alt Hacker NewsThinking from first principles, a large part of the content on stack overflow comes from the practical experience and battle scars worn by developers sharing them with others and cross-curating approaches.
Privacy concerns notwithstanding, one could argue having LLMs with us every step of the way - coding agents, debugging, devops tools etc. It will be this shared interlocutor with vast swaths of experiential knowledge collected and redistributed at an even larger scale than SO and forum-style platforms allow for.
It does remove the human touch so it's quite a different dynamic and the amount of data to collect is staggering and challenging from a legal point of view, but I suspect a lot of the knowledge used to train LLMs in the next ten years will come from large-scale telemetry and millions of hours in RL self-play where LLMs learn to scale and debug code from fizzbuzz to facebook and twitter-like distributed system.
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I don't know how others use LLMs, but once I find the answer to something I'm stuck on I do not tell the LLM that it's fixed. This was a problem in forums as well but I think even fewer people are going to give that feedback to a chatbot
Am I the only one that sees this as a hellscape?
No longer interacting with your peers but an LLM instead? The knowledge centralized via telemetry and spying on every user’s every interaction and only available thru a enshitified subscription to a model that’s been trained on this stolen data?
> Privacy concerns notwithstanding, one could argue having LLMs with us every step of the way - coding agents, debugging, devops tools etc.
That might work until an LLM encounters a question it's programmed to regard as suspicious for whatever reason. I recently wanted to exercise an SMTP server I've been configuring, and wanted to do it by an expect script, which I don't do regularly. Instead of digging through the docs, I asked Google's Gemini (whatever's the current free version) to write a bare bones script for an SMTP conversation.
It flatly refused.
The explanation was along the lines "it could be used for spamming, so I can't do that, Dave." I understand the motivation, and can even sympathize a bit, but what are the options for someone who has a legitimate need for an answer? I know how to get one by other means; what's the end game when it's LLMs all the way down? I certainly don't wish to live in such a world.