So I guess everyone uses LLMs to think now

The people I work with outsourcing their research to LLMs are doing wonders. The people I work with outsourcing the line-by-line level of coding to LLMs are hugely productive. It's honestly amazing to see what is possible.

The people I work with outsourcing their thinking to LLMs are struggling, and if I'm not careful they're creating more work for me in review and feedback. The people I work with outsourcing their codebases entirely to LLMs are producing some of the worst software I have ever used.

> i truly have tried to use llms before, just to try it out. nothing i was going to publish as research, but i really couldn't and it left me never wanting to use an llm again

>

> i don't know how more people don't experience this, but staring at an llms output be confidently wrong eventually to get there in the process, or looking at the commands its running and see some really stupid things its doing drives me crazy to the point i will just stop it before it answers, i cannot handle something being that confidently wrong (even though it'll probably still get there in the end)

When people say stuff like this, that they've used LLMs before and hated it, and then list off a bunch of stuff about how they're confidently wrong and all this other stuff, my only question is when? When was the last time that they used an LLM? three months ago, six months ago, one year ago, two years ago?

I think there is a lot of interesting discussion around the topic of offloading thinking to AI and the consequences, but blogs like this don’t scratch that itch. This falls more into the category of virtue signaling and pick-a-side division that does well on social media but has little relevance to real life.

The core piece of this blog post is that the author doesn’t use LLMs for fun work because they do the fun work to have fun. Okay. Nothing new there. I some times grow vegetables myself and eat them instead of buying them from the store because I think it’s fun. I don’t feel the need to go around sneering at people who offloaded all of their vegetable growing to someone else. I also don’t like associating with people who get smugly superior and condescending about their personal gardening.

In fact, even though I enjoy gardening and nerding out about it, I don’t like talking to the gardening snobs who have turned it into a part of their personality and who think it makes them superior to the lowly people who don’t garden.

And that’s the exact vibe I get from the articles like this, where the topic drifts into virtue signaling and criticizing the LLM users.

There have been an exhausting supply of these articles for the past few years, and there’s frequently a section like this in each of them:

> i truly have tried to use llms before, just to try it out. nothing i was going to publish as research, but i really couldn't and it left me never wanting to use an llm again

I won’t judge anybody for not using LLMs or for using LLMs for their fun work. Do whatever you want for fun! Don’t let virtue signaling posts like this one shame you into thinking there’s a right way or wrong way to enjoy your fun project time.

That said, I find that to get good discussion about the pros and cons of AI on our thinking you have to look beyond these people who just don’t get LLMs at all. You can’t really understand this topic until you’ve seen both sides.

I wouldn’t find it interesting to read an article on this topic from someone who never learned to program but only uses LLMs to write code because they do not understand the other side. Imagine seeing “I tried to learn how to code once but it didn’t really click for me. It left me never wanting to write code again.” Then they went on to talk about the brilliance of vibecoding with some collected examples of hand-written code causing problems. This article is essentially that, but from the other perspective.

"for me, at least, the process of getting somewhere is more interesting then the end product." -- that's perfectly fine for a hobby, but not for an engineer job.

Coding is now a lot like playing chess.

It's been decades since beating the best computer at chess was possible. But people still play, because they find it fun to get better at.

The major difference being that winning a chess game doesn't yield a permanent artifact that is useful, generally.

It's fine this person wants to journal about the things they do privately for fun. They clearly aren't writing for others to read their work.

Some of us capitalize the first letter of every sentence. Wild.

When as an industry you are collectively doing a trillion in CapEx every year, you are just going to do your best to brainwash the living hell out of everyone to adopt your crap because you really want your money back. Everyone (and their agency and their ability to think even) be damned. The consequences for society? Whatever. There's money you need to make. It's all about the Benjamins, baby. And so, all day long spam, spam, spam. All we do here at Hacker News is talk about these companies. Even worse in other sides of the Internet, there are practical death cults that have formed around all this. It's madness.

I have the same thought on all these "I don't use AI" posts: I would like to not use an LLM too, but I'd soon be out of a job if I didn't. It's an exhausting place to be and I wish I were closer to retirement.

> don't know how more people don't experience this, but staring at an llms output be confidently wrong eventually to get there in the process, or looking at the commands its running and see some really stupid things its doing drives me crazy to the point i will just stop it before it answers, i cannot handle something being that confidently wrong (even though it'll probably still get there in the end)

They do? Internet is filled with people complaining about it

> eMudhra. you know, the company who had their CA private key as the number Four. this wasn't found by an ai, but just a human using a old ass library made by google called paranoid_crypto to scan through keys for fun out of curiosity

https://github.com/google/paranoid_crypto

> The goal is to increase the confidence in cryptography use cases inside and outside Google. With Paranoid, any cryptographic artifact can be tested, but its primary motivation is to detect the usage of weak third party hardware or software black boxes.

So google didn't use their own paranoid_crypto lib to check the key before adding it to the Chrome trusted certs.

i don't know how more people don't experience this, but staring at an llms output be confidently wrong eventually to get there in the process, or looking at the commands its running and see some really stupid things its doing drives me crazy to the point i will just stop it before it answers, i cannot handle something being that confidently wrong (even though it'll probably still get there in the end)

Let's talk about being "confidently wrong." I don't know if the original author is reading comments here, but if so: how long has it been since you had the experience above?

Have you noticed it happens less and less often as time goes on? And that the models take less time and fewer trials to "get there in the end?"

Because the rate of change is the important part, not the state of the art at the particular moment in time when you formed your opinion.

The tone of this article is "I guess everyone else is stupid now", but his reason for not using LLMs is that he likes doing it the hard way.

Good for him but I don't think that justifies such a snooty position.

I will agree that it kinda sucks not being able to claim credit for your work. I've vibe coded or vibe finished several apps now that are extremely impressive, better than the existing alternatives. But I feel weird saying "I made this" because it feels like I barely did anything.

So I guess everyone uses IDE to code now. I consider anybody not using vim to be a complete moron. Auto complete and syntax highlighting are for the weak minded. /s