> Conversely, I also am a user of LLMs (true shocker these days, I know), and am noticing a speedup in areas I was already familiar with, and a quicker introduction to new ones. The obvious benefit cannot be denied, and doing so regardless makes you look uninformed. [Excluding people who don’t want anything to do with LLMs out of moral principle, which curiously just like the overarching topic I also both respect and understand, but on the other hand don’t do myself.]
Setting aside my moral outrage over the magic token machines. What about me, who gets so tripped up over minor factual errors, that I'm unable to let them go, and it taints the whole conversation such that I'm too wrapped up in my frustration that I can't think about it clearly? Or my innate drive for correctness that's so strong that I eval the minor errors in output, as catastrophically incompatible with my goals?
> Stoically continuing to sharpen your skills on your own, but risking being left in the dust productivity-wise?
I don't believe there's a meaningful productivity increase. Please cite your published (not preprint) peer-reviewed research that proves the productivity improvement. Until then, I'm unconvinced. (Believe me I'd like to be convinced of reality, the answer is still unresolved, and I have my opinions, but I'd rather something conclusive that I can have confidence in)
Then, even if you did show a significant productivity improvement, it wouldn't help me. I have too many qualms over the output quality that I simple can not let go, (I don't think I should, but everyone keeps trying to convince me to lower my quality standards). I don't want something fast, I have plenty of really "fast" things in my life. I exclusively want to add things that are high quality to my life. Things that don't endlessly frustrate me.
The question about where the middle ground is a rhetorically dishonest question. You'd first have to prove/convince me, that there IS a middle ground. Instead of what I believe where that middle ground belongs is quality, and everything emitted by an LLM moves reality in the wrong direction.
Are any of these absolutes? nah, hence my request/demand for peer-review research. All the productivity claims and quality assertions (mine included) are still *exclusively* vibes. But exactly none of them are pristine, (especially not any of the LLM output.)
While I can see that you feel very passionately about this, the reality is that it's the majority experience that will dictate adoption.
There may never be published research on productivity -- blinding in this instance is impossible, so I don't know how you'd ever do fully-controlled behavioural studies that carried any weight. It doesn't matter. If enough of us decide that LLMs are useful to us, then this form of coding will become the norm.
If that ends up causing more harm than good, then eventually there will be a course correction. But for now, for enough people that matter, LLMs are at least giving the perception of productivity increases. And our decisions and choices come down to the perception of reality, not reality itself (for better or worse).
So I think it's far more useful to take a pragmatic approach, as per TFA. Accept that LLMs have issues, but also bring advantages, and that LLM use in coding is here to stay. What we can do is remain aware of the bad, and make better use of the good.
As for you, personally ... if you mentally cannot deal with LLM output, then I think you have two choices. You can either learn to author system prompts, so that LLM output better fits your needs and no longer triggers you; or you can sit more and more on the outer, raging against the machine while the world changes around you.
Eventually, you'll be like a master craftsman in an era of mass-production. But that's potentially highly valuable in niche markets (consider a watchmaker working in Glashutte, for example), so you may yet win from this. Remember that every day, LLMs are making your own coding skills and knowledge more elite and therefore lucrative, sit back, and smile.
Jesus ! You guys are very authoritharian. Even if it is now the norm, I prefer to not use that tool and I bet the more the time past and the more I will be faster than anyone that use LLMs (because of skills atrophy)
LLMs can also be used to improve quality. The approach I tend to encourage, is to write the thing yourself, but let the LLM review your work.
I think that's a far better and more enjoyable way of working than letting the LLM write it and letting users review it. Partially because writing is more enjoyable than reviewing, and I think people are inherently bad at reviewing while LLMs with their infinite patience are much better at it. But also because the writing itself shapes our thinking and we learn much more from it; it makes us better in ways reviewing the LLM's work does not.
That said, I do let AI write a lot for me, because I'm tackling issues that would otherwise be way too big for a single person. Is this a good idea? Maybe not in general, but iny particular context I think it is.
I'm not sure to what extent I'm fooling myself about that last bit.
Peer-reviewed evidence of "productivity" is a pretty high bar to demand.
I don't know if I've ever seen a study that attempted to demonstrate productivity that was ironclad to the point that nobody could find any methodology holes to pick in it.
I won't be as diplomatic as the other reponse to you. You are welcome to your reticence to agentic coding. But as you're no doubt observing, all your peers are saying they're moving ahead leaps and bounds.
Either all of them are wrong, or you will be left behind. Whatever the outcome, it will be on you, and you may make your peace with that.
I appreciate the candor :) But if I'm honest about the size of my ego; the people who write code I admire, the ones who feel remorse when something they built breaks. The people who care about others, and about quality, and don't list TC as something of value. Those are the people who I consider peers. None of them enjoy LLM codegen. They all tell me, that it's annoying because it takes more effort to fix it's output than to just write it by hand. So, no, none of my peers are saying they're moving ahead leaps and bounds. They equally don't understand why everyone thinks it's better. Excluding those people though; I'm more used to everyone around me being wrong. It'll be interesting to see if I, or we, get left behind.
I really appreciate your comment, I think I've discovered part of why I've never felt any anxiety over being replaced by an LLM. I've never tried or wanted to emit low quality code at high velocity, my standards and goals have always listed quality first. Feels more like asking a chef if they're afraid of llms. Why would they be, they're not doing the same thing.
I'm a hobbyist and know the programming trade to a certain extent, but at work I'm "the client" and I have my employer contract developers to address all kinds of needs that I represent as a "business interface".
I'm with you on LLMs being in a different league than good developers curating a fine design with attention to detail, soundness and maintainability. It's just that 1- not all software/components within require that same amount of care: many capabilities are already commodified (as library code or boilerplate, or frameworks, or prior art in the training data that LLMs could easily parrot), and 2- till now, the financial calculus was leaning strongly towards "new developments are expensive, let's use restraint" (irrespective of the actual effort/ratio of commodified code).
So long story short, I don't see LLMs taking out skilled and caring developers: I'll still be reaching out to them for the critical/strategic projects, but on the other hand, I appreciate that the "ancillary" or "fancy" stuff can be cobbled together with the LLM glue gun and remove the impression to my management that engaging with software development is necessarily a costly/risky/exposing endeavour. Some software is to be treated like pets and cherished, and the new reality is to accept that we might have cattle software too, with swaths of prototypes, one-off's, very specific and niche and disposable, and it's fine because this no longer represents an unsustainable financial burden (my bean counting management already likes to kill useful software on a pure spec-sheet matching exercise and shovel everything into large "do it all" systems like ERPs: the fewer things the cheaper, right? Except for those underrepresented users thrown under the bus and their effective productivity).
You need to create your own custom interface. Dive into the harness where the System Prompt lays and write instruction for the LLM to quadruple-check facts before presenting them. Instruct them to check and verify all outputs using tools of your preference before claiming their tasks are finished. Instruct them to review everything, to look for gaps in their reasoning and fix them, to never assume your intent but ask for clarity.. No doubt over the years you have developed a highly tuned arsenal of tools and protocols for work. Treat LLMs in the interface as a tool that you can lay your tuned arsenal over, recreating it as a filter your LLM works inside. Don't use vanilla interfaces and expect them to mirror your niche level of expertise. Over the last year I have developed a custom Claude Code interface using tweakCC, but other interfaces like PI and OpenCode are better documented. I am full on adhd and autistic, and have achieved as a result of access to LLMs things my neurology would never allowed me to achieve otherwise. I can bounce all over the place and still achieve excellence because of the hardcore customizations I have in place that account for my neurology. To me there is no middle ground. Slop is unacceptable. The harness and System Prompt is what moves LLMs to quality outputs.
> It doesn't matter whether you misunderstand LLM summary or LLM "misunderstands" you – there are real risks involved, and you wouldn't want them to weigh on your conscience if they were to materialize.
"fun" fact, a number (some? many? all?) of the LLM speech to text models will editorialize or hallucinate words for you, to make your speech fit the pattern it expects.
I don't think it's appropriate to use a model that can editorialize in a medical transcription setting. I feel that crosses a huge number of ethical lines.
> At the moment consensus is that it must not be banned, but also not mandated in any way - people must take responsibility, and they must be able to decide for themselves where and when the LLM use is justified and where it is not.
I have a really hard time understanding how supposed experts in their field, have been taken in so perfectly and so completely. You're a trained and certified medical/healthcare worker, responsible for the health, safety and well being of other humans, and yet willingly turn over parts of the process that exists to protect the safety and health of others, to a machine that you know can and will make mistakes you wouldn't or even couldn't ever reasonably make. You're supposed to make sure it works and is safe for everyone you're responsible for before you start using it... but then, I prefer healthcare that doesn't move fast, and break humans.
I'm sure someone will try to play devil's advocate and suggest it's a good thing to ration care, and that you have to acknowledge that you can't save everybody, faster is better after all But no, I'm angry enough about it that if a licensed person suggests that, I'll gladly complain to your licensing board (rhetorically speaking, I'm not gonna try to doxx anyone). You can't ethically argue for rationing care, and letting a machine known to make errors in ethics or care decisions, that you have been trained not to make. (Advocating for a reduction in the standard of care in order to increase profits.) (Yes, you're correct, if you're in a state of triage, you're required to, and in those cases, using an imperfect machine is possibly preferable, and probably ethical, but still objectionable. I currently refuse to believe that the US is in a state of emergency, but perhaps that's where I'm wrong) Part of your licensure you promised to prioritize patient care above personal gain. You can't then make decisions to experiment with systems you cant prove are safe.
I can understand in when SWEs ignore the best interests of the humans they're working for. But Doctors and Nurses? I guess I expected better from my former colleagues?
In a medical setting we first have to be clear about whether the LLM is acting as a transcriptionist or a scribe. Those are different roles. A transcriptionist merely writes down everything the clinician says verbatim, with perhaps a bit of formatting to fit a standard template. Speech recognition software has been used for transcription since before LLMs even existed. Sometimes a human transcriptionist will review and edit the software output. But ultimately the clinician is accountable for approving the document before it legally becomes part of the patient chart.
A medical scribe isn't just taking dictation, they're doing some level of interpretation and often entering structured, coded data directly into an EHR. This is a more complex role and requires some clinical skills. There are some new LLM products that automate this to an extent, but ultimately the licensed clinician is still legally accountable for what goes into the patient chart.
I can absolutely ethically argue for rationing care. All healthcare systems ration care although the means vary. Demand is effectively infinite, especially from older patients with complex or terminal conditions. Resources are finite.
I saw someone whose doctors were misled by this "transcriptionist vs scribe" difference in an ER situation. The LLM was listening and recording as the doctor asked questions and the patient answered. PT had suffered a falling episode. ER doctor asked if pt had any warning (e.g., was dizzy, faint, or unbalanced before fall). Pt said no. Later when reading final discharge report with pt we noticed that the LLM had inserted that the pt "experienced dizziness and then fell" which completely contradicted the pt's actual words.
Since then pt has had to re-explain to multiple doctors how the ER report was incorrect, to their usual MD skepticism. So, for now, I figure LLMs are for shite. Maybe in another 15 years...
And it pays to read everything on a medical report before leaving the facility.
Most humans use a default trust model for life; they've been lied to. That's part of why I'm angry, if you trust other people; why would you look for it? This entire article is about the fallout from not looking for it, and the resulting harms to pt care. So, it turns out, it was a mistake to adopt the new tech quickly; you know, as evidenced by the harms to patients?
So I don't know, why do you think they couldn't they predict the harms that I thought were obviously predictable, and then happened?
Setting aside my moral outrage over the magic token machines. What about me, who gets so tripped up over minor factual errors, that I'm unable to let them go, and it taints the whole conversation such that I'm too wrapped up in my frustration that I can't think about it clearly? Or my innate drive for correctness that's so strong that I eval the minor errors in output, as catastrophically incompatible with my goals?
> Stoically continuing to sharpen your skills on your own, but risking being left in the dust productivity-wise?
I don't believe there's a meaningful productivity increase. Please cite your published (not preprint) peer-reviewed research that proves the productivity improvement. Until then, I'm unconvinced. (Believe me I'd like to be convinced of reality, the answer is still unresolved, and I have my opinions, but I'd rather something conclusive that I can have confidence in)
Then, even if you did show a significant productivity improvement, it wouldn't help me. I have too many qualms over the output quality that I simple can not let go, (I don't think I should, but everyone keeps trying to convince me to lower my quality standards). I don't want something fast, I have plenty of really "fast" things in my life. I exclusively want to add things that are high quality to my life. Things that don't endlessly frustrate me.
The question about where the middle ground is a rhetorically dishonest question. You'd first have to prove/convince me, that there IS a middle ground. Instead of what I believe where that middle ground belongs is quality, and everything emitted by an LLM moves reality in the wrong direction.
Are any of these absolutes? nah, hence my request/demand for peer-review research. All the productivity claims and quality assertions (mine included) are still *exclusively* vibes. But exactly none of them are pristine, (especially not any of the LLM output.)