Well llms are imperfect tools that provide a lot of value (they offer leverage in form of agents to put it in Naval Ravikant words). They are here to stay.
Modern internet ruined forums and google search sucks hairy balls, and most of the content is SEO optimised ad ridden crap. Its literally impossible to find anything meaningful on the internet nowadays. What else can we do besides asking an LLM these days?
For reasonably skilled people, it's often more just a matter of priority.
A lot of people get wrapped up in pursuing compensation opportunities or prestige brands as their top priority, only to burn themselves out or wallow in a domain/culture that doesn't suit them, but if you're willing to deprioritize pay or dinner table cred, you often end up with a lot more flexibility on other work factors. And sometimes, flourishing in those better-fit environments pays off bigger in compensation and career growth in the end anyway.
Granted, Fowler was able to do very well on more axes than many of us, but most competent mid- or late- career people have plenty more flexibility on worklife than they admit to themselves.
I've had several jobs that were great for the first 12-18 months before the manager that hired me left. Then they sucked for another couple years but the pay didn't change.
I have been trying to find one of these "lower pay better conditions" places, but it is _such_ a gamble. It is so hard to tell how the work is going to be before you join. If I am almost certain to at least have a mild dislike for the work I might as well go for the place that pays better.
Also in my experience lower pay places tend to eventually suck because they tend to get into financial difficulties much more easily.
It’s always best to just aim for highest compensation. Even if a team is your dream fit today, it can easily change.
High compensation can also bring more freedom and happiness, since it’s more costly for your employer to replace you. It’s cheaper to keep an existing employee happy than to spend a lot of time and money to bring a new person on board. If your compensation is lower, it’s not as big of a factor.
I wouldn’t take a job if it clearly doesn’t fit me at all, but within the band of “acceptable jobs” aiming for highest compensation is the way to go in my opinion.
In my 20’s and early 30’s i wanted to work places where I felt this cultural and work fit since work was a bigger part of my life — but now I’m in my 40’s that shifted just want to get paid as much as possible and provide for my family.
Don’t much care about who I work with, although I do draw the line at crypto, porn and harmful stuff.
The unknowns are so high going to any job, current state unknowns, future state unknowns. Higher compensation is the only proxy we have for importance and leverage, always chose higher leverage over lower leverage unless burnout is a possibility.
Just make sure that if you aren't born into wealth and status you know how to code switch into it, lie if you need to, as long as people think you are from the wealth class they won't begrudge negotiations around compensation.
What makes this a luxury? I've met many people in my life, and this gives me the opportunity to pick-and-choose with whom I do business. It's a matter of degree.
Plus, I've been on the receiving end, too. Is this not simply adulthood?
> I don’t like them. They talk to me in this grating LLM-voice, an uncanny valley of talking to a real human.
This takes about 30 seconds to fix permanently. You can prompt them to use any tone , be as concise or verbose as you like.
> They confidently bullshit me - often giving me useful, helpful answers. But also just making stuff up with the same assurance - and with only a veneer of fake remorse when I call them out on it.
Only people with flimsy epistemological underpinnings feel threatened in this way. Everyone makes mistakes, and gets fooled by AI (as we’ve been fooled by historians and scientists), but to write off AI because you feel it’s constantly misleading you mean you lack proper foundations. Most of my fun conversations with AI are bending it back into proper grounded truth.
What is the Silicon Valley brogrammer subculture? Is it the same as the Silicon Valley subculture? What defines both?
Are LLMs really the product of brogrammers?
In some ways I miss the early LLM days before RL and system prompts (I assume this is the difference) made them all sound the same. They would say weird stuff. They got better at being useful and worse at being fun.*
*This sadly also describes me as a 31 year old man.
A major difference is they weren't being sold as "assistants" back then. Now they're a product expected to act a certain way. While some LLMisms probably come from shared poison in the pretraining corpus, many of them also come about as a result of trying to make them more appealing as a product. Even those that aren't are still downstream of the norm and expectations instilled at this point.
archive.is / archive.ph haven't loaded for me for a while, but since people are sharing fresh links it must be working somewhere. Am I experiencing a DNS block?
yes they are incredibly unpleasant to work with. Like the most annoying coworker you ever had.
For my own sanity ive wrapped my pi setup in some strict bubble wrap and it is basically exclusively an LOC generator. I have no need nor desire to "converse" with the LLM, it is there to do exactly what i need when i need it.
> ... one that comes from my direct interactions with LLMs. I don’t like them
> One of my most successful life-hacks is to avoid people I don’t like or don’t trust.
> When we think of AI agents, we shouldn’t anthropomorphize, treating them as conscious beings with their own will. They are (software) machines, developed by people working in corporations.
One of the I dunno, weird things about LLMs, is that their search space feels exceptionally constrained.
I'm sure I can sort of prompt it to try to give the answer I want but some people talk about "I don't want an LLM with a political perspective, just provide all the perspectives equally and without bias."
And to a certain extent they have to be constrained. Anything more than a 500 word response I'm probably not going to read, particularly if I want to go deeper on something I want to navigate the conversation. But it means that tuning things like sycophancy just create sort of extremely simple mitigations. Even when I say "May" or "slight chance of" I'm often corrected "Be careful to make too blanket of a statement."
Likewise a bias towards "Say things equally without bias" is an exceptionally poor way to actually explore the nuances of an idea, with this sort of regression to the mean.
I don't know if they'll be able to solve this problem broadly. I mean, LLMs probably shouldn't be therapists/coaches/philosophical gurus. But I could anticipate a growth in sort of groupthink and regression to the mean in terms of perspectives broadly speaking as a society.
I have great success in specifically asking LLM tools for academic literature after describing the problem or field I would like to get some insight into.
It's usually the first step I take when writing research. I don't even read the analysis, just go straight for the papers.
They usually provide me with very relevant seminal papers and I can then easily expand from the bibliography in those papers.
It basically solves discoverability, whereas in the past I would spend days and would need to ask colleagues and librarians for help, to achieve what I can get in minutes now.
But again, I value the actual output of the LLMs at bellow zero factually wise because I need to check everything they say if I want to internalize it and use it for any end. Pointing me to sources is the perfect use case. Really, I cannot emphasize enough how little I trust the text LLMs produce, I actively avoid reading it because I really don't want to risk ingesting spurious information that I might later repeat or rely on for any reason.
LLMs have helped me a ton and have allowed me to replace all my apps that I was paying for. They're internal, so they don't have to be perfect, but man they've saved me money. That's just my experience.
I think this is a very even-handed reasonable position. and it's true - LLMs can be unpleasant to talk to. the day it feels like a magical delightful experience is the day we'll probably be out of jobs, though.
While the article is fairly broad (it talks about "our profession", which ostensibly is coding, but then talks more about LLMs and their conversational style which is something that everyone has opinions on), it's worth pondering what his professional relationship with coding is today.
Is he actively coding...anything? Any projects? And engagements? Or is he a coding influencer now, giving hot takes and opinions, and riding on the XP inertia as a relevant authority?
Because if it's the latter, and I strongly suspect it is, his opinions on LLMs and coding are close to worthless. There are loads of "I'm now an influencer" giving these sorts of hot takes now, and they all seem...detached and irrational with the real world.
Meh, i use LLMs every day as a 9-5 dev and i absolutely despise how they write, and i don't particularly like how they write code. Sometimes I'd rather just have something done, and asking an LLM is basically always faster than using Google now.
> Fundamentally I don’t think we have a choice about riding on the AI technology train.
It's amazing how effectively tech leaders have indoctrinated people to give up their power and give the tech people free reign. The same thing has happened in the socio-political realm. Assertions of powerlessness are seen as wisdom.
It surprises me a little bit that we still don't have a personalized agent.
I def want to finetune my llm responses and yes sure Claude has some type of memory but its too early to just bet on one horse and while i use claude at home through claude.ai i also use claude through an api at my company.
It might start feeling better when they solve the issue of forgetting things they already got right before.
Kinda funny that one of the biggest software engineering “influencers” of all time can’t host a blog that survives HN front page traffic. Maybe try LLMs Martin.
He is of course entitled to his opinion on the topic, but I’m personally not going to put too much weight on it considering he hasn’t written software for a living in probably decades.
I for one am excited to move past the whatever-martin-fowler-thinks era of infrastructure "best practices".
Many of his ideas are trendy nonsense that have caused more harm than good. Ask anyone managing 150 enmeshed and intertwined microservices that could have run on a single computer
The post has nothing to do with writing software. It would have as much value if it were written by someone who'd never written a line of code in their life. It's about the social dimension of LLMs and how the personality they present is, for some of us, pretty grating.
Martin is a good writer and (from what I've heard from those who've spent time with him) a lovely person which I think makes him well qualified to speak on the topic.
105 comments
[ 54.2 ms ] story [ 837 ms ] threadi would expect that when you cite someone by name, the sentence being cited should at least be significant and meaningful to the slightest degree
following this advice would have made most of my professional life impossible, what a luxury it would have been to be able to.
A lot of people get wrapped up in pursuing compensation opportunities or prestige brands as their top priority, only to burn themselves out or wallow in a domain/culture that doesn't suit them, but if you're willing to deprioritize pay or dinner table cred, you often end up with a lot more flexibility on other work factors. And sometimes, flourishing in those better-fit environments pays off bigger in compensation and career growth in the end anyway.
Granted, Fowler was able to do very well on more axes than many of us, but most competent mid- or late- career people have plenty more flexibility on worklife than they admit to themselves.
Also in my experience lower pay places tend to eventually suck because they tend to get into financial difficulties much more easily.
High compensation can also bring more freedom and happiness, since it’s more costly for your employer to replace you. It’s cheaper to keep an existing employee happy than to spend a lot of time and money to bring a new person on board. If your compensation is lower, it’s not as big of a factor.
I wouldn’t take a job if it clearly doesn’t fit me at all, but within the band of “acceptable jobs” aiming for highest compensation is the way to go in my opinion.
In my 20’s and early 30’s i wanted to work places where I felt this cultural and work fit since work was a bigger part of my life — but now I’m in my 40’s that shifted just want to get paid as much as possible and provide for my family.
Don’t much care about who I work with, although I do draw the line at crypto, porn and harmful stuff.
Just make sure that if you aren't born into wealth and status you know how to code switch into it, lie if you need to, as long as people think you are from the wealth class they won't begrudge negotiations around compensation.
Plus, I've been on the receiving end, too. Is this not simply adulthood?
Or adapted for modern life in America: 'the king shits in their diaper'
This takes about 30 seconds to fix permanently. You can prompt them to use any tone , be as concise or verbose as you like.
> They confidently bullshit me - often giving me useful, helpful answers. But also just making stuff up with the same assurance - and with only a veneer of fake remorse when I call them out on it.
Only people with flimsy epistemological underpinnings feel threatened in this way. Everyone makes mistakes, and gets fooled by AI (as we’ve been fooled by historians and scientists), but to write off AI because you feel it’s constantly misleading you mean you lack proper foundations. Most of my fun conversations with AI are bending it back into proper grounded truth.
it is a tool after all.
*This sadly also describes me as a 31 year old man.
Right now it’s top notch here. Would say more but don’t want to give bots an abusable profile :)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317
For my own sanity ive wrapped my pi setup in some strict bubble wrap and it is basically exclusively an LOC generator. I have no need nor desire to "converse" with the LLM, it is there to do exactly what i need when i need it.
> One of my most successful life-hacks is to avoid people I don’t like or don’t trust.
> When we think of AI agents, we shouldn’t anthropomorphize, treating them as conscious beings with their own will. They are (software) machines, developed by people working in corporations.
Martin, I think you have solved your own problem.
I'm sure I can sort of prompt it to try to give the answer I want but some people talk about "I don't want an LLM with a political perspective, just provide all the perspectives equally and without bias."
And to a certain extent they have to be constrained. Anything more than a 500 word response I'm probably not going to read, particularly if I want to go deeper on something I want to navigate the conversation. But it means that tuning things like sycophancy just create sort of extremely simple mitigations. Even when I say "May" or "slight chance of" I'm often corrected "Be careful to make too blanket of a statement."
Likewise a bias towards "Say things equally without bias" is an exceptionally poor way to actually explore the nuances of an idea, with this sort of regression to the mean.
I don't know if they'll be able to solve this problem broadly. I mean, LLMs probably shouldn't be therapists/coaches/philosophical gurus. But I could anticipate a growth in sort of groupthink and regression to the mean in terms of perspectives broadly speaking as a society.
It's usually the first step I take when writing research. I don't even read the analysis, just go straight for the papers.
They usually provide me with very relevant seminal papers and I can then easily expand from the bibliography in those papers.
It basically solves discoverability, whereas in the past I would spend days and would need to ask colleagues and librarians for help, to achieve what I can get in minutes now.
But again, I value the actual output of the LLMs at bellow zero factually wise because I need to check everything they say if I want to internalize it and use it for any end. Pointing me to sources is the perfect use case. Really, I cannot emphasize enough how little I trust the text LLMs produce, I actively avoid reading it because I really don't want to risk ingesting spurious information that I might later repeat or rely on for any reason.
Is he actively coding...anything? Any projects? And engagements? Or is he a coding influencer now, giving hot takes and opinions, and riding on the XP inertia as a relevant authority?
Because if it's the latter, and I strongly suspect it is, his opinions on LLMs and coding are close to worthless. There are loads of "I'm now an influencer" giving these sorts of hot takes now, and they all seem...detached and irrational with the real world.
It's amazing how effectively tech leaders have indoctrinated people to give up their power and give the tech people free reign. The same thing has happened in the socio-political realm. Assertions of powerlessness are seen as wisdom.
I def want to finetune my llm responses and yes sure Claude has some type of memory but its too early to just bet on one horse and while i use claude at home through claude.ai i also use claude through an api at my company.
It might start feeling better when they solve the issue of forgetting things they already got right before.
He is of course entitled to his opinion on the topic, but I’m personally not going to put too much weight on it considering he hasn’t written software for a living in probably decades.
Many of his ideas are trendy nonsense that have caused more harm than good. Ask anyone managing 150 enmeshed and intertwined microservices that could have run on a single computer
Martin is a good writer and (from what I've heard from those who've spent time with him) a lovely person which I think makes him well qualified to speak on the topic.
It's a static site, slap in a Cloudflare for crying out loud.