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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   31347 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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There's a real sense in which it's just getting better at everything. It started out decent at some areas of code, maybe it could write sql scripts ok but you'd need to double check it. Now it can handle any code snippet you throw at it and reliably solve bugs one shot on files with fewer than a thousand lines.

What? That just isn't true. I've tried to have it write code and it's still in the same shitty place it was three years ago. You get something which looks correct, but maybe it is and maybe it isn't, and you have to double check every time. Which is to say, AI tools still slow you down rather than speed you up.

This is why I'm so skeptical that we'll have AI any time soon. The current tools aren't even good at the things their advocates say they are good at, let alone harder things. I have yet to see any substance behind the hype, at all.

Yeah, I keep hearing this claim from people and keep rebutting it.

It's better than it was three years ago, and the autocomplete functionality saves some time, but it definitely can't "handle any code snippet you throw at it" and its reliability for solving bugs is like 1/10 maybe.

Have you actually used the latest tooling? What tasks have you actually had it try? This seems incredibly unlikely to me.

I just use whatever ChatGPT has to offer, which would mean yes I'm using the latest tooling (since they keep it up to date). I've tried a variety of things - writing config files for programs we use at work, writing shell scripts, and asking it to explain how to do tasks in AWS CloudFormation. The first and the third tasks it just makes shit up (in some cases even dreaming up code which isn't even syntactically valid), I've found it to be completely useless for those. I've gotten some mileage in shell scripting, where it does fine as long as I keep the request small (like a few lines) so it can't trip over itself. But shell scripting is also an area I'm incredibly weak (essentially I can read bash but can't write it well at all), so it has the biggest gains to make over my own skill there. In cases where I actually know the language well, there's no benefit to me to use these tools. Like I said, if I have to check carefully every time I have it generate something (and you really do), then that's not actually speeding me up.

Here. I picked a random easyish task I could test. It's the only prompt I tried, and ChatGPT succeeded zero-shot. (Amusingly, though I used o3, you can see from the thought process that it considered this task too simple to even need to execute the script itself, and it was right.) The code's clear, well-commented, avoids duplication, and handles multiple error cases I didn't mention. A lot of interviewees I've encountered wouldn't do nearly this well - alas, a lot of coders are not good at coding.

Ball's in your court. Tell me what is wrong with my example, or that you can do this yourself in 8 seconds. When you say "like a few lines", is that some nonstandard usage of "few" that goes up to 100?

Even better, show us a (non-proprietary, ofc) example of a task where it just "makes shit up" and provides "syntactically invalid code". With LLMs, you can show your receipts! I'm actually genuinely curious, since I haven't caught ChatGPT hallucinating code since before 4o. I'd love to know under what circumstances it still does.

Wow! You asked chatgpt to solve a dead simple toy problem, and it solved it! I'm so impressed!!!! Surely this means that chatgpt is definitely capable of handling actual real world tasks.

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

Not my fault @SubstantialFrivolity chose to set the bar this low in his claims. An existence proof is all I need. But hey, you are fully free to replace that sarcasm with your example of how deficient ChatGPT/Claude is. Evidence is trivially easy to procure here!

I think that we are in the phase of chatgpt in which calligraphs and stenographs don't see the point of typewriters. I would definitely say that chatgpt has saved me a lot of time and made me more productive.

It's sensitive to context and prompting. When having it write bash scripts have you consider just dumping the man files into the context? Don't bother actually formatting them, just dump anything that could possibly be relevant into the prompt.

You keep banging this drum. It's so divorced from the world I observe, I honestly don't know what to make of it. I know you've already declared that the Google engineers checking in LLM code are bad at their job. But you are at least aware that there are a lot of objective coding benchmarks out there, which have seen monumental progress since 3 years ago, right? You can't be completely insulated from being swayed by real-world data, or why are you even on this forum? And, just for your own sake, why not try to figure out why so many of us are having great success using LLMs, while you aren't? Maybe you're not using the right model, or are asking it to do too much (like write a large project from scratch).

monumental progress since 3 years ago, right?

On paper benchmarks number goes up, but it hasn't translated into real usefulness. Also Goodhart's law

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