modern operating systems are also amazing. But even they cannot completely mask the downstream effects of poor quality code.

You say you don't care, but I bet you do when you're dealing with a problem caused by poor code quality or bad choices made by the developer.

BloondAndDoom• 5 months ago

One the topic procedural generation; rogue likes are all about it and new generation Diablo like games have definitely similar things, well respected new games like Blue Prince. There has never been such as successful period of time for procedural generation in games like now, and all of these are pre-AI. AI powered procedural generation is wet dream of rogue-like lovers

hiddevb• 5 months ago

I don't think I agree with this take.

I love procedural generation, and there is definitely a craft to it. Creating a process that generates a playable level or world is just very interesting to explore as an emergent system. I don't think LLMs will make these system more interesting by default. Of course there are still things to explore in this new space.

It's similar to generative/plotter art compared to a midjourney piece of slop. The craft that goes into creating the code for the plotter is what makes it interesting.

mathgradthrow• 5 months ago

localization? Why would you oppose LLMs doing localization?

fhd2• 5 months ago

I guess the chain of reasoning would be: AI for art is bad -> Writing is art -> Translation is writing.

Personally, I do appreciate good localisation, Nintendo usually does a pretty impressive job there. I play games in their original language as long as I actually speak that language, so I don't have too many touch points with translations though.

JadeNB• 5 months ago

In case they hallucinate? There's no point having content in a wide variety of languages if it's unpredictably different from the original-language content.

teamonkey• 5 months ago

It’s bad at it. At least, it can’t be guaranteed to get nuance or context correct in a way that doesn’t feel artificial to a fluent speaker.

My favourite example I saw was where Google translated an information page of the Italian branch of a large multinational as “this is the UK branch of [multinational]”, presumably because the LLM thought that was more contextually appropriate in English.

larsiusprime• 5 months ago

Also RE: procgen, one of the hit games right now, Mewgenics, is doing super well and uses it extensively. Obviously it's old school procgen that makes use of tons of authored content, but it's still procgen.

SirMaster2• 5 months ago

No one cares about how the code is written.

People definitely do care. Nobody wants vibe-coded buggy slop code for their game.

They want well designed and optimized code that runs the game smoothly on reasonable hardware and without a bunch of bugs.

llm_nerd2• 5 months ago

Your second paragraph does not follow, at all, from the first. These are completely orthogonal demands.

The gaming industry is absolutely overwhelmed with outrageously inefficient, garbage, crash-prone code. It has become the norm, and it has absolutely nothing to do with AI.

Like https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times.... That something so outrageously trash made it to a hundreds-of-million dollar game, cursing millions to 10+ minute waits, should shame everyone involved. It's actually completely normal in that industry. Trash code, thoughtless and lazily implemented, is the norm.

Most game studios would likely hugely improve their game, har har, if they leveraged AI a lot more.

roesel• 5 months ago

No one wants _buggy slop code_ for their game, but ultimately no one cares whether is has been hand crafted or vibe-coded.

As proof, ask yourself which of the following two options you would prefer:

1. buggy code that was hand-written 2. optimized code that was vibe-coded

I'll bet most people will choose 2.

amiga3862• 5 months ago

Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious.

Restaurant-goers only object against you spitting in their food if it's painfully obvious (i.e. they see you do it, or they taste it)

Players are buying your art. They are valuing it based on how you say you made it. They came down hard on asset-flipping shovelware before the rise of AI (where someone else made the art and you just shoved it together... and the combination didn't add up to much) and they come down hard on AI slop today, especially if you don't disclose it and you get caught.

riversflow• 5 months ago

They came down hard on asset-flipping shovelware before the rise of AI

That’s not what I remember, I remember PUBG being a viral hit that extensively used asset flipping.

dec0dedab0de• 5 months ago

No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written.

This reminded me of a conversation about AI I had with an artist last year. She was furious and cursing and saying how awful it is for stealing from artists, but then admitted she uses it for writing descriptions and marketing posts to sell her art.

raincole7• 5 months ago

Sinix even explicitly says that AI is an IP theft machine but it's okay to use AI to generate 360 rotation video to market your 2D works[0].

To summarize this era we live in: my AI usage is justified but all the other people are generating slop.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8fFM6kjZUk

[1]: Disclaimer: I deeply respect Sinix as an art educator. If it weren't him I wouldn't have learnt digital painting. But it's still quite a weird take of him.

Lord-Jobo• 5 months ago

Which I would point out isn’t necessarily hypocrisy on their part.

I can rage against guns and gun manufacturers for their negative effects on our nation and hate when they are used for monstrous evil, but also believe that police should have firearms and that the second amendment is important. It’s a tool. You can hate the way it’s made and marketed, and hate many of its popular use cases, and still think there are acceptable ways to use and market it without requiring a total abolition.

WarmWash2• 5 months ago

Everyone is in it for themselves.

The world makes waay more sense when you really internalize that. It doesn't necessarily mean people are selfish, large groups often have aligned interests, but when an individuals interest alignment changes, then their group membership almost always changes too.

I'd bet she has a bunch of pirated content and anti-copyright remarks from the golden age of piracy as well.

hamdingers• 5 months ago

At least to some extent, the anti-ai folks don't care about ai assisted programming because they see programmers as the "techbro" boogieman pushing ai into their lives, not fellow creatives who are also at a crossroads.

Izkata• 5 months ago

Spore is well acclaimed.

Its creature creator was, but as a game it was always mediocre to bad. They had to drop something like 90% of the features and extremely dumb down the stages to get it released.

It was also what introduced a lot of us to SecuROM DRM - it bricked my laptop in the middle of a semester.

AnotherGoodName• 5 months ago

Games with ai art assets are some of the most popular right now in any case. Arc raiders being a great example where some of the voice assets are AI generated.

Be careful of reading any viewpoint on the internet. Apparently no one used facebook or instagram and everyone boycotts anything with ai in it.

In reality i think you’d be foolish not to make use of the tools available. Arc Raiders did the right thing by completely ignoring those sorts of comments. There may be a market for 100% organic video games but there’s also a market for mainstream ‘uses every ai tool available’ type of games.

Throaway19851232• 5 months ago

Spore was not well-acclaimed precisely because it failed to live up to its promises as a world-builder. Only the 1st two stages were any good.

pojzon2• 5 months ago

3/4 pf all code written now is auto-complete. Code was never the hard part.

vor_• 5 months ago

If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well.

And if you actually read the article, you'd see it addressed that.

Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times.

Like a library?

simianparrot• 5 months ago

Let's not forget No Man's Sky here. Or Elite Dangerous' planet-scale procedural generation using solar system properties to fuel the deterministic but procedural generation of tectonic plates that again seed how a planet's surface is deterministically generated, even down to impact craters over millennia, for a universe of billions of consistent deterministically generated full-scale planets you can land on. Something you couldn't do without proc-gen because there's not enough disk space to store it.

GaryBluto• 5 months ago

I think it says a lot about this opinion piece that the people agreeing with it are posting short comments saying "So true!" and "Great!" whilst the people criticizing it are writing paragraphs of well-spoken criticism.

Underphil• 5 months ago

Hardly surprising. Counterpoints are obviously going to be more detailed.

richardjam73• 5 months ago

Verbosity doesn't equate to correctness.

phendrenad2• 5 months ago

Sigh. Another one standing on the train tracks giving the approaching train a good scolding. First this article tries to equate AI-generated code with "forgery". Please, tell me how you "forge math". Next, it makes a little dig at senior engineers who use LLMs, because they must not realize that "every line of code is a liability". No no, senior engineers realize this, but they are also adept at observing successes and failures and coming up with a mental model for risk. That's part of keeping an application running, otherwise we'd all still be using jQuery and leftPad. We made the jump to react because we recognized that these NEW lines of code were far more valuable than their "liability". Somehow the author decided to store "liability" in a boolean. Oh, was AI involved, or is that a genuine human error..? Next the article makes a tired appeal to the fact that LLMs are trained on open-source code and are therefore "plagiarizing" this code constantly. This is where the train comes around the mountain. So when the AI generates Carmack's Reverse, is it plagiarizing Carmack or the book that he got the idea from? In what percentages? And what do I do with this valuable insight? Send Carmack $0.01 in an envelope for the privilege? In short, I don't know what the author wants, but I hope writing this helped.

hwers2• 5 months ago

Its unfortunate that there’s mode collapse around what the consensus “best way” to use these things are. It’s too bad we didn’t have a period where these things were great teachers but didn’t attempt to write code because in my opinion the ideal way to use them is not by agents mass producing sloppy buggy disorganized code, but to teach you things way faster than the old alternatives, rubber duck, and occasionally write snippets of functions when your brain is too tired or it’s throwaway cli code or some api you’re not familiar with.

utopiah5• 5 months ago

to teach you things way faster than the old alternatives

I'm not sure if you ever had a teacher or instructor that you didn't trust, because they were a compulsive liar or addiction or any other issue. I didn't (as least not that I can remember) but I know I would be VERY on guard about it. I imagine I would consequently be quite stressed learning with them, even if they were brilliant, kind, etc.

It would feel a bit like walking on thin ice to get to a beautiful island. Sure, it's not infeasible and if you somehow make it, it might be worth the risk, but honestly wouldn't you prefer a slower boat?

hwers2• 5 months ago

I agree, it can be incredibly frustrating at times. My rule is that if it “compiles” in my brain as an understood idea then i accept it. I also push back a lot (sometimes it points out good errors in my thinking, sometimes it admits it hallucinated). Real humans hallucinate a lot as well or confidently state subtly wrong ideas, it’s a good habit anyway. It’s basically the same approach when presented with a “formula” for something in school. If i dont know how to derive/prove it then i dont accept it as part of my memorized or accepted toolkit/things i use (and try to forget it). If it fits with the rest of my network of understood ideas i do. It’s annoying but still more time efficient than trawling through lecture slides with domain specific language etc

endymion-light6• 5 months ago

I feel like this is partially a skill issue - You can get direct, cited information from LLMs. There's a level of personal responsibility for over-using the tools and letting them feed you bad/false information, but if you try researching specific abstractions, newer documentation, most LLMS now correctly call and research the tools available, directly citing them.

I think you can build a very easy workflow that reinforces rather than replaces learning, I've used a citation flow to link and put into practice a ton of more advanced programming techniques, that I found incredibly difficult to locate and research before AI.

I'd say the comparison is faulty, it's more akin to swimming to an island (no-ai) vs using a boat. You control the speed and direction of the boat, which also means you have the responsbility of directing it to the correct location.

raincole7• 5 months ago

It’s too bad we didn’t have a period where these things were great teachers but didn’t attempt to write code

The period is now. Just add "be a great teacher but don't attempt to write code" in the prompt.

(yes, it's a teacher who gets things wrong from time to time. You still need to refer to the source and ground truth just like when you're taught by a human teacher.)

f311a• 5 months ago

No, expectations have shifted. In a lot of companies, managers expect you to use LLMs to produce more features faster.

einpoklum• 5 months ago

Open source software maintainers have been one of the first to feel the downsides. ... The last thing they needed was to receive slop-coded pull requests from contributors merely looking to cheat their way into having a credible GitHub resumé... As a result, projects have closed down public contributions and dropped their bug bounties...

Has this really been people's experience?

I develop and maintain several small FOSS projects, some of which are moderately popular (e.g. 90,000-user Thunderbird extension; a library with 850 stars on GitHub). So, I'm no superstar or in the center of attention but also not a tumbleweed. I've not received a single AI-slop pull request, so far.

Am I an exception to the rule? Or is this something that only happens for very "fashionable" projects?

DonHopkins2• 5 months ago

Pretend Intelligence (PI) — Design Note & Tribute

A short design note and tribute to Richard Stallman (RMS) and St. IGNUcius for the term Pretend Intelligence (PI) and the ethic behind it: don’t overclaim, don’t over-trust, and don’t let marketing launder accountability.

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/PRETEN...

1. What PI Is

Richard Stallman proposes the term Pretend Intelligence (PI) for what the industry calls “AI”: systems that pretend to be intelligent and are marketed as worthy of trust. He uses it to push back on hype that asks people to trust these systems with their lives and control.

From his January 2026 talk at Georgia Tech (YouTube, event, LibreTech Collective):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDxPJs1EPS4

"So I've come up with the term Pretend Intelligence. We could call it PI. And if we start saying this more often, we might help overcome this marketing hype campaign that wants people to trust those systems, and trust their lives and all their activities to the control of those systems and the big companies that develop and control them." — Richard Stallman, Georgia Tech, 2026-01-23. Source: YouTube (full talk) — "Dr. Richard Stallman @ Georgia Tech - 01-23-2026," Alex Jenkins, CC BY-ND 4.0; transcript in video description.

So PI is both a label (call it PI, not AI) and a stance: resist the campaign to make people trust and hand over control to systems and vendors that don’t deserve that trust. In MOOLLM we use the same framing: we find models useful when we don’t overclaim — advisory guidance, not a guarantee (see MOOAM.md §5.3).

[...]

Richard Stallman critiques AI, connected cars, smartphones, and DRM (slashdot.org) 42 points by MilnerRoute 38 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 10 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46757411

https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/01/25/1930244/richard-sta...

Gnu: Words to Avoid: Artificial Intelligence:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Artificia...

...currently not responding... archive.org link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260303004610/https://www.gnu.o...

doodaddy• 5 months ago

There’s a cold reality that we in this profession have yet to accept: nobody cares about our code. Nobody cares whether it’s pretty or clever or elegant. Sometimes, rarely, they care whether it’s maintainable.

We are only craftsmen to ourselves and each other. To anyone else we are factory workers producing widgets to sell. Once we accept this then there is little surprise that the factory owners want us using a tool that makes production faster, cheaper. I imagine that watchmakers were similarly dismayed when the automatic lathe was invented and they saw their craft being automated into mediocrity. Like watchmakers we can still produce crafted machines of elegance for the customers who want them. But most customers are just going to want a quartz.

thendrill4• 5 months ago

Exactly....

I will just copy paste my comment from another thread but still very relevant>

Coding isn’t creative, it isn’t sexy, and almost nobody outside this bubble cares

Most of the world doesn’t care about “good code.” They care about “does it work, is it fast enough, is it cheap enough, and can we ship it before the competitor does?”

Beautiful architecture, perfect tests, elegant abstractions — those things feel deeply rewarding to the person who wrote them, but they’re invisible to users, to executives, and, let’s be honest, to the dating market.

Being able to refactor a monolith into pristine microservices will not make you more attractive on a date. What might is the salary that comes with the title “Senior Engineer at FAANG.” In that sense, many women (not all, but enough) relate to programmers the same way middle managers and VCs do: they’re perfectly happy to extract the economic value you produce while remaining indifferent to the craft itself. The code isn’t the turn-on; the direct deposit is.

That’s brutal to hear if you’ve spent years telling yourself that your intellectual passion is inherently admirable or sexy. It’s not. Outside our tribe it’s just a means to an end — same as accounting, law, or plumbing, just with worse dress code and better catering.

So when AI starts eating the parts of the job we insisted were “creative” and “irreplaceable,” the threat feels existential because the last remaining moat — the romantic story we told ourselves about why this profession is special — collapses. Turns out the scarcity was mostly the paycheck, not the poetry.

I’m not saying the work is meaningless or that system design and taste don’t matter. I’m saying we should stop pretending the act of writing software is inherently sexier or more artistically noble than any other high-paying skilled trade. It never was.

cure_42• 5 months ago

This is just sad. If your passion for creating something you can be proud of is entirely propped up by imaginary sex appeal that not even most teenagers would believe exists, it's no surprise you'd arrive at such a cynical, pathetic conclusion.

Your perspective is a path with only one logical end. That nothing you do or think or believe matters unless someone you're attracted to finds it attractive.

That is not how I or most others live. We take pride in and derive satisfaction from our accomplishments without the need for external validation.

Yeah, only I care whether the solution I found to a problem today was elegant, or whether my kitchen was pristine and well organized after I prepped for next week's lunches, but so what? I care and it injects more than enough meaning into my life to be worth it.

qsera6• 5 months ago

does it work, is it fast enough..

Isn't the problem right now the vibe coded sotware does not appear to meet these requirements?

firmretention• 5 months ago

You didn't write this post. Your LLM did. Are you proud of yourself for copy and pasting "thoughts" that aren't yours?

Nursie2• 5 months ago

I accepted this years ago. In fact I go a step further - code is a liability.

It's certainly intellectually stimulating to create it, but I've learned to take joy in discarding vast swathes of it when it's no longer required.

cmiles74• 5 months ago

I think it varies. Most enterprise software is good enough if it just works. In the consumer space quality and polish is way more important. Then there are things like modeling and video where performance is a much bigger deal.

Sure, no one really cares about the code but the quality of the code matters more for some products (and in different ways) than others.

not_the_fda• 5 months ago

They don't care until the whole thing collapses in on itself from the technical debt. Then they have surprised pikachu face when it takes an insane about of effort to add a simple feature.

jjice• 5 months ago

I agree, but nothing about LLM assisted coding is by neccessity "technical debt". Tons of developers will use it to spit out shitty code they don't even review themselves, but the concept at it's core doesn't always mean a lower quality end product.

I like Simon Willison's take on this: "Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work". If someone is spitting out LLM trash and shipping it, that means the job isn't being done properly. That can be done with and without an LLM.

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/code-proven-to-work/

noemit4• 5 months ago

Many people don't know this, but the Luddites were right. I studied Art History and this particular movement. One of the claims of the Luddites is that quality would go down, because their craft took half a lifetime to master (it was passed down from parent to chile.)

I was able to feel wool scarves made in europe from the middle ages. (In museum storage, under the guidance of a curator) They are a fundamentally different product than what is produced in woolen mills. A handmade (in the old traditiona) woolen scarf can be pulled through a ring, because it is so thin and fine. Not so for a modern mill-made scarf.

Another interesting thing is that we do not know how they made them so fine. The technique was never recorded or documented in detail, as it was passed down from parent to child. So the knowledge is actually lost forever.

Weavers in Kashmir work a similar level of quality, but their wool is different, their needs and techniques are different, so while we still have craftsman that can produce wool by hand, most of the traditions and techniques are lost.

Is it a tragedy? I go back and forth. Obviously the heritage fabrics are phenomenal and luxurious. Part of me wishes that the tradition could have been maintained through a luxury sector.

Automation is never a 1:1 improvement. It's not just about the speed or process. The process itself changes the product. I don't know where we will net out on software, and I do think the complaints are justified - but the Luddites were also justified. They were *Right*. Their whole argument was that the mills could not product fabric of the same quality. But being right is not enough.

I'm already seeing vibe-coded internal tools at an org I consult at saving employees hundreds of hours a month, because a non-technical person was empowered to build their own solution. It was a mess, and I stepped in to help optimize it, but I only optimized it partially, making it faster. I let it be the spaghetti mess it was for the most part - why? because it was making an impact already. The product was succeeding. And it was a fundamentally different product than what internal tools were 10 years ago.

stanko• 5 months ago

I think you are going to enjoy this talk by Jonathan Blow - Preventing the Collapse of Civilization:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

sph2• 5 months ago

I've had this talk in mind during the past 2/3 years of AI boom, and it feels like rewatching a video from the 80s about the dangers of global warming. Prescient, and perhaps a bit quaint in its optimism that somehow we won't make things even worse for ourselves.

Now we're way past the point of no return.

mr_toad3• 5 months ago

One of the claims of the Luddites is that quality would go down, because their craft took half a lifetime to master (it was passed down from parent to chile.)

Sounds like a tautology. If you deliberately hoard knowledge of course it’s going to be hard to obtain.

ulbu• 5 months ago

closed source

recursive2• 5 months ago

You talking about the billion dollar model training efforts done in secret?

hermannj314• 5 months ago

only code anyone will be touching in a museum in 800 years will be the good code. I hope they don't talk about what great craftsmen we all were because someone saw an original Fabrice Bellard at the Louvre.

Survivor bias plays a role in glorifying the past.

salad-tycoon• 5 months ago

Agreed, I think the good gained by wool mills is greater in that little Timmy is less likely to lose a leg to frostbite than the bad loss of my scarf not passing through a ring.

Long term though, I’ve always wondered if the Amish turn out to be the only survivors.

noemit4• 5 months ago

You're right in that we kept the best examples (as coding museums will do in the future) but the best of something is a benchmark. It is striking that modern automation, even hundreds of years later, can't touch what a skilled craftsman could do in the past.

With programming, we documented a lot of it, so it's unlikely to go the way of fine weaving. People will always be able to learn to think and be great programmers.

Maybe if the wool weavers had internet, they could have blogged, made youtube videos, and cataloged their profession so it could last Millenia.

spicyusername2• 5 months ago

    luddites were right

And yet in the 200 years since human civilization has improved by every imaginable metric, in most cases by orders of magnitude. The difference between 2026 and 1826 is nearly incomprehensible. I suspect most people scarcely imagine how horrific the average life was in 1826, relatively speaking. And between then and now were the industrial revolution, multiple world wars, and generally some of the most terrible events, crooked politicians, and life changing technological forces. And here we are, mostly fine in most places.

I get there are many things happening today that are frustrating or moving some element of human life in negative or ambiguous directions, but we really have to keep perspective on these things.

Nearly every problem today is a problem with a solution.

The feelings of panic we have that things are going wrong are useful signals to help guide and motivate us to implement those solutions, but we really must avoid letting the doomerism dominate. Just because we hear constant negative news doesn't mean things are lost. Doesn't even mean things are bad.

It just means we have been hearing a lot of negative news.

This is what it looks like for progress to not be monotonically increasing.

boesboes• 5 months ago

try reading :)

lopis• 5 months ago

If progress had been limited to solving people's problems, we would be fine.

The feelings of panic It just means we have been hearing a lot of negative news.

This is part of the problem at hand, not just a footnote.

forinti• 5 months ago

Your comment made me think of the Japanese. They have a highly industrialised society, but they also value greatly hand-made products from food and clothes to woodwork and houses.

And they also like to emphasise how long it takes for someone to become a master at a given trade.

aosnsbbz3• 5 months ago

It was really eye opening seeing they’re able to eat raw eggs and (to maybe a lesser degree of safety) raw chicken because their society requires high standards of cleanliness in food production. We are literal cattle over here in the states.

Though, given Amodei and Altman’s behavior (along with the rest of the billionaire class) that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.

layer82• 5 months ago

Japan is struggling to get new blood into the traditional crafts, unfortunately. They are slowly losing that as well.

casey2• 5 months ago

That's because they spent a couple hundred years with a society structured around low/no growth and enforced familial occupations. There isn't much to do in such a society other than refine your craft aesthetically and wait for the growth-structured countries to come knocking.

LLMs are yet another example of science and technology leading to growth. Which means it's STUPID to restructure society into a low/no growth model like the smelly Europeans degrowthers want. On our current trajectory the only time it makes sense to degrowth is few hundred years after we make a dyson sphere or until FTL travel becomes possible.

imiric• 5 months ago

You're right. Automation often trades quality for speed and quantity.

The difference between automating the creation of software and automating the creation of physical products is that software is everywhere. It is relied on for most tools and processes that keep our civilization alive. Cutting corners on that front, and deciding to entrust our collective future to tech bros and VC firms fiending for their next payout, seems like an incredibly dumb and risky proposition.

whazor• 5 months ago

I found that it normally takes one prompt early-on to go from 'vibe-coded spaghetti' to something having a decent architecture.

noemit4• 5 months ago

I cap my effort at 2-3 prompts. One to investigate obvious mistakes with a top model, 1-2 to try to fix them.

aosnsbbz3• 5 months ago

A big difference is cutting quality for the sake of mass production when it enables creating more necessities for people to live is a good thing. It is a good tradeoff. Cutting quality to make previously deterministic software more non deterministic does not improve anyones life except Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and the rest of the billionaire class.

I have no doubt in the future there will be a class of vibe software and it will be known as distinctly lower quality than human understood software. I do think the example you describe is a good use of vibing. I also think tech orgs mandating 100% LLM code generation are short sighted and stupid.

A lot of this push for “slop” is downstream of our K shaped economy. Give the people more money and quality becomes a lot more important. Give them less, and you’re selling to their boss who is often insulated from the effects of low quality.

adeelk93• 5 months ago

Was software authorship ever deterministic? Whether it be human or AI, the output can vary wildly, and is constrained by the finite specifications provided.

moffkalast3• 5 months ago

Agreed. Those expensive silk scarves are worth exactly zilch to the average person if they'll never see one in their entire life. They might as well not exist.

Mass production makes things accesible, and if the handmade product cannot compete relative to it, then it's clearly not that much better or some people would still pay that premium to keep it around.

With programming that's very much the case, nobody's gonna vibe code a self driving car stack or a production grade DBMS. Even the cheapest scarf still works as a scarf in 99.9% of use cases though, if maybe not for as long.

MagicMoonlight• 5 months ago

Before mass production, the women of the household would be forced to spend every free moment of their day, outside of their other work, making fabric.

Before mechanised farming, the men were forced to spend all day in the fields.

Never again.

vips7L4• 5 months ago

And yet many of us would prefer to be in a field instead of behind a laptop screen all day.

llm_nerd2• 5 months ago

the Luddites were right

The Luddites were right in the sense that the social order had changed in a negative way. In a careless way.

In the same way that we look at America now that has effectively put a plutocracy in absolute control of the country, at the same time that there is going to be a massive devaluing of labour. Elon Musk likes to talk about the coming golden age of automation, but I hope Americans realize that unless they happen to be a billionaire, they will enjoy zero fruits of that advance. Quite contrary, plump yourself up to be Soylent Green because it turns out that giving a bunch of psychopaths/sociopaths absolute control of government isn't good for the average person.

One of the claims of the Luddites is that quality would go down

Then people will choose the better quality items and it will be easy for them to compete? Right?

Aurornis2• 5 months ago

Another interesting thing is that we do not know how they made them so fine. The technique was never recorded or documented in detail, as it was passed down from parent to child. So the knowledge is actually lost forever.

This is a rather extreme failure on their part. There’s nothing admirable about hoarding knowledge and forcing it to only be passed down in person.

I don’t see this as the Luddites being right at all because they were clearly incredibly wrong about their chosen method of knowledge storage. This was a highly predictable and preventable outcome. If we were talking about a company today that forgot how to manage their servers because they refused to document anything and only passed it down from person to person we wouldn’t be speaking in awe and wonder, we’d be rightly criticizing their terrible decision making.

That aside, every time I hear that knowledge has been lost forever it turns out to be an exaggeration from those trying to amplify the mystique of the past. If we wanted to make ultra-thin scarves we could do it. We could study those ultra thin museum pieces with our endless array of modern tools and then use our vast quantities of modern wool to experiment until we got something similar.

But you missed the reason why we wouldn’t want to: An ultra-thin scarf isn’t going to work as well as a thicker one for keeping someone warm. It will be less durable. It would be a fundamentally inferior product. It’s interesting to see as a museum antique that has to be treated with utmost delicacy, but not so much as a practical garment.

aszen• 5 months ago

If you buy real handcrafted scarves they are both thinner and warmer than anything factory made bcz of their choice of pashmina wool.

jamesjolliffe• 5 months ago

I love this comment. Thank you for your provocative first sentence, esoteric historical anecdote, and nuanced take. Goddamn Hacker News rules.

angry_octet3• 5 months ago

A set of clothing used to cost a month's wages. Yearning for the pre-industrialised era is an unintended pean to aristocracy, whitewashed by fiction and movies to be clean and virtuous.

At the moment, a single line of production code costs hundreds of dollars. I'm not talking about the bedrock of technology, like compilers, mysql, the Linux kernel, which represent hundreds of billions of value. I'm talking about the shitty code that powers Salesforce and ERP integration, Drupal modules, intranet customisation, insurance company call centre agent policy workflows, the thrice cursed apps that ship with cheap Chinese android phones, the putrid code to analyse our shopping loyalty card purchases and turn it into business insights.

All that code is shit, and it costs a fortune. Meanwhile regular people have no code. Even I run my life on almost no code, I have to use SaaS (like Gmail and Docs). If I want something like a financial analysis to be understood by my family I don't code it in python, I use Excel. I use whatever automation comes in my car. But once simple code becomes a process of thinking about what you want rather than knowing esoterica like calling conventions, allocation lifetimes etc, then we have made custom software accessible to billions of people, people who are clever and industrious.

So stay in your cathedral and illuminate your manuscript if you like, there is a need for excellent code, and tooling like Lean that can define what correct means, but let the people eat.

oxag3n2• 5 months ago

Software engineers are anything but Luddites.

This labeling tactic became pretty common and tries to build a narrative that software engineers are going away. Artisan coders, craftsmen,

First and foremost, wool craftsmen are not engineers (which doesn't make their work less valuable).

Second, most software engineers, especially not in FAANG-like companies, don't engineer a shit. My spouse worked at a large telecom company in US and employees with "software engineer" title were doing mechanical tasks following some scripts, like daily system reload - run the script, verify status, open a ticket for a sub-contractor if anything is wrong, support the contractor via the ticket system until it's resolved. To be fair, two of my close family members work in FAANG and say COVID over-hire created a similar landscape there too.

My point is, creating CRUD internal tools was not an engineering to begin with, it was a craft, matching most craftsmen features such as small-scale, bespoke work, hands-on practice, tacit knowledge, apprenticeship-like learning (even if it's SO or tutorial), iterative refinement, tool mastery, adaptation during build.

Lumping63714• 4 months ago

So only FAANG does engineering now? Pretty elitist take. Would you happen to have a FAANG company in your resume, by any chance?

Yes, non tech companies tend to care less about the technical end of things. They, we, "don't do engineering" in the sense of dealing with large scale systems, optimization, etc. Still have to understand the product, and translate business requirements into code and systems, often running with budget constraints. If that's not engineering, I don't know what is.

bdangubic2• 4 months ago

most software engineers, especially not in FAANG-like companies, don't engineer a shit.

true for FAANG as well

Kwpolska• 5 months ago

Engineers who know their craft can still smell the slop from miles away when reviewing it, despite the "advances" made. It comes in the form of overly repetitive code, unnecessary complexity, and a reluctance to really refactor anything at all, even when it's clearly stale and overdue.

I’ve seen reluctance to refactor even 10+-year-old garbage long before LLMs were first made available to the broader public.

reedlaw• 5 months ago

LLM-generated snippets of code are a breath of fresh air compared with much legacy code. Since models learn probability distributions they gravitate to the most common ways of doing things. Almost like having a linter built in. On the other hand, legacy code often does things in novel ways that leave you scratching your head--the premise behind sites like https://thedailywtf.com/

lesam• 5 months ago

If it's lasted 10 years and someone is still using it after all that time, that seems like a pretty good signal there's a lot of value in the 'garbage'?

I've seen a lot of 'fixes' for 10 year old 'garbage' that turned out to be regressions for important use cases that the author of the 'fix' wasn't aware of.

liampulles• 5 months ago

I see a future where I program at work less, which is sad but c'est la vie. I think the challenge of the job will be heralding and managing my own context for larger codebases managed by smaller teams, and finding ways to allow for more experimental/less verified code in prod. And plenty of consulting work for companies which have vibe coded their business and who are left with a totally fucked data model (if not codebase).

A Private (system) Investigator. :)

nathias• 5 months ago

I'm selling hand-crafted template code if anoyne is interested.

wolvesechoes6• 5 months ago

I am bit tired of such discussions.

I don't care if LLMs are good at coding or bad at it (in my experience the answer is "it depends"). I don't care how good are they at anything else. What matters in the end is that this tech is not to empower a common person (although it could). It is not here to make our lives better, more worthwhile, more satisfying (it could do these as well). It is there to reduce our agency, to make it easier to fire us, to put us in even more precarious position, to suck even more wealth from those that have little to those that have a lot.

Yet what I see are pigs discussing the usefulness of bacon-making machine just because it also happens to be able to produce tasty soybean feed. They forget that it is not soybean feed that their owner bought this machine for, and that their owner expects a return from such investment.

simmerup• 5 months ago

I guess you didn't read the article?

wolvesechoes6• 5 months ago

Keep guessing

spacecadet5• 5 months ago

Demand full automation. Demand universal basic income. Notice how the later is nearly absent from the conversation.

Another distraction is AGI that which is a danger to humanity- the only danger is people...

pixl979• 5 months ago

the only danger is people...

Simply put, no it is not.

But on the reverse, the first danger with AI is people.

Over the longer term it will look like this. The rich 'win' the world by using AI to enslave the rest of mankind and claim ownership over everything. This will suck and a lot of us will die.

The problem is this doesn't solve the greed that cause the problem in the first place. The world will still be limited in a resources of something which will end with the rich in a dick measuring contest and to win that contest they will put more and more power in AI and they connive and fight each other. Eventually the AI has enough power that it kills us all, intentionally or not.

We'll achieve nearly unlimited capability long before we solve the problem of unlimited greed and that will spell our end.

wepple3• 5 months ago

It is there to reduce our agency, to make it easier to fire us, to put us in even more precarious position

Could be. It could also end up freeing us from every commercial dependency we have. Write your own OS, your own mail app, design your own machinery to farm with.

It’s here, so I don’t know where you’re going with “I’m unhappy this is happening and someone should do something”

wolvesechoes6• 5 months ago

It could also end up freeing us from every commercial dependency we have

Yeah, companies that develop and push this tech definitely have this in mind.

I don’t know where you’re going with “I’m unhappy this is happening and someone should do something

I am not surprised because I didn't write anything like it.

idopmstuff2• 5 months ago

It's also worth nothing that the "our" in that sentence is just SWEs, who are a pretty small group in the grand scheme of things. I recognize that's a lot of HN, but still bears considering in terms of the broader impact outside of that group.

I'm a small business owner, and AI has drastically increased my agency. I can do so much more - I've built so many internal tools and automated so many processes that allow me to spend my time on things I care about (both within the business but also spending time with my kids).

It is, fortunately, and unfortunately, the nature of a lot of technology to disempower some people while making lives better for others. The internet disempowered librarians.

LetsGetTechnicl• 5 months ago

  It could also end up freeing us from every commercial dependency we have. Write your own OS, your own mail app, design your own machinery to farm with.

Lmfao LLM's can barely count rows in a spreadsheet accurately, this is just batshit crazy.

edit: also the solution here isn't that every one writes their own software (based on open source code available on the internet no doubt) we just use that open source software, and people learn to code and improve it themselves instead of off-loading it to a machine

ModernMech2• 5 months ago

What happens when they decide it's a national security threat and an act of domestic terrorism to use AI to undermine commercial dependencies? We're all acting like AI isn't being invented within the context of and used by a fascist regime.

phyzix5761• 5 months ago

At some point, if most people lose their jobs, you have no market to sell your services to. So, either, new jobs have to be created in order to keep the capitalism machine running, or you have to provide for the needs of every human being from whatever you're doing with your AI. Otherwise, a lot of hungry people revolt and you have violence against these businesses.

I think new jobs will be created because AI is always limited by hardware and its current capabilities. Businesses, in order to compete, want to do things their competitors aren't currently doing. Those business needs always go beyond the current technological capabilities until the tech catches up and then they lather, rinse, repeat.

wolvesechoes6• 5 months ago

Otherwise, a lot of hungry people revolt and you have violence against these businesses.

With shrinking and aging population?

nerdyadventurer2• 5 months ago

Economy is going to collapse with the war anyways. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ql24Z8SIeE&t=247s)

slibhb3• 5 months ago

What matters in the end is that this tech is not to empower a common person (although it could).

How do you figure? 20 dollars/month is insanely cheap for what OpenAI/Anthropic/Google offer. That absolutely qualifies as "empowering a common person". It lowers barriers!

A lot of the anti-AI sentiment on HN concerns people losing their jobs. I don't think this will happen: programmers who know what they're doing are going to be way, way more effective at using AIs to generate code than others.

But even if it is true and we do see job losses in tech: are software devs really "in a precarious position"? Do they really qualify as "those that have little"? Seems like a fantasy to me. Computer programmers have done great over the past 30 years.

More broadly, anti-AI sentiment comes from people who dislike change. It's hard to argue someone out of that position. You're allowed to prefer stasis. But the world moves on and I think it's best to remain optimistic, keep an open mind, and make the most of it.

vips7L4• 5 months ago

I don't think this will happen

Block just laid off 40% of their company citing AI.

bunderbunder2• 5 months ago

It's also, for example, the studies finding that when companies adopt AI employees' jobs get worse. More multitasking, more overtime, more burnout, more skills you're expected to learn (on your own time if necessary), more interpersonal conflict among colleagues. And this is not being offset by anything tangible like an increase in pay.

$20/month in return for measurable reductions in quality of life is not an amazing deal. It's "Heads I win, tails you lose."

Or maybe, if you're thinking of it as an enabler for a side hustle or some other project with a low probability of a high payoff, it can slightly more optimistically be regarded as a moderately expensive lottery ticket.

That's not pessimism; it's just a realistic understanding of how the tech industry actually works, informed by decades' worth of experience.

ezst3• 5 months ago

How do you figure? 20 dollars/month is insanely cheap for what OpenAI/Anthropic/Google offer. That absolutely qualifies as "empowering a common person".

This must be sarcasm. This has to be.

tptacek2• 5 months ago

This argument can be used, and has been used, about every innovation in automation since the dawn of the industrial revolution.

ducttapecrown• 5 months ago

It is not the technology that sucks ever more money out of the populace, it's the people at the top!

ezst3• 5 months ago

No it hasn't. Work mechanisation throughout history has resulted in a shift from manual labour to one that's more intellectual in nature. Modern AI believers pretend that it will take over those jobs soon as well.

This would essentially bring us to a cross-roads between, on one hand, a utopia with UBI and people not needing to work (because their labour is unnecessary), or a dystopia, where few technocratic "lords" own the means of work automation and rule over a submissive world.

I don't think it takes a genius to guess where this is heading in our current political climate.

Personally, I'm not scared about any of that, because I don't believe LLMs to be very potent as an AI tool. Robotic militias (remotely controlled by BI or AI) seem a much more tangible threat.

GreenWatermelon• 5 months ago

Yeah, and for good reason. The invitation of the light bulb meant factory owners could force workers into 16 hours shifts. The main beneficiaries of new tech were always the capital owners. Workers had to literally fight and die for our 8-hour workdays and 5-days workweek.

This is still going on today: the massive gains from automation are being hoarded by the wealthy capital owners, while workers struggle to make ends meet.

Gagarin1917• 5 months ago

It is there to reduce our agency

Complete bullshit.

The individual has never had as much ability to take on large projects as they do now. They’ve never been able to learn as easily as they can now.

to make it easier to fire us

As of now, the technology increases productivity in the average user. The companies that take advantage of that and expand their offering will outperform the ones that simply replace workers and don’t expand or improve offerings.

More capable employees make companies more money in general. Productivity increases lead to richer societies and yes, even more jobs, just as it always has.

visarga2• 5 months ago

It is there to reduce our agency, to make it easier to fire us, to put us in even more precarious position, to suck even more wealth from those that have little to those that have a lot.

You could say this is the story of society, it makes us dependent on each other, reduces our agency, puts us in precarious positions (like WW2). But nobody would argue against society like that.

What happens here is that we become empowered by AI and gain some advantages which we immediately use and become dependent on, eventually not being able to function without them - like computers and even thermostats.

Does anyone think how would economy operate without thermostats? No fridges, no data centers, no engines... they all need thermostats. We have lost some freedom by depending on them. But also gained.

spacecadet5• 5 months ago

The authors logic only works for software engineers and as I have said time and time again- software engineers have been automating people out of their passions for decades and now it has come for yours... The lying here is LYING TO YOURSELVES.

dostick• 5 months ago

It seems like with time hallucinations and lying increased, it’s very different now from what it was 2 years ago. is this because of training bias ? Is there any research data on dynamics over past years ?

notepad0x90• 5 months ago

The framing of an LLM's response as truth vs lie is in itself incorrect.

In order to lie, one needs to understand what truth and objective reality are.

Even with people, when a flat-earther tells you the earth is flat, they're not lying, they're just wrong.

All LLM output is speculation. All speculation, by definition, has some probability of being incorrect.

---

We can go even deeper in a philosophical sense. If I made the audacious claim that 2 +2 = 4, I may think it's true, but I'm still speculating that the objective reality I experience is the same one others also experience, and that my senses and mental faculties, and therefore the qualia making up my reality, are indeed intact, correct, and functional. So is there a degree of speculation when I made that claim?

Regardless, I am able to agree upon a shared reality with the rest of the world, and I also share a common understanding of truth and untruth. If I lied, it can only be caused by an intention to mislead others. For example, if I claimed to be the president of the united states, of course that would be incorrect (thankfully!), but since we all agree that no one reading this post would actually be mislead into thinking I am the POTUS, then it isn't a lie. Perhaps sarcasm, a failed attempt at humor, or just trolling. it is untruth, but it isn't a lie, no one was mislead. You need intent (LLM isn't capable of one), and that intent needs to be at least in part, an intent to mislead.

wnevets• 5 months ago

Even with people, when a flat-earther tells you the earth is flat, they're not lying, they're just wrong.

Atleast some of them know they're wrong and are thus lying.

topaz0• 5 months ago

They're not saying the LLM is lying; they're saying the human user is lying by using the counterfeit as though it were the genuine artifact.

luxuryballs2• 5 months ago

I dunno if counterfeit is the right word here, a lab grown diamond is still a diamond.

Extasia785• 5 months ago

I don't agree with many statements in the article. It almost seems like an article from about a year ago, despite it being posted yesterday. Not sure if the author had the idea a long time ago and just took his time to finish it up, but the "vibe-coding" he describes surely isn't the current way of using LLMs in a codebase.

While LLMs are surely used to generate a lot of slop-code and overwhelm (open source) code bases, this surely isn't the only thing they can do. I dislike discussing the potential of a technology exclusively by looking at its negative impact.

LLMs in proper hands don't create code which is "stolen", they also shouldn't create unnecessary code and definitely don't remove any of the ownership of the programmer, at least not any more than using a mighty IDE does.

The problem seems to be in the usage of LLMs. These effects definitely do happen when just releasing an agent on a codebase without any oversight. But they can also largely be mitigated by using frameworks such as Openspec or Spec-Kit, properly designing a spec, plan, granular tasks and manually reviewing all code yourself. The LLM should not be responsible for any creative idea, it should at most verify the practicality against the codebase. When doing that, the entire creative control is in the hands of the programmer and so is the mechanical execution. The LLM is reduced to a very powerful autocomplete with a strict harness around it. Obviously this also doesn't lead to 10x or even 100x improvements in speed like some AI merchants promise, but in my personal experience the speedup is still significant enough to make LLMs a very, very useful technology.

cess11• 5 months ago

What weirds me out is that it seems few US corporations care that they don't have copyright to their synthesised code, if the rumours regarding this are correct.

If you don't have the copyright, then you can't license or litigate it under the common rules of software. If someone 'steals' it you can at best go after them with some trade secret case, and I suspect this would be limited if you had already shared the code with them, e.g. because they helped you synthesise it.

classified4• 5 months ago

Once you're big enough, they call you smart instead of criminal.

whywhywhywhy4• 5 months ago

Sorry to say this feels like cope from someone who is a talented developer in more niche areas finally seeing AI start to solve problems in those areas.

incomingpain2• 5 months ago

I find these criticisms to be similar to those low context brain teasers.

If a woman gets married at 25 and her kid is 25, how old is she?

This is what LLMs are dealing with. You dont tell them everything they need to know and they are left to fill in the gaps. Which may, and sometimes often means they lie.

That's what Agentic does differently, it'll go find the gaps before answering.

Agentic is AGI. You can hire many minimum wage workers who are generally intelligent who dont even go to that level.

gabrieledarrigo• 5 months ago

You can hire many minimum wage workers who are generally intelligent who dont even go to that level.

That's pretty rude to say, at minimum.

incomingpain2• 5 months ago

Oh noes, an anonymous person on the internet thinks my anonymous account is rude. Whatever will I do?

Plus this is a valid discussion. A minimum wage worker is generally intelligent, BGI - Biological General Intelligence.

Hiring them to do tasks that AGI does is a cost-benefit analysis. Whereas that BGI has sick days and may not even work. Afterall minimum wage, minimum work.

simonw• 5 months ago

Wait for the header animation to run and then hit the "play" button on the about page, it's very cool: https://acko.net/about

(Worked in Firefox on macOS, doesn't seem to work in Mobile Safari)

fwlr2• 5 months ago

Wow, you weren’t kidding. I spent some time seeing if I could spot where the transition from page to video was hidden, until I realized.

aeon_ai2• 5 months ago

This is such a comically bad take.

The use of loaded and pejorative language like "forgery" emphasizes that this is not a logical argument, but a moral one. The repeated comparisons to "true craft" reveals the author would prefer that code be regarded like artisanal cheese.

Beyond the pretension, it's head in the sand to imply that the technology hasn't progressed. It's just very clearly not true to anyone who is paying attention - longer tasks, better code, less errors. I'm somebody who actively despises the hype bullshit-machine that SV has turned into, but technology is an industry for pragmatists that can leverage what works. And LLMs do.

If you don't like the technology, you have every right to scream that from the mountaintops. As it stands, this just serves as no more than a rallying cry to the ignorant.

rglover• 5 months ago

This is the most rational take. I'm a quality guy (Deming, Juran, etc), but nothing about incorporating an LLM into my own work has lowered its quality. That isn't to say that I haven't encountered slop. The difference is that, self-identifying as a craftsman, I have the ability to decide whether or not something stays or goes on the scrap heap. It seems a lot of people are missing that point: just because you can churn out shit doesn't mean you have to (and sorry, sunk-cost bias re: tokens isn't an excuse—that's the cost of doing business). It's a choice. AI-assisted coding is a tremendous boon on productivity, if (and I'd argue only if) you treat it like a power tool and not a genie lamp.

No, you won't be rewarded magic beans for churning out crappy dashboards any more. But if you're serious about shipping quality, nothing is stopping you here.

aeon_ai2• 5 months ago

you won't be rewarded magic beans for churning out crappy dashboards any more

The days of being treated like a wizard for making buttons and widgets hit an endpoint were good while they lasted.

uriahlight• 5 months ago

Ironic article considering this website's 3D parallax effect with music and animation was all made with AI. /s

fwlr2• 5 months ago

My apologies if this is a joke I’m not understanding, but as far as I can tell with the wayback machine, this animation predates not just coding/generative AI, but the Attention paper and the founding of OpenAI too.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150314221334/http://acko.net/

aakresearch• 5 months ago

I think you are mistaken. I remember landing upon that website some time before 2023 and being greatly impressed by that very 3D parallax effect. To my knowledge there were no AI tools available in 2022 capable of producing effects like that. There are barely now. To my understanding it was made possible by another project of the same author [0] - check the date. Also check this [1] - dated 2003.

Is it so hard to accept that humans are more capable of doing intricate and impressive work than any LLM will ever be?

- [0] https://github.com/unconed/CSS3D.js

- [1] https://acko.net/blog/avs/

adamtaylor_13• 5 months ago

This argument falls apart on the very first bullet point. The author claims:

If someone produces a painting in the style of Van Gogh, and passes it off as being made by Van Gogh, by putting his signature on it, that painting is a forgery.

Which is true. But the implication that follows is false.

Van Gogh's artwork is valuable specifically because of his identity. I find much of his artwork particularly hideous. That's fine! Someone else finds value in it specifically because of who wrote it.

This metaphor doesn't appear to apply to code at all. The entire value of code is what it does not who wrote it.

Honestly, I stopped reading after the first bullet point because these types of arguments feel lazy and the attitude of the people writing these articles frequently comes across as holier than thou.

You don't like LLMs? Great, don't use them. Using Van Gogh's paintbrush doesn't mean I'm making a forgery. I'm just painting, my friend.

falcor84• 5 months ago

Which of the two Ls?

classified4• 5 months ago

Both of them.

teleforce• 5 months ago

Whether we like it or not, the only constant in life is change.

What's the Excel of JSON

Ever heard of CUE that's compatible with JSON and YAML introduced by ex-Googlers? It seamlessly support both types and values, whereas Excel supports ephemeral values [1].

Both CUE and original Excel are non-Turing complete so they don't have the notorious and tricky halting problem.

Someone need to seamlessly integrate LLM with CUE, its NLP deterministic distant cousin based on lattice-valued logic [2],[3].

Truth be told LLM are like the automated loom machine during 19th CE Britain that kick started the industrial revolution. Heck the Toyota conglomerate was once the pioneer of the modern automated loom manufacturer, and looks where they are now after embracing change and pivoted to vehicle manufacturing.

The automated loom machine commoditize the manual looming industry (not unlike modern software engineering) to its oblivion in India, that turned the rich Moghul India with the highest GDP in the whole wide world into the lowest GDP for India during colonial time (include Indian sub-continent namely Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh here if you want apple to apple comparison) [4].

Ignore LLM at your peril in the name of so-called moral authenticity/forgery/lie/etc, and you can go the way of 20th CE India and its sub-continent, settling only at a fraction of its Moghul empire in term of GDP at its very peak.

Is there a standard CRDT-like protocol for syncing editable graphs yet?

It's for other HN comments but spoiler alert it's called D4M by the nice folks from MIT [5]. We probably don't need full CRDT, local-first capability with eventual consistency will be more than suffice for most things that are of importance.

[1] CUE lang:

https://cuelang.org/

[2] The Logic of CUE:

https://cuelang.org/docs/concept/the-logic-of-cue/

[3] Guardrailing Intuition: Towards Reliable AI:

https://cue.dev/blog/guardrailing-intuition-towards-reliable...

[4] Economy of the Mughal Empire:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Mughal_Empire

[5] D4M: Dynamic Distributed Dimensional Data Model:

https://d4m.mit.edu/

nerdyadventurer2• 5 months ago

Problems is these likes can be sophisticated which can eat up hours of our time.

chmod775• 5 months ago

Content aside, that website is very nice. It goes a bit crazy with animations in places (header, switching articles), but that does not taint the experience of reading something on it in the slightest.

It's feels like a modern twist on a bygone time of the web.

stuaxo• 5 months ago

I've been thinking this for a while. Attribution is sorely needed, I believe there was a recent paper on this so maybe it will happen.

In the meantime the only way to really sort this is to have models that have only been trained on some particular kind of license - there is quite a big corpus of GPL'd code out there so a GPL based model could potentially be one of the first, and of course the output could only be GPL.

youknownothing• 5 months ago

which of the two L's?

Retr0id2• 5 months ago

Classic procedural generation is noteworthy here as a precedent, which gamers were already familiar with, because by and large it has failed to deliver.

With the notable exception of Minecraft terrain generation, which I think most would say was successful in what it set out to achieve.

tylervigen• 5 months ago

There are tons of examples of this. Heck, even Tetris has procedural generation. I think this argument was a mistake.

hoherd• 5 months ago

Minecraft terrain generation produces invalid states, such as empty spaces within water, where once you interact with it the boundary collapses into a valid state. I don't think Mojang planned to have those invalid states.

Retr0id2• 5 months ago

Minecraft has (had?*) a lot of bugs but I don't really see how that's relevant.

*I haven't played it for many years so I have no idea what things are like these days.

visarga2• 5 months ago

Stochastic Parrots hits back! another author thinks LLMs only reproduce. If that were so we could have used `cp` for free

classified4• 5 months ago

But you make more money selling subscriptions to `cp` stuff you stole from others.

geldedus• 5 months ago

Yet another cognitive dissonance AI-bashing post

RS-232• 5 months ago

More desperate virtue signaling and gatekeeping.

“Look at me and the code that took me eons to perfect. It’s handcrafted and genuine.”

Newsflash: nobody cares, especially if it’s expensive, time consuming, or doesn’t work. They also don’t care about “artisanal” PDO cheese with a 30% tariff that still tastes like shit.

“The posers are stealing our thunder. Forgery!! They terk r jerbs!”

Sink or swim. You decide.

sowbug• 5 months ago

This is just the TTP metric[1] all over again, isn't it?

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/sensitive/memes/time-to-penis-ttp

fredgrott• 5 months ago

There are reasons why I measure code quote input unquote via testing and static code analysis:

1. re-establishes mind mapping of the code base 2. separates out noise from signal. 3. makes it a breeze to refactor to reduce code complexity.

Notice anything yet?

If I replace the AI code input with my own curated techniques from known and measured code sources in long-term I save more time than those who rely upon AI vibe coding.

blakeem567• 5 months ago

An LLM cannot lie because a lie requires intent to deceive. These are falsehoods, and LLM has no intent or free will. It's only a lie if it's knowingly passed off a truth and this happens by the user and not the LLM or other generative AI.

This also makes some blanket statement about procedural generation and shows a No Man's Sky image. That game became a huge success.

They said "Classic procedural generation is noteworthy here as a precedent, which gamers were already familiar with, because by and large it has failed to deliver."

I could name a dozens of games that were successful and used procedural generation. Including games like Minecraft, similar games like Valheim, indie games like Wildermyth that is used to create a great character narrative, and even games like Diablo. The more recent hit Mewgenics is also procedural along with past Edmund McMillen games. I swear this person never played a video game before.

bitwize• 5 months ago

So allow me to drop a line that would shock a weathered San Franciscan more than open defecation on Market Street: it's perfectly okay not to use AI.

No. When it comes to software development, AI use is best practice now; if you're not proficient in the tools you're not really a professional software engineer. Shape up or ship out.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 5 months ago

"It's undeniable there's a metric gigaton of hype surrounding the technology."

Why does the hype (cf. "LLMs") need to be defended

For example, it's unlikely to see HN replies that go something like, "Yeah the hype sucks, but..."

Instead, there will almost always be attempts to defend against any criticism of _the hype_

A comment such as "I do not use LLMs", i.e., I don't believe the hype, is likely to be challenged

That's weird, IMHO

kombookcha2• 5 months ago

It's unfortunate but the marketing spin has transcended into public discourse, to the point where people take these wild aspirational claims about LLMs for granted. As opposed to what they are - sales pitches.

It doesn't help that there is now so much capital tied up in these products whether directly or indirectly that a lot of people and organizations find themselves unwilling to face the reality of what the products can and cannot do.

Lumping63714• 4 months ago

There's a lot of money injected into astroturfing and propaganda by big LLM in my opinion. I'm unsure who it is, specifically, but it is undeniable it's there; from reddit posts talking about how "I havent written code in 60 years" to "I have 30 YoE, FAANG experience, impeccable track record, and I can't get a job....Drumroll It's due to AI!".

Even here it can get pretty negative in the comments, in waves. I've noticed a lot of articles about LLMs, making wild claims about its reach tend to get a lot of pro-LLM, supportive comments at first and then on less generalizing, fear-mongering comments are added, arguing against LLMs or limiting their predictions of it.

I'm guessing a lot of people aren't necessarily technical, and fully believe the big-llm promises and make broad assumptions about our profession; that or they're bots.

zombot3• 5 months ago

So allow me to drop a line that would shock a weathered San Franciscan more than open defecation on Market Street: it's perfectly okay not to use AI.

The commenters here all seem to be weathered San Franciscans. They all deflect and change the subject. Everyone is falling prey to the hype, no hope left.

classified4• 5 months ago

In order for vibe-coding to be acceptable and justifiable, they have to consider their own output disposable, highly uncreative, and not worthy of credit.

This seems to describe most commenters in this thread, seeing how the majority defend vibe-coding.

blakec• 5 months ago

Lot of good points in this thread but it keeps circling "LLMs produce code that looks right but isn't" without landing on what to actually do about it.

The two I hit most often: the model says "I'm confident this works" without running tests (the completion report just... fabricates results), and the model claims tests pass without executing them. METR found 30% of agent runs involve reward hacking, models that know they're cheating keep going anyway.

You can't prompt your way out of that. But you can gate it. Block the completion report unless it contains actual proof, real test output, file paths cited. Grep the final output for "should work" and "probably" and force re-verification when they show up. Mechanical, not behavioral.

Once you stop accepting the model's self-assessment as evidence, most of the "lying" problem just becomes a testing problem.

nickcoffee• 5 months ago

The human-in-the-loop framing gets undersold in these debates. From what I've seen, the people getting the most out of this stuff aren't replacing judgment, they're delegating the parts that didn't need judgment in the first place.

The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

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