In my experience they are mostly the subset of engineers who enjoyed coding in and of itself and ——in some cases—— without concern for the end product.

I certainly read it as one and found it funny.

But if true presumably it’s one of the usual reasons for observing data with low likelihood according to a model: misspecification or statistical bias/variance.

I’m not sure it’s really true in practice yet, but that would certainly be the claim.

That pattern is people complaining that a particular model has degraded in quality of its responses over time or that it has been “nerfed” etc.

Although the models may evolve, and the tools calling them may change, I suspect a huge amount of this is simply confirmation bias.

The most successful engineers are the ones who can accurately assess the trade-offs regarding those things. The things you list still may be critical for many applications and worth obsessing over.

The question becomes can we still achieve the same trade-offs without writing code by hand in those cases.

That’s an open question.

This is not really a point about whether LLMs can currently be used as English compilers, but more questioning whether determinism of the final machine code output is a critical property of a build system.

I suspect those using the tools in the best way are thinking harder than ever for this reason.

In the happy case where I have a good idea of the changes necessary, I will ask it to do small things, step by step, and examine what it does and commit.

In the unhappy case where one is faced with a massive codebase and no idea where to start, I find asking it to just “do the thing” generates slop, but enough for me to use as inspiration for the above.

I say this with sincerity: I have met precisely zero young people who I think come anywhere close to this description over the last decade.

I’ve seen it in the online world, yes, but this tends to amplify the very very small minority who (on the surface) appear to fit your description. And I see it across all age ranges and political persuasions.

Edit: I see they raise this point at length themselves in TFA.

“The fact is most ordinary mortals never get access to a fraction of that kind of power”

That said, observing attempts by skeptics to “unsuccessfully” prompt an LLM have been illuminating.

My reaction is usually either:

- I would never have asked that kind of question in the first place.

- The output you claim is useless looks very useful to me.

In my view many of these small regions (that blend into one another) could be combined to give a much more useful map with more sharply distinct accents.

Such a map may be less precise, but far more useful to most.