I’m glad Linus is pragmatic about this, ethical questions aside LLM’s are a highly valuable tool in software development and they are likely to continue to improve. Any engineer fighting the use of LLM’s will ultimately find that their peers are achieving more in a shorter time then they are. Open weight LLM’s have also come a long way and are already good enough for daily use.
Any engineer fighting the use of LLM’s will ultimately find that their peers are achieving more in a shorter time then they are.
How do you measure that?
I am asking because I tried all the AI coding tools (copilot, cursor, claude code, etc.), even the paid versions, to find the utopia that doubles my productivity where lots of people are talking about. But everytime I find they take more time to generate code than me typing it, they rarely get things right the first time, they produce way more code than needed (which is much more to reason about) and all in all it takes longer to achieve something using “AI” instead of doing it on my own.
The worst results are the ones that seem to be correct, but can only be found incorrect on closer inspection. For instances, a part of my job is to write data collection applications for sensors; those sensors come with a datasheet (usually 100 to 200 pages) that explain how to “talk” to the sensor. Sounds perfect for an LLM - throw the datasheet in, get a small C application out. But either I get something that does not even compile, or something that seems to collect data, but configures the sensor completely wrong. Debugging that takes more time than just working through the datasheet myself and program it myself.
The other day I did a google search for a basic JavaScript function. Gemini gave me almost the exact function that I needed. Should I have closed my eyes or smashed my head with a hammer until I forgot? Ofc I used it. It was the first result, helpful, and easy.
I don’t believe in “AI” since it doesn’t exist, but these augmented or summarized searches can definitely be helpful. I imagine it’s the same with other LLMs, search engines, etc.
Well that’s because copilot and cursor are pure shit, and claude code is overpriced and over rated.
TBH I have been hopping between agent frameworks, but mostly I use locally run Qwen or Deepseek to draft individual function blocks or brainstorm in a notepad interface:
And manually insert them as I review the code… I like my stuff uncomplicated and unobstructed.
If I were to pick an API provider today, I’d buy one year of Xiaomi MiMo, because it is dirt cheap and good enough. GLM and Deepseek are great, but more expensive since they are popular now.
They are really not that distinct, all the models cheat off each other just like they cheat copyrights.
The entire premise of chatbots is to have a simple natural-language interface instead of those scary GUIs and programming languages. The idea that maybe they didn’t know enough about how to interact with ai, and that’s why it failed to help them, is a little silly, and the more you explain how we’re all using ai wrong, the sillier you look.
You’ve obviously sunk a lot of costs into genai, both in time and money, and that is making you defensive. Somebody that isn’t impressed by Claude premium isn’t going to do any of what you suggest, let alone get any more value out of it, and that’s valid for them. You’re not seriously interested in helping them professionally, you are just insecure.
The entire premise of chatbots is to have a simple natural-language interface instead of those scary GUIs and programming languages.
Absolutely not. This is not what text models were made for, it’s what jerks like Altman and Modi twisted them into with marketing.
The idea that maybe they didn’t know enough about how to interact with ai, and that’s why it failed to help them, is a little silly, and the more you explain how we’re all using ai wrong, the sillier you look.
I’m not blaming the user, I’m saying they’re crap services. I think the superlative/cursing is necessary here; they are so bad and enshittified it is astounding.
You’ve obviously sunk a lot of costs into genai, both in time and money, and that is making you defensive.
I have paid a total of a few bucks into APIs, I’ve never had a Claude or OpenAI subscription in my life. I don’t know why you would assume this.
Somebody that isn’t impressed by Claude premium isn’t going to do any of what you suggest, let alone get any more value out of it, and that’s valid for them. You’re not seriously interested in helping them professionally, you are just insecure.
I’m not insecure about this. I don’t need LLMs or generative ML, though I am interested in it. I have many dire personal issues, but people are free to program however they wish and I’m not going to gaslight anyone about that.
I do think text models have been bastardized into “a simple natural-language interface instead of those scary GUIs and programming languages.” That is NOT what they were intended to do, no matter how much Claude tries to sell people on it. I think this misunderstanding is extremely important because it’s exactly what’s propping up abominations/scams like OpenAI/Anthropic.
But they can still be extremely useful tools in narrower scopes, like all machine learning has for over a decade, and I’m not going to shy away advocating for that. I do resent all of LLMs being pigeonholed so tightly, and if people are going to try them, I at least want to point them to a more reasonable/frugal source than Claude premium and Claude Code.
Evangelizing llms is pretty much all you do on here, you have spent an enormous amount of time and effort on them. If you’re not even willing to accept that you have sunk costs relating to genai, your stating “I’m not insecure about this” is really not compelling.
Evangelizing llms is pretty much all you do on here, you have spent an enormous amount of time and effort on them.
This is a fair point. I talk about it a lot here, too much TBH.
Sorting by New Comments, topics like this are mostly what come up and peak my interest… I suppose I need to curate/moderate my Lemmy feed, like I’ve been telling myself I should do for some time.
It’s usually the illiterate that proclaim the sharpest opinions too. Linus is very steady and rational on this, he sees the operator as responsible and the real author. Which is I think how it should be. It reminds me of piracy debates in early internet. You have to be insane to think it is possible to prevent the use of a tool that you could just use and not say you used. It’s just futile and honestly just a counter psychosis of the same polarized issue. I just wanna tell both sides: Its not really a debate, because nobody is in charge or could ever enforce a decision either way. It’s also a form of privilegium overload to just think we can legislate or de-arm this knowledge and hunt the users down. It is an extreme position to think that it isn’t going to continue existing.
find that their peers are achieving more in a shorter time then they are
I’ve been reading this for 3 years and all I’ve seen so far is my peers making more work for me by going on wild goose chases and making me wade through slop. I do believe there are ways to use it responsibly and productively but that is definitely not what is happening on average.
I don’t understand why so many people decided to take “LLMs increase productivity” as an axiom instead of using their fucking eyes and looking at what is happening around them.
I think most misplaced critic comes from people not understanding or knowing the different types of AI. Some even hate all types of intelligence it seems.
They did, just on a smaller scale, and they used all games ever played by high-level players. LLMs and image generators were stealing data years before they became viable. And nobody gave a shit.
Let’s not pretend most people give a shit about ethics or the environment. Those were impacted long before AI became viable in any way. People hate on AI because it’s affecting everyday prices and employment. Ethics and environment are just convenient shiny arguments few actually stand behind.
If tomorrow billionaires turned around and said “actually, here’s UBI for everyone, provided by AI!”, most people would be cheering on intellectual theft and destruction of this earth, and call everyone still against it selfish and regressive.
Ethics and environmental destruction are “convenient shiny arguments”?? Go fuck yourself you delusional shill. Praying for a billionaire saviour while gagging on their boots, fuck you.
Most people don’t give a shit about ethics and the environment. They care about the well being of themselves, the well being those close to them, and their comfort, ABOVE ALL ELSE. even if they won’t admit it to themselves.
Delusional? I wish I was. Look at the last 30 years, how many protested to get climate change taken seriously? How many raised their voices against various human rights violations around the world? A drop in a bucket, that’s how many. Most people just don’t give a shit about anything that doesn’t affect them and it’s plain to see.
So yes, for majority of people, ethics and environmental destruction are “convenient shiny arguments” that make them feel good about themselves when they virtue signal them on social media and then forget about them 5min later.
Curse me all you want, the world of today is of our collective making.
You conflate one type of AI with all the other ones. Call it LLM or generative AI.
I programmed AI 20 years ago, it still is AI but doesn’t use datacenters. I programmed deep neural networks ten years ago, it did not use datacenters either.
You didn’t pirate the collective works of humanity to train on, while under a society that requires intellectual property rights to ensure those creators are compensated, in order to undercut them twice (once to train and once to replace them)
You didn’t pollute the sky, dry the soil, bulldoze people’s homes to make your chessbot.
You didn’t corner the market on components to brute force the solution to declare yourself computer god, where everyone must come to you for compute.
Gen AI seeks to replace humans and it’s not even sentient. I don’t give a single fuck how useful a fancy algorithm is, it’s not ok with me if it’s designed to destroy my life.
Well do the work and call it for what it is, not just “AI”.
Generative AI.
LLM
Is it truly that hard?
I mean you seem to want to, and thus we can have a discussion about it, which I favour instead of having people just being generally angry it seems.
The day when it doesn’t crush the environment, should we use gen AI to help us in our daily lives? Or should we not? Is there something good in it? Or isn’t it? I’d love seing constructive discussions but they just get globbed by people thinking with their gut it seems. Like if you don’t hate “AI” then you’re pro genocide.
Why should we indulge your hypothetical? They’re actively building fossil fuel powered data centers so it’s not even moving in that direction.
And most tech literate people that are anti-genAI would also prefer if it didn’t completely usurp the term AI or that everything historically called ML got also got sucked in. You’re acting like anti people made that happen but it was the boosters and now AI=chatgpt is in the common lexicon. Nitpicking their language when you obviously know damn well what they mean is just silly.
Please understand that ChatGPT was released in November 2022.
And also understand that the distinction between chess and ChatGPT is the point of the comment. These two things both use AI but one is harmless and useful while the other is not.
I’m glad Linus is pragmatic about this, ethical questions aside LLM’s are a highly valuable tool in software development and they are likely to continue to improve. Any engineer fighting the use of LLM’s will ultimately find that their peers are achieving more in a shorter time then they are. Open weight LLM’s have also come a long way and are already good enough for daily use.
Yeah, ethical, environmental, legal and fuck the consumer memory questions aside.
That’s every corp and government in existence.
How do you measure that?
I am asking because I tried all the AI coding tools (copilot, cursor, claude code, etc.), even the paid versions, to find the utopia that doubles my productivity where lots of people are talking about. But everytime I find they take more time to generate code than me typing it, they rarely get things right the first time, they produce way more code than needed (which is much more to reason about) and all in all it takes longer to achieve something using “AI” instead of doing it on my own.
The worst results are the ones that seem to be correct, but can only be found incorrect on closer inspection. For instances, a part of my job is to write data collection applications for sensors; those sensors come with a datasheet (usually 100 to 200 pages) that explain how to “talk” to the sensor. Sounds perfect for an LLM - throw the datasheet in, get a small C application out. But either I get something that does not even compile, or something that seems to collect data, but configures the sensor completely wrong. Debugging that takes more time than just working through the datasheet myself and program it myself.
The other day I did a google search for a basic JavaScript function. Gemini gave me almost the exact function that I needed. Should I have closed my eyes or smashed my head with a hammer until I forgot? Ofc I used it. It was the first result, helpful, and easy.
I don’t believe in “AI” since it doesn’t exist, but these augmented or summarized searches can definitely be helpful. I imagine it’s the same with other LLMs, search engines, etc.
Well that’s because copilot and cursor are pure shit, and claude code is overpriced and over rated.
TBH I have been hopping between agent frameworks, but mostly I use locally run Qwen or Deepseek to draft individual function blocks or brainstorm in a notepad interface:
https://github.com/lmg-anon/mikupad
And manually insert them as I review the code… I like my stuff uncomplicated and unobstructed.
If I were to pick an API provider today, I’d buy one year of Xiaomi MiMo, because it is dirt cheap and good enough. GLM and Deepseek are great, but more expensive since they are popular now.
They are really not that distinct, all the models cheat off each other just like they cheat copyrights.
The entire premise of chatbots is to have a simple natural-language interface instead of those scary GUIs and programming languages. The idea that maybe they didn’t know enough about how to interact with ai, and that’s why it failed to help them, is a little silly, and the more you explain how we’re all using ai wrong, the sillier you look.
You’ve obviously sunk a lot of costs into genai, both in time and money, and that is making you defensive. Somebody that isn’t impressed by Claude premium isn’t going to do any of what you suggest, let alone get any more value out of it, and that’s valid for them. You’re not seriously interested in helping them professionally, you are just insecure.
I dispute all of this
Absolutely not. This is not what text models were made for, it’s what jerks like Altman and Modi twisted them into with marketing.
I’m not blaming the user, I’m saying they’re crap services. I think the superlative/cursing is necessary here; they are so bad and enshittified it is astounding.
I have paid a total of a few bucks into APIs, I’ve never had a Claude or OpenAI subscription in my life. I don’t know why you would assume this.
I’m not insecure about this. I don’t need LLMs or generative ML, though I am interested in it. I have many dire personal issues, but people are free to program however they wish and I’m not going to gaslight anyone about that.
I do think text models have been bastardized into “a simple natural-language interface instead of those scary GUIs and programming languages.” That is NOT what they were intended to do, no matter how much Claude tries to sell people on it. I think this misunderstanding is extremely important because it’s exactly what’s propping up abominations/scams like OpenAI/Anthropic.
But they can still be extremely useful tools in narrower scopes, like all machine learning has for over a decade, and I’m not going to shy away advocating for that. I do resent all of LLMs being pigeonholed so tightly, and if people are going to try them, I at least want to point them to a more reasonable/frugal source than Claude premium and Claude Code.
Evangelizing llms is pretty much all you do on here, you have spent an enormous amount of time and effort on them. If you’re not even willing to accept that you have sunk costs relating to genai, your stating “I’m not insecure about this” is really not compelling.
This is a fair point. I talk about it a lot here, too much TBH.
Sorting by New Comments, topics like this are mostly what come up and peak my interest… I suppose I need to curate/moderate my Lemmy feed, like I’ve been telling myself I should do for some time.
I remember people being angry at IDEs for making programming too easy and belittling code colourization as for children.
There will always be a crowd that wants everything to stay the way they know it.
Some people still think that digital artists aren’t real artists.
deleted by creator
Conservatives.
It’s usually the illiterate that proclaim the sharpest opinions too. Linus is very steady and rational on this, he sees the operator as responsible and the real author. Which is I think how it should be. It reminds me of piracy debates in early internet. You have to be insane to think it is possible to prevent the use of a tool that you could just use and not say you used. It’s just futile and honestly just a counter psychosis of the same polarized issue. I just wanna tell both sides: Its not really a debate, because nobody is in charge or could ever enforce a decision either way. It’s also a form of privilegium overload to just think we can legislate or de-arm this knowledge and hunt the users down. It is an extreme position to think that it isn’t going to continue existing.
I’ve been reading this for 3 years and all I’ve seen so far is my peers making more work for me by going on wild goose chases and making me wade through slop. I do believe there are ways to use it responsibly and productively but that is definitely not what is happening on average.
I don’t understand why so many people decided to take “LLMs increase productivity” as an axiom instead of using their fucking eyes and looking at what is happening around them.
Well it’s about time those slackers caught up. And all they needed was a slop machine.
No, pragmatically speaking, LLMs and in general AI will only make code worse each day.
I think most misplaced critic comes from people not understanding or knowing the different types of AI. Some even hate all types of intelligence it seems.
Especially their own. Every single day, the backlash looks more like garden-variety anti-intellectualism to me.
Chess engines have been using AI, specifically, neural networks, for years before ChatGPT or other LLMs. Nobody complained.
Chess engines didn’t require data centers that guzzle water and spit out pollution like an 18th century factory.
It’s all about scale, there aren’t billions of chess engine users.
Exactly right. That is the distinction I’m trying to draw.
They did, just on a smaller scale, and they used all games ever played by high-level players. LLMs and image generators were stealing data years before they became viable. And nobody gave a shit.
Let’s not pretend most people give a shit about ethics or the environment. Those were impacted long before AI became viable in any way. People hate on AI because it’s affecting everyday prices and employment. Ethics and environment are just convenient shiny arguments few actually stand behind.
If tomorrow billionaires turned around and said “actually, here’s UBI for everyone, provided by AI!”, most people would be cheering on intellectual theft and destruction of this earth, and call everyone still against it selfish and regressive.
Ethics and environmental destruction are “convenient shiny arguments”?? Go fuck yourself you delusional shill. Praying for a billionaire saviour while gagging on their boots, fuck you.
Most people don’t give a shit about ethics and the environment. They care about the well being of themselves, the well being those close to them, and their comfort, ABOVE ALL ELSE. even if they won’t admit it to themselves.
Delusional? I wish I was. Look at the last 30 years, how many protested to get climate change taken seriously? How many raised their voices against various human rights violations around the world? A drop in a bucket, that’s how many. Most people just don’t give a shit about anything that doesn’t affect them and it’s plain to see.
So yes, for majority of people, ethics and environmental destruction are “convenient shiny arguments” that make them feel good about themselves when they virtue signal them on social media and then forget about them 5min later.
Curse me all you want, the world of today is of our collective making.
Here we go again!
You conflate one type of AI with all the other ones. Call it LLM or generative AI.
I programmed AI 20 years ago, it still is AI but doesn’t use datacenters. I programmed deep neural networks ten years ago, it did not use datacenters either.
And that’s why no one is opposed to those.
You didn’t pirate the collective works of humanity to train on, while under a society that requires intellectual property rights to ensure those creators are compensated, in order to undercut them twice (once to train and once to replace them)
You didn’t pollute the sky, dry the soil, bulldoze people’s homes to make your chessbot.
You didn’t corner the market on components to brute force the solution to declare yourself computer god, where everyone must come to you for compute.
Gen AI seeks to replace humans and it’s not even sentient. I don’t give a single fuck how useful a fancy algorithm is, it’s not ok with me if it’s designed to destroy my life.
No but we did all that for Taylor swift and Walmart. Hopefully you don’t do anything with any major brands at all.
Well do the work and call it for what it is, not just “AI”.
Generative AI.
LLM
Is it truly that hard?
I mean you seem to want to, and thus we can have a discussion about it, which I favour instead of having people just being generally angry it seems.
The day when it doesn’t crush the environment, should we use gen AI to help us in our daily lives? Or should we not? Is there something good in it? Or isn’t it? I’d love seing constructive discussions but they just get globbed by people thinking with their gut it seems. Like if you don’t hate “AI” then you’re pro genocide.
Sorry for the rant!
Why should we indulge your hypothetical? They’re actively building fossil fuel powered data centers so it’s not even moving in that direction.
And most tech literate people that are anti-genAI would also prefer if it didn’t completely usurp the term AI or that everything historically called ML got also got sucked in. You’re acting like anti people made that happen but it was the boosters and now AI=chatgpt is in the common lexicon. Nitpicking their language when you obviously know damn well what they mean is just silly.
What “hypothetical”? I couldn’t be more clear.
What are you talking about?
Chess using neural nets didn’t happen until around 2017 with Alpha Zero, based on Google DeepMind.
Ie… Two years after OpenAI was founded. ChatGPT is part of the exact same tech rush.
Nobody complained because chess is harmless, ChatGPT is not 🤷
Please understand that ChatGPT was released in November 2022.
And also understand that the distinction between chess and ChatGPT is the point of the comment. These two things both use AI but one is harmless and useful while the other is not.
Lol you angered the luddites lol.