alt Hacker News> Because nobody actually wants a "web app". People want food, love, sex or: solutions.
Talk about a nonsensical non-sequitur, but I’ll bite. People want those to be deterministic too, to a large extent.
When people cook a meal with the same ingredients and the same times and processes (like parameters to a function), they expect it to taste about the same, they never expect to cook a pizza and take a salad out of the oven.
When they have sex, people expect to ejaculate and feel good, not have their intercourse morph into a drag race with a clown half-way though.
And when they want a “solution”, they want it to be reliable and trustworthy, not have it shit the bed unpredictably.
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> When they have sex, people expect to ejaculate and feel good, not have their intercourse morph into a drag race with a clown half-way though.
speak for yourself
Ways to start my morning...reading "When they have sex, people expect to ejaculate and feel good, not have their intercourse morph into a drag race with a clown half-way though."
Stellar description.
This thing of 'look, nobody cares about the details really, they just care about the solution' is a meme that I think will be here forever in software. It was here before LLMs, they're now just the current socially accepted legitimacy vehicle for the meme.
In the end, useful stuff is built by people caring about the details. This will always be true. I think in LLMs and broadly AI people see an escape valve from that where the thinking about the details can be taken off their hands, and that's appealing, but it won't work in exactly the same way that having a human take the details off your hands doesn't usually work that well unless you yourself understand the details to a large extent (not necessarily down to the atoms, but at the point of abstraction where it matters, which in software is mostly about deterministically how do the logic flows of the thing actually work and why).
I think a lot of people just don't intuit this. An illustrative analogy might be something else creative, like music. Imagine the conversation where you're writing a song and discussing some fine point of detail like the lyrics, should I have this or that line in there, and ask someone's opinion, and their answer is 'well listen, I don't really know about lyrics and all of that, but I know all that really matters in the end is the vibe of the song'. That contributes about the same level of usefulness as talking about how software users are ultimately looking for 'solutions' without talking about the details of said software.
Exactly this. The perfect example is Google Assistant for me. It's such a terrible service because it's so indeterministic. One day it happily answers your basic question with a smile, and when you need it most it doesn't even try and only comes up with "Sorry I don't understand".
When products have limitations, those are usually acceptable to me if I know what they are or if I can find out what the breaking point is.
If the breaking point was me speaking a bit unclearly, I'd speak more clearly. If the breaking point was complex questions, I'd ask simpler ones. If the breaking point is truly random, I simply stop using the service because it's unpredictable and frustrating.