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dindunuftoday at 2:32 PM1 replyview on HN

first of all, LLM-assisted coding is less than 3 years old. 3 years ago all we had was GPT-4 with 8192 token context, which wasn't enough for most things.

and second of all...

>Any shared sense of rigour is just completely torpedoed by the LLM world, particularly the cloud LLM world it seems, and we are reduced to cargo culting. Nobody is any more right or wrong than anyone else.

what "sense of rigour"? it's way too soon to put those rose-tinted glasses on.


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JCTheDenthogtoday at 2:53 PM

>what "sense of rigour"? it's way too soon to put those rose-tinted glasses on.

I don't think OP is claiming that prior to LLM coding everything in the software development world was super rigorous (I assume that's effectively what you mean with the "rose-tinted glasses" comment). But rigor was actually possible and in a deterministic way too, which is fundamentally impossible with LLMs. You can build all kinds of guardrails and processes around LLMs that make it somewhat approach rigor again, but it's still fundamentally based on a bunch of statistical probabilities instead of deterministic, repeatable results.

All of the methods I see to mitigate the fundamental and inherent issues of LLMs seem roughly equivalent to the kind of crap you see in astrology groups or palm reading etc. You need Venus and Mercury to be in alignment while Mars is retrograde if you want to be able to get the right results from your token predictor.

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