My Experience with LLMs
Disconnected thoughts on the unpleasant experience of interacting with AI.
As a child, I wanted a robot pal. I was in love with the idea of giving a computer verbal commands, like in Star Trek. It might make a sarcastic comment and we’d be best friends. Now the thought repulses me. It would be (I assume!) like fucking a sex doll. That is, a humiliating, undignified facsimile of a fundamental human activity. By contrast, I’ll talk to dogs and cats. They have a primitive interiority. LLMs have a gee-wiz factor, of course, but so do holographic trading cards and 3D glasses.
I use it daily in software development. In the span of about 6-8 months, my work changed from hand-crafting software to ordering around a squad of obsequious amnesiacs. I read code, but I don’t write a lot of it. Too much of programming was getting stuck on something stupid, like the odd edge of an API, and the robot pal does not get stuck on these things very often. I spec out the work with Claude, review it, iterate a few times, then we write the implementation guide, then it shits something out, I review it, etc. I “press on the right seam”, my “instincts were correct”, I’m of course “absolutely right”. Qualities are genuinely real, input and output fans in and out, and concerns get flagged.
This would excite me if I were interested in productivity for its own sake, but I’m not. I’m here to do a job, of course, and I’ll use whatever tool required to get the job done. AI is still a bit of a magic wand that makes a class of hard but uninteresting problems go away. It is efficient, but what sticks in my craw is that it’s not nearly as efficient as it feels, and the mess they tend to leave requires a lot of attention to guard against. I’ve heard it said that we mainly need to be concerned with the input and output, and the internal structure is the AI’s concern, and I find that attitude so poisonous it makes me marvel at how differently I view software and its development than some other developers. Better? I don’t know. I’ve heard serious studies of AI and productivity cite something like a 25% increase in real productivity; that sounds roughly correct to me. I have found it especially helpful in prototyping, but the idea that you would abdicate your authority so quickly is astonishing, especially since no one is going to be held to account to the code that you push or that is pushed on your behalf except you. When your unexamined code launches your production DB into orbit, you will not be able to blame Claude.
I’m probably behind the curve. I’m sure there’s a set of skills or harnesses that solve all these problems and make everything perfect forever. It’s not like I was pushing perfect code before all this. I will continue to do it and look on the bright side. Producing software with AI feels like I’m getting away with something, in the sense that I’m about to get caught.
I have a running style guide, some of which is because I think its writing is counterproductive, and some of it is because it offends my sensibilities. One of Claude’s worst tendencies is to coin pseudo-jargon. I have rules against doing that. I also have rules against using rationalist slang, and other online bullshit. Simple, direct, clear. Leave the cultural flourish to humans.
At some point we’re going to have to reckon with the volume of text we’re using AI to write and summarize. At some point, we’ll have to realize that if no humans read it, then there’s probably a better way to communicate whatever is being communicated. Maybe we should have peer to peer AI communication, an always-on agent who can communicate with the always-on agents of your colleagues for context building, on-demand documentation, and then we can all go out for lunch. You don’t get hired, your digital representation gets hired. Eventually Altman et al will have to just start killing us, right?
There’s a savage glee among the true believers about the number of corporate lampreys and dead weight this tech will excise, but it seems like the opposite is happening. AI can mask laziness and incompetence very well. Do NOT say it masks my laziness and incompetence. I’m smart and cool.