17 months, 25 days of fucking around, followed by five days of hurriedly entering prompts into ChatGPT?

After working on a team that uses LLMs in agentic mode for almost a year, I’d say this is probably accurate.

Most of the work at this point for a big chunk of the team is trying to figure out prompts that will make it do what they want, without producing any user-facing results at all. The rest of us will use it to generate small bits of code, such as one-off scripts to accomplish a specific task - the only area where it’s actually useful.

The shine wears off quickly after the fourth or fifth time it “finishes” a feature by mocking data because so many publicly facing repos it trained on have mock data in them so it thinks that’s useful.

In our case, there are enough upper management folks who are opposed to it that I doubt it will last or ever be enforced. For people like me, it really doesn’t make any sense to enforce it in the first place, because all of my teammates are in other states and countries.

Making me go to the office just means you can’t schedule early meetings with me, because I’ll be commuting during that time.

My office just did the same thing. And the backlash is enormous. No one wants it. No one likes it.

For Palestine’s sake, we really have to hope that it’s not all - or even a majority - of Israelis. I’ve seen the footage of protests there, and heard interviews with Israelis who reject genocide. They give me some hope that the entire country hasn’t lost its mind.

The general Israeli populace needs to come to terms with the fact that their government is now committing a very specific war crime that makes their prisons for Palestinians look like Nazi concentration camps.

There is no positive way to spin this. Starving prisoners is literally what the Nazis did.

The funny thing is that I’m actually an Arch user. I’m just not a dick about it.

Yeah, this sucks. Use the distro you like, people.

There’s a weird, cool anime that takes place in a bizarre version of it called Kowloon Generic Romance.

Wow! After over a decade of incompetent involvement in politics, did Trump just finally actually learn that dictators don’t like democracies?!?

Nah. He’s actually just pissy because the dictators didn’t invite him into their club.

That’s how it’s done, yep.

Exactly! Jeffries was the exact example I had in mind of a Democrat who simply will not stand up for anyone.

Not the person you asked, but I do that sometimes. For instance, when I want to watch a specific video but I don’t want having watched it to affect other video recommendations.

Even in acknowledging the need for new leadership, he gets it wrong. Biden himself wasn’t the problem, he did a perfectly fine job as president. The problem was you guys in Congress, and the DNC insisting that the Democrats move to the right.

Age may correlate with compromised ethics and standards, but it’s not the cause. If the Democrats in Congress weren’t such fucking pushovers and did good jobs, I wouldn’t give a shit if they held office until they keeled over dead.

Fight - for us - and you can have the job as long as you want it. Refuse to fight? Then get the hell out of the way.

You’re right, unit tests are another area where they can be helpful, as long as you’re very careful to check them over.

Actually, there’s growing evidence that beyond a certain point, more context drastically reduces their performance and accuracy.

I’m of the opinion that LLMs will need a drastic rethink before they can reach the point you describe.

So there are a few very specific tasks that LLMs are good at from the perspective of a software developer:

1. Certain kinds of analysis tasks can be done very quickly and efficiently with Copilot in agent mode. For instance, having it assess your existing code for adherence to stylistic standards where a violation isn’t going to trigger a linting error.
2. Quick script writing is something it excels at. There are all kinds of circumstances where you might need an independent script, such as a database seed file. It’s not part of the application itself, but it’s a useful utility to have, and Copilot is good at writing them.
3. Scaffolding a new application. If you’re creating something brand new and know which tools you want to use for it, but don’t want to go through the hassle of setting everything up yourself, having Copilot do it can be a real time saver.

And that’s… pretty much it. I’ve experimented with building applications with “prompt engineering,” and to be blunt, I think the concept is fundamentally flawed. The problem is that once the application exceeds the LLM’s context window size, which is necessarily small, you’re going to see it make a lot more mistakes than it already does, because - just as an example - by the time you’re having it write the frontend for a new API endpoint, it’s already forgotten how that endpoint works.

As the application approaches production size in features and functions, the number of lines of code becomes an insurmountable bottleneck for Copilot. It simply can’t maintain a comprehensive understanding of what’s already there.

Exactly. It’s not true. Any company that fires all of its developers and sets up some poor intern to prompt-engineer updates to their codebase is going to fail spectacularly.

Source: I’m a software developer and use LLMs regularly. There are certain tasks they are very good at, but anyone who commits unexamined code generated by an LLM gets exactly what they deserve.

How’s your badly-generated AI meme game? Dictators don’t get very far around these parts unless they or their sycophants can shit out dozens of horrifyingly plastic-looking, improbably-muscular pictures of themselves riding giant bald eagles while American flags explode in the background.