alt Hacker NewsI've noticed several companies replacing deterministic systems in their support flows with a LLM version that is slower and worse. Many interfaces simply aren't better with AI added
Replies
I am seeing similar things in just regular tooling and development. Things that can be solved deterministically or what would have been a simple CLI 5 years ago are now an LLM integration.
Instead of using the LLM to create deterministic tools, we are using LLMs to replace them. It's completely backwards and I don't know why people (especially high ranking people in my company at least) seem to think that this is the way forward. No, I don't want a whole CI pipeline that is just LLM prompts. Yes it's very easy, but it's expensive, slow and prone to failure in ways you can't even predict.
Same things like using LLMs for the code review process. What would have been a simple linting rule is now a pass with an LLM rather than using the LLM to create the linting rule, which it is absolutely excellent at creating.
My management is pushing for us to come up with ideas on where we can use LLMs in our product. The whole team has been very resistant for this exact reason. Anything we can think of will only make things worse, and we’ve already been told anything above a 1-2% failure rate is unacceptable. If anything we need more structure and standards to hit that, not less.
Basically, folks nowadays think that this article[1] was aspirational rather than a cautionary tale.
Unwise design. “It talks, CSRs talk, it’s the same thing”. The fact CSRs talk is incidental. Nobody contacts support to talk. Customer service is a kind of “exception handler” for that which you failed to automate. If your system exists, works and is legible, conversation is avoided.
> replacing deterministic systems in their support flows
The issue is, they don't want to provide "better" support but "cheaper" support. Imagine a trained agent that understands the big picture. Now imagine a company investing in humans to use AI to retrieve knowledge that the human can easily identify as being relevant or not, and using that knowledge to better aid the customer.
Right now AI is being sold as a "we don't need support personells" instead of "how can we provide better service." For a lot of products, better service will probably not matter as "cheaper" products will win most of the time.
Most people don't want to pay for better. They want to pay the same for something better, which is what companies are not investing their time in figuring out how to use AI properly for I think.
That's the completely opposite of what people should do. The laborious task of programing logical work flows is the only reason AI is useful for me.
As a contractor who built a lot of predictive systems and workflows in last three years I can tell you that quite often there is a specific request to put AI into it even when it is not needed and would objectively make the system worse, slower and more expensive.
The AI psychosis is a real thing.
Yeah but did number go up? Can CEO check a box to show investors?
Now that’s real value.
With inexperienced or non-technical people, talking to them about AI can be very confusing, as a LOT of their "AI" usecases are basically they didn't realize or know how to write a program for this straightforward logic.
The real best case scenario is using LLMs to help build deterministic systems. Instead of asking an LLM to do some task that you know will be repeated, instead ask the LLM to build a program (Python script or whatever) to do the task.