This is one of the worst takes from LLM enthusiasts.

⏚ Antoine Chambert-Loir

@arroz he claims to “make apps and break things”...

ᛋᛁᚵᛁᛋᛘᚢᚾᛑ ᚾᛁᚾᛃᛅ

@nils_ballmann @arroz @binford2k what one faces when doing formal verification of LLM output. However, LLMs might enable us to write larger formally verified systems in practice. LLMs could help with the spec writing and validation as well. We'll see.

LLMs are basically generators in neuro-symbolic hybrid systems. And many people like to use them for productivity. I.e. a component or tool. No reason to get emotional about it. Like humans, LLMs are unreliable but still useful.

Steve Loughran

@arroz well, except gcc -Ofast, obviously

Notable that dynamic code generation has fallen out of favour in database engines (select -> assembly-> machine code) with SIMD opcodes being the replacement because it's a nightmare to debug when a failure happens inside generated code
AVX512 opcodes support breakpoints and debugging if you add them through intrinsics

Chris

@RMKrug @arroz Yes, that way works.
But telling it to be a compiler won't.

The ol' tealeg 🐡

@arroz I’d actually hazard a guess that there are more assembly programmers alive today than at any time in history.

gudenau

@arroz @poleguy It's a local LLM so it's basically free to run. At least *that part* is correct.

noplasticshower

@arroz I think you may be overlooking another point here: there is absolutely NO reason LLMs should not build directly into machine code or better yet a chip. Why have a "human readable" interface (that is a programming language or a universal hardware layer) at all?

If we stop creating UTMs and adopt machines farther down the chomsky hierarchy (and identify the inherent security advantages of doing so) we can probably make interesting progress. Especially in security engineering.

If we fab machines directly that don't require software to rebind them ...

Since the '40s we have been building machines that do too much (on purpose) and getting mad when they do parts of what we built them to do...

Jesús A.

@arroz @stroughtonsmith I can even see his point about LLMs being the new compilers (although I don’t agree). But then a compiler doesn’t suffer from the societal, ethical and environmental issues these model do. It seems like looking away from the screen is not a very worked on skill by programmers and CSs in general. In that sense it’s even funny we may all lose our jobs precisely by our collective lack of empathy and global perspective.

Ted

@arroz
My skip manager tried using this argument why we should adopt LLMs. It was too absurd to reply to, though maybe I should have.

There are cases where correctness isn't as critical and maybe it is ok to use something vibe coded (I recently met someone vibe coding algorithmic art, treating some bugs as happy accidents).

But my day job is a case where the whole point of what we build is to avoid human mistakes.

ROMMIX

@arroz LLMs are NOT random content generators. That is false. The LLM output is based the user prompt. Seems to me you don't know how to prompt correctly.