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| ▲ | doubled112 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > mixed-technique approach I think my biggest annoyance with the way we rolled out AI is that nobody seemed to want to use it to augment already working solutions. Just throw everything out and have an LLM do it instead. | | |
| ▲ | neutronicus 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I've been frustrated with Copilot in this regard. I work on a large C++ codebase, with large files. Human developers jump around between files with the Visual Studio fuzzy search, set breakpoints to trace execution in the Debugger, use the IDE's refactoring tools. Microsoft's answer to this was to just ... expose none of this to their Agent Mode!? Replace the working semantic autocomplete with fucking lies!? Maybe it's changed, I haven't been paying that much attention after bouncing off of this. I've gotten mild acceleration from using gptel-mode in emacs, manually adding references to context, and having models do various mechanical transformations on code. And I've even had some limited success writing tools for it to do LSP lookups. | | |
| ▲ | xnorswap 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It frustrates me too, it really feels like the next breakthrough will be when someone gets agents working "natively" with LSP on large code-bases. Anthropic added LSP support to claude-code, but the current implementation is worse than useless, because any changes aren't reflected fast enough, so it's constantly working on outdated views / compilation caches, and it gets in a right muddle between its "internal" state / understanding in context, the real-world file, and the LSP. If it could just leverage LSP to apply refactorings it would be amazing, but it feels like the LSP can't keep up, and I don't know if that's an LSP problem or a claude problem. So we binned the LSP plugin and we're back to watching a machine find/replace, because while waiting on that is slower than LSP, it's a "Action => Wait" which the tooling understands, while LSP is "Possibly Wait for LSP to catch up => Action" which it doesn't understand nearly as well. I suspect the LSP plugins also need better skills that pair with them so it reaches for them more often. It hurts my soul to see it reach for find/replace to rename a class, complete with mistakes made in complex solutions where you might have name clashes in different namespaces. Something the LSP handles without problem, but can trip up an LLM. | | |
| ▲ | bee_rider 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I wonder, is the problem here that LSP is updating too slow all the time? Or just that there’s a chance it will update very slow, and you never really know if you’ll hit that chance, so your model always has to do the “long time wait” just in case? It seems like it ought to be possible for LSP to report that it is still processing, in the latter case, somehow… | | |
| ▲ | xnorswap an hour ago | parent [-] | | I'm not an expert, but my reading of the spec is that LSP can handle generic $notifications, but there isn't a specific standard for readiness reporting beyond "Initialize / Initialized", which isn't suitable for monitoring on-going staleness or readiness post-file-detected change, the spec has that as a single first-time initialization. There are notifications (i.e. `textDocument/didChange` ) that you can send to the LSP to help it along, but again you might end up racing the notification from the client making the change and any file-watchers you might have running. I suspect the answer will come in the form of some kind of more powerful LSP implementations with generous memory caches so that disk changes are just another buffered input that can be disregarded if already stale, no longer seen as the source of truth, and the LSP becomes the real source of truth, so everything can coordinate through it, operating mostly out of memory. Another avenue for better success will be more research into faster compilation and better incremental compilation for languages with slower compilation. Maybe one day we'll even get AI agents directly manipulating syntax trees, and the code to get there being written back as merely a side-effect, but that seems like sci-fi compared to the current state of play. LSP is still very document based, and of course LLMs are also trained on oodles of source. |
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| ▲ | hamburglar 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I work in Unity and I got frustrated with Claude constantly doing gross bash/grep/awk/sed/grep nested loops that took forever that I finally described (and had Claude implement and install) a tool that could, in a single pass, gather all this info from a Unity forest of scenes at once and answer all the questions Claude ever wanted to ask about a Unity project in a single pass that takes 50ms instead of 10 30 second iterations. It still took a lot of coaching to get it to actually use this tool, but it seems like I’ve convinced it. | | |
| ▲ | evntdrvn 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | if it helps, I've found that using context (Claude.md etc) is way less effective for this type of pattern compared to using PreToolHook to capture "bad patterns" and either transparently rewriting them to "do the right thing" if that is possible statically, or if not then rejecting the tool use with a message that tells the agent "how" to use the intended tooling itself. |
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| ▲ | vablings 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | tool_call is just a fancy wrapper to a black box that executes console commands. Said commands are now the actual backbone of all agentic AI, It feels like the linux people are incredibly vindicated in the single responsibility principle |
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| ▲ | peteforde 14 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Hey man, speak for yourself. It's never occurred to me to even try getting an LLM to design or layout a circuit for me. Instead, I have dozens or hundreds of chats in my history where I debate the merits of different parts for different tasks and scenarios, the nuances of decoupling strategies (package size vs deregulation), work out resistor network ratios from the reels I have on hand. Then being able to feed an LLM a datasheet and have it write a custom driver against the registers I need so that it does exactly what I want without the cognitive overhead of a buggy package with someone else's strong opinions about how a part should be used is amazing. Frontier models are incredibly good at electronics, and it's got nothing to do with what happens inside the EDA. | |
| ▲ | NateEag 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I recently saw a Claude skill that used Claude, with no tools, as a spell checker. I wanted to hurl my laptop out to the window. | | |
| ▲ | julianlam an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | This type of laziness isn't novel. Check out left pad or the two dozen other "utility" packages that could be done in a single line of code. | |
| ▲ | mattkrause 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Isn't this pretty much why language models were invented? Pasting something directly into the chat interface seems weird, but if you could somehow just see where P(token | context) falls off a cliff, that's a pretty good hint that your writing has problem. | | |
| ▲ | lambda 4 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, but for this use case you don't need Claude. You probably want a tuned lightweight small model that can run locally. Even Haiku is massive overkill for this use case. |
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| ▲ | kangalioo 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What would be a better way to incorporate AI as a spell checker? In comparison to non-AI traditional tools, AI has the advantage of "understanding" the text, reducing the number of "stupid" mis-corrections. And its spelling correctness is usually already impeccable, so what is there to gain by interfacing it with traditional solutions, and how can it be achieved? | | |
| ▲ | trollbridge 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | AI can’t really spell check without risking changing the meaning of sentences. Spell checking was a solved problem before this. | | |
| ▲ | applfanboysbgon 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Spellchecking is absolutely not a solved problem. I immediately disable spellchecking on every avenue it tries to approach because managing a bunch of dictionaries on every browser/device/application that has its own spellchecker for some godforsaken reason to not have squigglies spammed over every piece of jargon, slang, and slightly atypical spelling is incredibly annoying. I don't know how effective LLMs are, but it's difficult to imagine they can be worse than the existing regime, which is embarrassingly bad for the decades it's been around. | | |
| ▲ | quuxplusone 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | An interesting idea I saw long ago in some book (I thought it was K&P's "Software Tools," or my second guess was K&R1, but neither of those panned out — a strong Mandela effect) was the clever idea of a whole-document spellchecker that works purely probabilistically, by histograms: you feed it a document, it tallies the trigraphs, and any trigraph that appears only rarely is flagged as a likely typo. This approach lets through unknown-but-realistic words like "antithematory" while flagging unrealistic words like "prisencolinensinainciusol" (because of its unlikely "ciu" and "ius" clusters) and "antthemaory" (because of "ntt" and "aor"). To make this approach work better, feed it a bunch of English text (or whatever language your document is in) before the document you really want to "spellcheck." Essentially this isn't a spell "checker" so much as a spell "linter" — it looks for antipatterns statistically associated with bugs, and reports the patterns for further investigation. If anyone knows where this trigraph-based "spellchecker" was first presented, I'd love to find out again. | | | |
| ▲ | PaulHoule 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Human copy editors are less than perfect too. I hired one copy editor who I could not trust to be the last person who touched a document before it went out. I had a friend who wrote an article for the New York Times: the article made a lot of sense before she submitted it, but it was edited for length and style and it definitely read like a New York Times piece but didn't completely make sense. |
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| ▲ | intrasight 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If it's a solved problem, then why does my iPhone suck at it? | |
| ▲ | wat10000 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Only if the problem is declared to be whatever it is that spell checkers solve. As the classic joke goes, "Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken." | | |
| ▲ | xoa 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | >Only if the problem is declared to be whatever it is that spell checkers solve. The problem being misspelling, hence, "spell checker". Like, this seems pretty straightforward? Grammar checking if you cannot use the language properly is a pretty different problem space, and indeed has long existed and is exposed as a separate thing. And not just in fancy word processors either, if you go to something as simple as macOS TextEdit you'll see separate check boxes for "Check spelling as you type" vs "Check grammar with spelling". If someone wants to try out using LLMs for grammar no problem, but spell checking is purely about the mechanical and, importantly, deterministic aspect of typos or outright non-words. >As the classic joke goes, "Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken." There is a genuine touch of irony/meta in you using that here in this context. That sentence has no misspelled words, and importantly gets across the exact humorous meaning the human who wrote it intended. The joke literally only works because a human was able to make creative use of language. If you had an LLM agent posting for you to HN and it automatically changed that to: >As the classic joke goes, "My spellchecker works great but could use some grammar checking." Well, where would the joke be now!? This goes to the exact concern people have with powerful non-deterministic meaning-changing tools replacing deterministic meaning-preserving ones. | | |
| ▲ | applfanboysbgon 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I just fed this entire thread (excluding your comment pointing out the joke, and the text mentioning that it was a joke) to an LLM, and it did better than the dictionary spellchecker: corrected one real error, left my "squigglies" alone which was attacked by squigglies with the old-hat spellchecker, and specifically noted, without any prompting in that direction, that it left the joke spelling unchanged. It did not rewrite any sentences. I'm all for determinism where deterministic tools work, but the current implementations are so bad I can't blame people for turning to a non-deterministic program if it's still better on average. | | |
| ▲ | xoa an hour ago | parent [-] | | LLMs don't seem to be doing a very good job of clarifying your basic thinking however, in this post or your earlier one. To reply to both: >I immediately disable spellchecking on every avenue it tries to approach because managing a bunch of dictionaries on every browser/device/application that has its own spellchecker for some godforsaken reason to not have squigglies spammed over every piece of jargon, slang, and slightly atypical spelling is incredibly annoying. But this is a logic fail is it not? LLMs are irrelevant to this. Your stated problem is "not all software/devices I use has a single shared dictionary/grammar tool to my preferences". That's a very, very reasonable complaint. I agree with you that it's always been tremendously irritating that so many applications won't even make use of operating system dictionaries but rather recreate their own, really that the entire infrastructure around spelling or grammar dictionaries is so primitive. But how do you think LLMs help? Even setting aside quality concerns they don't magically retroactively make every software/device use them, they're just another tool in the space something could use, or not. So you're still stuck with the exact same problem. You still don't have something sync'd/shared universally across your entire experience. I can see how you could just live within some single environment to avoid that (do everything in a browser, use the same browser company's products across platforms with sync supported, so you can use the browser language tools for everything), but again that's not unique to LLMs. That approach would work for conventional tools as well. >I just fed this entire thread to an LLM This is a second logic fail. The entire point and meaning of "non-determinism" is precisely that you can't just do something once and then have that be evidence. If we all did the "same thing", feeding every thread to an LLM, thousands of times we wouldn't all get identical results every time. Sometimes we'd get something else. And the very fact it's rare is one of the core challenges of this entire space, because humans are very, very bad at dealing with things where it works 99% of the time and fails 1% of the time. This has always been true. | | |
| ▲ | applfanboysbgon an hour ago | parent [-] | | > But this is a logic fail is it not? It is not. The LLM approach is not dependent on system configurations. You can expect that it probably works the same from any device or application, because it can surmise slang/jargon from training and context rather than needing to be fed every little individual case as a per-user configuration. There are advantages to making a program more sophisticated than a literal == check against a list of pre-programmed words. And even if there were an easy and satisfying way to unify dictionaries cross-device, it still wouldn't be a pleasant experience. That first time adding every single jargon term you use is not enjoyable. If there was a solution that just... didn't require that, it would solve a problem current spellcheckers do not solve. And what do you know, it appears there is one! > This is a second logic fail. Saying things are logic fails doesn't make them logic fails, all the more so when the failure is your own reading comprehension. I explicitly noted that non-determinism doesn't need to be flawless, only better than the deterministic solution on average. If the non-deterministic error rate of LLMs is below 1%, that still puts it far, far, far ahead of the deterministic tool's error rate. It may be possible to create a deterministic tool that is better on average, but I haven't seen one. The current tooling is so fucking horrendously bad that after decades they cannot handle pluralising any uncommon word that is pluralised with "ies", for example squiggly is recognised and squigglies is not. That is fucking shamefully bad technology. | | |
| ▲ | xoa 30 minutes ago | parent [-] | | >The LLM approach is not dependent on system configurations How is it not dependent? Like, help me out here: I'm writing something up in vim on my FreeBSD system using the built-in dictionary capability, maybe I've got grammar too with LanguageTool via the ALE plugin. I've added various words to my good words list over time. I save it to a network drive and want to keep working on it and do some graphical formatting as well for output to a different audience with a different tool on an iPad for a flight. How does "the LLM approach" uniquely slot into vim and the iPad app. "Uniquely" as-in a way that you couldn't slot in a shared sync'd dictionary file or whatever else. What if one of the developers doesn't want to and I don't have time or (if it's closed source) can't? How does it help all the other different software I use that are still using their own thing? If by "LLM approach" you specifically mean "I copy/paste into this whole other software, and that software is what I use from different platforms" well, that's nice but it's not an "LLM approach" it's a "copy/paste into different software" approach which again could be done with whatever. I explicitly noted that non-determinism doesn't need to be flawless, only better than the deterministic solution on average. But how do you know what the "average" is? You can't get that from a single shot. And what's the upside vs downside of false positives or false negatives or meaning changes/hallucinations? That's also a point of contention, particularly when it comes to any problem space (coding of course, but also law, medicine etc) where precision in language is important even 1% of the time. And you clearly have an intense personal issue here around grammar/spelling that is not universally shared. Which is fine, but the tradeoffs you're willing to make are also going to be personal. It's also going to vary, just as with using LLMs for coding, based on the user. Some people are sufficiently capable with language to realistically be able to expect to double check an LLM and mostly do fine. It's a lot riskier though for someone with a weak grasp to depend on. |
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| ▲ | wat10000 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's not clear whether using "grate" instead of "great" is a grammar mistake or a spelling mistake. I'd argue it's a spelling mistake. The intent was not "my spell checker works a frame of metal bars," it was "my spell checker works well." It just so happens that the misspelled word matches a different word. An example of a sentence like this with correct spelling but bad grammar would be "my spell checker works good." All of the words are what they're meant to be, but the last word is not the correct part of speech.= But because computers are good at detecting "this doesn't match any known word" and bad at detecting "this matches a word but isn't the word you meant to use here," we've redefined "spell checking" to mean "find words that don't match any known word." Your point about the joke is not correct. If I put my comment into ChatGPT and ask for a grammar check, it recognizes that it's a joke with deliberately bad grammar and suggests leaving it alone. If I put my comment into a grammar checker, it flags multiple errors in the joke. And "deterministic meaning-preserving ones"? Traditional spell/grammar checkers may be deterministic, but at no point have they ever been guaranteed to preserve meaning, or even been particularly good at it. | | |
| ▲ | xoa an hour ago | parent [-] | | >It's not clear whether using "grate" instead of "great" is a grammar mistake or a spelling mistake. It actually is clear, because words have meaning. "Spelling" refers specifically to the order of letters forming a given word [0, 1]. The proper use of words with a sentence, the "the study of the classes of words, their inflections, and their functions and relations in the sentence" [2] is the definition of "grammar"! >I'd argue it's a spelling mistake. Perhaps so, you're welcome to invent your own special snowflake definitions for words without much relation to decades/centuries of usage. It's a free country. But I would and will argue you are incorrect to do so and then expect to communicate with other humans. ---- 0: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spell 1: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/spell 2: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grammar | | |
| ▲ | wat10000 an hour ago | parent [-] | | > "Spelling" refers specifically to the order of letters forming a given word Right. And "the given word" in that particular example means "well" and is spelled G R E A T. G R A T E is a misspelling of that word. Your position doesn't make any sense when you boil it down. I write some word as some sequence of letters. Whether it's correctly spelled depends not only on how that word is spelled, but how all other words, completely unrelated, are also spelled? Let's say someone meant to write "bite" but wrote "byte" back in 1950. That's a misspelling. Did it retroactively become a grammar error when the word "byte" was coined in 1956? Or does the word have to exist at the time of writing for it to be a grammar error instead of a spelling error? It's a lot more consistent if you consider the spelling relative to the word that's supposed to be there and accept that computer spell checkers miss the case where a misspelling happens to match a different word. | | |
| ▲ | xoa an hour ago | parent [-] | | >And "the given word" in that particular example means "well" and is spelled G R E A T. G R A T E is a misspelling of that word. "Grate" is a real word, and it is correctly spelled. In fact, within the purpose of the joke, it's even correctly used! But even if someone were to write that sentence out with no joke meaning, because perhaps they had learned English as a second language purely phonetically and were just trying to write things as they sounded, it'd be a grammar issue not a spelling one. Same as more common IRL hiccups like their/there, or its/it's. We even have other words like in the English language specifically to describe that in turn, like "homonym". >Your position doesn't make any sense when you boil it down. No, it's your position that makes no sense. You are effectively arguing that the word "grammar" shouldn't exist! There is in fact an objective difference between mechanically misspelling words and incorrectly using a homonym. >I write some word as some sequence of letters. Whether it's correctly spelled depends not only on how that word is spelled, but how all other words, completely unrelated, are also spelled? As I said, you're free to invent your own special snowflake definitions. But what you are writing is not in fact the shared definition at all. You for some reason are very determined to conflate "spelling" with "grammar". I linked you a few major sources, but this is not an area of contention, it has been consistently used for a very long time including in computers. It's even had plenty of attention over the decades. I still remember when a grammar checker was added for the first time to Microsoft Word and the debates about its quality (or lack thereof). There are even whole UX patterns around this, like coloring the squiggly lines below writing differently depending on if it's a spelling check error (commonly red) or grammar check (often blue). Precisely because grammar checking is harder and has often been iffier many people will disable it but leave spell checking on, because they're confident enough in their grammar and don't trust the computer, but don't want to accidentally post or send a message with "great" or "grate" as "graeyte". Edit: in reply to wat10000 doing the 'ol virtual "good day to you SIR!" below: I said it was a snowflake definition, given it's completely contrary to every dictionary and historical usage. I didn't call you yourself a snowflake. And what's actually really fucking infuriating is when people like you simply refuse to use standard, shared dictionary definitions of words and widely used established software tools in your conversation and then further refuse to acknowledge it when corrected. And also refuse to engage with any substance and instead storm off in a virtual huff. You could have just gone "right I meant grammar correction, present grammar correction really kind of sucks and that's what I think people need most vs spelling correction" and that'd be that. | | |
| ▲ | wat10000 34 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I have more to say, but repeatedly calling me a snowflake is pretty fucking infuriating, so I'll leave it. |
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| ▲ | bityard an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Strong disagree. One of the core strengths of LLMs from the beginning is that they are very good at NOT changing meaning, as long as your model isn't so small that it starts to get "dumb" and as long as your input fits in the context window. (Two known limitations that aren't always exposed to the end user in poorly-written applications.) Of course, LLMs are non-deterministic and do occasionally make mistakes, so you have to use them correctly and review their output. You shouldn't paste a doc into the web UI and tell it "fix all the mistakes and write the output to a new file." You should instead have it present each mistake and fix to the user as a diff and let the user approve or deny, either within the application or allowing the user to make their own edits. Never let it "rewrite" the whole document, that's the document-editing equivalent of giving OpenClaw root on your personal computer. Nothing good will come of it. Classic spell checkers can't detect homophones. E.g. "there" and "their." Grammar checkers can, but at least the ones that I have used also like to change the tone of my writing to sterile corporate PC speak. LLMs used for grammar checking have not, in my experience, meddled with my tone. (Although sometimes they try to admonish me for it!) | | |
| ▲ | dragonwriter an hour ago | parent [-] | | > Grammar checkers can, but at least the ones that I have used also like to change the tone of my writing to sterile corporate PC speak. Most grammar checker packages also include style checking, and the default options tend toward that style (because that’s the big market for them.) Most of them are also configurable, so you can disable style checking entirely while still checking grammar, or tweak which style rules are applied. |
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| ▲ | saynay 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | AI certainly is the shiny new hammer, and it is tempting to see the world as nails. Traditional methods might not be perfect, but they also easily fit in the memory of even low power devices. Perhaps it isn't a problem worth burning a dollar of tokens for every spelling mistake. | |
| ▲ | sarchertech 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The fact that it produces correctly spelled words says nothing about it’s ability to find spelling mistakes or to correct them without errors like completely changing the word. | | |
| ▲ | allears 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | You mean errors like misusing "it's" when the right word is "its?" |
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| ▲ | Hizonner 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > What would be a better way to incorporate AI as a spell checker? Don't do a stupid thing like that in the first place. > In comparison to non-AI traditional tools, AI has the advantage of "understanding" the text, reducing the number of "stupid" mis-corrections. I doubt it, but if that's true, run a normal spell checker, and then give the output to your LLM to filter. > what is there to gain by interfacing it with traditional solutions, About a billionfold improvement in compute efficiency, and a lower error rate. > and how can it be achieved? 10 seconds of actual thought. | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I am skeptical that AI brings any benefit to spell checking at all. |
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| ▲ | gedy 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I swear that so many AI usecases I see are: "I did not have the skill or realize that you can write a program for this obvious logic". I guess that works if you aren't a programmer or don't want to hire somebody, but then wtf would I pay for your service or product? |
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| ▲ | ACCount37 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Way too much engineering effort to make something that might get leapfrogged by the next gen LLM. It's a tantalizing thing, but far too treacherous to actually go for it, most of the time. | | |
| ▲ | intrasight 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | There are many domains where a hybrid of numeric and AI approaches would make sense. For example in those domains where there's already a rich practice of numeric tools such as with IC layout. |
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| ▲ | ahartmetz 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Something something bitter lesson blah blah I think the bitter lesson is severely misapplied in the current situation: If progress from "just add more resources" is very slow, and a huge amount of money is at stake, continous work on hand-engineering can give a continuous and very valuable competitive advantage. The labs all seem to be going for AGI through bigger LLMs, and I am reasonably sure that it's not going to happen like that. | | |
| ▲ | irthomasthomas 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > The labs all seem to be going for AGI through bigger LLMs I don't know if this is still the case. Labs like anthropic and openai are spending a huge amount of their time on custom model wrappers. Something which they used to leave to their customers. |
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| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | PyWoody 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A few days ago someone on HN commented that a teammate uses Claude to search for text in files on their own computer. Buddy... There's Command-line Tools Can Be 235x Faster Than Your Hadoop Cluster and then there's Command-line Tools Can Be ∞ Faster Than Your AI. | | |
| ▲ | dylan604 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | As snark, I've been using the phrase "ask GPT about it" for things that clearly do not need an LLM to be involved. The other day, I was on a zoom call and said it, only to see the present actually doing it. I hope my unmuted laugh wasn't too distracting. |
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| ▲ | ajross 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > nobody [wants to use AI] to augment already working solutions Plenty of people do, but that only produces a blog post that will get you to the front page of HN. If you want VCs to drop $40M on your head, you need to pretend to reinvent the world. Then, to further appease the rain gods, you need to sue the bloggers on the front page of HN who are challenging your world-changing narrative. Which will, heh, drop you on the front page of HN. Our community is, literally, eating itself at this point. There was a time when we actually took "make something people want" literally. Now it's just part of the fiction. |
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| ▲ | monuszero 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That precise mixed technique approach has worked well for me. I’ve been using JITX (python based circuit design with a powerful auto router). Free for personal use, and has been discussed a few times here in HN. Edit: it’s almost assumed at this point but for completeness Claude / Codex were the ones driving the OO python code and datasheet research and parsing. https://www.jitx.com/ | |
| ▲ | PaulHoule 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Until a few years ago it was generally understood that useful "creativity" involves solving problems within constraints, e.g. something a lot like SAT or SMT in spirit even if not in the details. Then we got LLMs which will make a good parody of anything and occasionally get it right. | |
| ▲ | kevin_thibedeau 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Within an IC you don't have large obstructions for metal layers, distances are short, and buffers can be inserted at will to manage SI. | | |
| ▲ | pjc50 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | It has been about 20 years since I worked on this (clock gating and clock buffering), but .. > distances are short I remember we had a catastrophic error for "wire longer than 2cm". > and buffers can be inserted at will to manage SI. Effective buffering of large nets was a massive pain. Areas where you want to buffer are inevitably areas with a very high level of placement congestion. So you push some cells out of the way to add a buffer. That ends up worsening their timing. So they need a bit more sizing/buffering. Rinse and repeat for a few hours. ( https://web.archive.org/web/20071028033035/http://www.edn.co... ; long since absorbed into Cadence) |
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| ▲ | CorrectHorseBat 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It is far from solved in IC, synthesis tools sometimes still do really stupid things and there's still quite a lot of hand-holding required to get to a working chip. | | |
| ▲ | Arodex 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | And LLM are even stupider and need even more hand-holding The right use of AI would be to use it to create a better routing/synthesis tool, but that's not what is being worked on |
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| ▲ | moron4hire 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | All of these Gen AI tools where you pay a subscription fee are basically Software-as-a-Casino. You spin the wheel and hope it doesn't come up 00, then chase good money after bad when it does. Add in the parasocial relationship that some people develop with the LLM and you basically have OnlyFans but instead of vaguely dissatisfying feet pics to order it's vaguely dissatisfying code to order. It's that edge of "almost there, just one more token, bro" that makes it addictive. | | |
| ▲ | Lerc 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | That might be the right analogy except it is not clear that it is a house always wins situation. If you have a .6 chance of success on any particular outcome. Long term win or loss is down to your behaviour. If you double or nothing every time loss is guaranteed. The right strategy will win over the long term. | | |
| ▲ | moron4hire 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Gambling addicts make all kinds of post-hoc rationalizations for why they are actually up, if you think about it. "Well, if you consider my entertainment, I'm actually up." "Well, if you think of all the drinks I got comped, I'm actually up." Even worse are the ones who talk about runs, "I was up $10,000 at one point." Nevermind they gave it all back and another $20k chasing that first $10k. At the end of the day, if they had just gone to the movies instead, they'd have more money on their pocket. Same with most people "doing a startup" or "opening a restaurant". There will be arguments all day long about how these affairs are technically possible and quite lucrative if everything goes according to plan. But the reality is that vanishly few people are equipped to identify and stick to the right plan. Reality meeting theory. I've told my developers they can use agentic coding if they want, but they must never mention it in the course of development. Not because I don't want to know, but because it's not going to change my evaluation of "their" work. If they can use the AI and get to a point that they can submit a PR that they themselves understand, then technically speaking, what do I care? But if it breaks the build or does something stupid and they don't understand it, it's going to be a bad day for them, whether they wrote it themselves or copied it out of StackOverflow or had Gemini do it. Nobody has taken me up on this offer, because I think they know that they aren't going to have the extreme discipline to do the hard thing of understanding "someone" else's code and sign their name to it. | | |
| ▲ | thenewnewguy an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > Same with most people "doing a startup" or "opening a restaurant". While I mostly agree with your sentiment, I think there is an important difference. Unless you are attempting advantage play (99.99% of gamblers are not, and casinos ban the few that are), there is literally nothing you can do at a casino to make it a positive EV activity. No amount of skill, drive, effort, or anything other than pure luck can consistently generate profit at a casino. A startup/business, on the other hand, can be effectived by your actions. Luck obviously plays a large factor, but you have some level of control over the outcome. | |
| ▲ | pjc50 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > If they can use the AI and get to a point that they can submit a PR that they themselves understand, then technically speaking, what do I care? This is where my employer has ended up after extremely cautious AI adoption: _must_ be reviewed by a human, and the human whose name is on the gerrit review is responsible for the quality of the work. For some reason the OpenAI dashboard shows me how much money the company as a whole has spent? It's still a very reasonable-looking amount of money and a tiny fraction of salaries. | | |
| ▲ | bee_rider 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | That doesn’t seem “extremely cautious,” it seems… exactly the right amount of cautious. “A computer can never be held accountable” and all that. |
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| ▲ | DrewADesign 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I am actually up all the drinks I got comped in Vegas. I sit down at the penny slots and bet one penny one row until I get offered a free drink. I tip the server $3, bet two more pennies for good measure, get up, and walk out with the drink in my hand. I just got like a $3.10 Manhattan for walking around the strip, including tip, courtesy of some business that was low-key trying to scam me and deserves to have less money than they do. | | | |
| ▲ | Lerc 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | If they cannot mention it how do you know that they have not taken up the offer? I agree that people will rationalise being in a losing situation as a winning situation. That does not change the fact that winning situations can exist. | | |
| ▲ | moron4hire 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | They can't talk about it during the code review. Basically, "no excuses." We talk about what we're doing otherwise. | | |
| ▲ | Lerc 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's still gambling, you've just made yourself the house. Developers have to gamble on whether they will be better with AI or without. The no excuses criteria means if they choose AI and it performs well, you both win, if it performs poorly they lose. If they don't choose AI but colleagues do and it performs well, they lose relative to their colleagues. The sensible solution would be solidarity and all reject the offer. Don't play the house. |
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