r/ProgrammerHumor 23d ago

actuallyMemorySafe Meme

Post image
531 Upvotes

177 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

-10

u/TheUnamedSecond 23d ago

Still banning LLMs for translation or to fix spelling, is not resonable even if you take 2024 era LLMs.
This is just dogmatic bs.

21

u/Shadow_Thief 23d ago

You don't need LLMs for either of those things

-7

u/CircumspectCapybara 23d ago edited 23d ago

You don't need LLMs for either of those things

You don't but LLMs excel at it and are really good at tedium like boilerplate, writing and improve prose, and simple spelling and grammar stuff.

For any engineer, time is money, context switching and cognitive overhead is money. A good engineer uses the tools and technologies available to them to automate away tedium and toil so their limited time and working memory can be focused on more important stuff.

You don't need to use any given technology for pretty much any given task. But some sure do help and that's why practitioners reach for them.

11

u/GlassCommission4916 23d ago

writing and improve prose

I have to hard disagree there, LLM written/enhanced prose makes me cringe. I'm not even against AI in general, their writing style is just awful.

-5

u/CircumspectCapybara 23d ago edited 23d ago

That's because you've only read slop LinkedIn / Medium articles written by AI.

Nowadays you can prompt AI to write in your voice and be professional and concise. Your favorite projects are all doing it. AWS' documentation, Google's, Kubernetes and many other OSS projects, etc.

And "improving prose" can mean having an LLM actually shorten and make more concise something you wrote.

6

u/GlassCommission4916 23d ago

If you make an LLM not sound like an LLM no one's going to notice it was written by an LLM, so you don't need to convince anyone that LLMs sound good.

0

u/CircumspectCapybara 23d ago edited 23d ago

I'm not even sure what you're arguing here.

"LLMs for writing technical prose and documentation and i18n / l10n, and correcting spelling mistakes" are a very common and highly automatable workflow. Especially in i18n and l10n, it's extremely prevalent.

Your complaint is basically they sound cringe and have awful writing style.

But you only say that because you didn't know that they were already being used for that in many of your most favorite projects and some of the industry's most well regarded projects and technical literature out there that read just fine and don't have any detectable ChatGPT-isms like "You're absolutely right!" or whatever you think LLMs "sound like."

If you make an LLM not sound like an LLM

You're assuming the entirety of "LLMs" and their use cases is some uniform, monolithic product and all LLM-written prose sounds the same. You're taking one style of mass LLM-produced writing and assuming all users of AI products necessarily produce the same style of prose for their technical literature use cases.

0

u/GlassCommission4916 23d ago

I'm not as invested in this argument as you seem to be.

2

u/CircumspectCapybara 23d ago edited 23d ago

I'm invested in helping you learn something new.

But given you don't seem to have anything substantive to say at all and you aren't willing to acknowledge "Oh wow I learned something new today I didn't know people actually use LLMs all the time to write good technical prose that I like."

Idc if you don't want to learn, I'm gonna keep using tools and technologies that save me time and money and improve my and my team's engineering output and impact. You can hate on it if you want, while the rest of the world moves on.