So blog with single post hyping LLMs. Oh and the domain name "human-in-the-loop". Call me suspicious.

My job as a staff engineer has turned into just reviewing slop farm vomit from offshore devs in Pakistan making pennies on the dollar given a slop code subscription and going wild.

I’ve lately just turned to having Claude do a quick /review, spot checking it, doing my own review and the. firing up some web agents to make the needed changes and just ignoring the back and forth because they don’t give a fuck anyway.

Just waiting for someone to notice and ask the obvious question at this point.

If corporations really thought LLMs were a great cost-savings tool, then the obvious target for replacement are not the lower-paid staff, but the higher-paid staff - the ‘product managers and stakeholders’. That justifies token burn, replacing the 7- and 8-figure people, right?

But that’s not the real goal, is it? The goal is to inflate the stock value, take the cream off the top, and dump the whole business on the pension funds, maybe creating a too-big-to-fail scenario where the government steps in an bails out the industry as with the airlines during Covid.

This is why all the testimonials and narratives are so suspect - nobody knows what fraction of online posts were created simply to sell the narrative that LLMs are this incredible disruptive tool that will change the world, solely in order to create FOMO in the investor class.

In this particular case, I’d like to see links to samples of LLM created codebases for “PCI compliance, double-entry ledgers, escrows, reconciliation, payment lifecycles, bank transfer idempotency”. It should be easy to put an open-source LLM-generated version up on github, right? And if not, why not?

The glory days are over. In the future, one software engineer will be able to support multiple product areas much like how one HR team can support 1,000's of employees.

LLMs have made domain knowledge and reasoning "cheap"; it doesn't matter if the output is lower quality - look around you for countless examples of where cheap wins and "cheap" continues to improve.

Good luck out there; we will all need it.

We are finally getting past the denial phase

I have no idea what you guys are up to, but it is just a job, it is just a role, it says nothing about you or who you are and it is not tied to your meaning. If you make it so and your perception is aligned with that, then you are not in control of what happens to you. What kind of slavery it is to give other people so much control over you is crazy

Am I the only one that has noticed the massive increase in buggy software across almost every domain? Like, EVERYTHING has so many more bugs now. Things just break constantly. AI isn’t one shotting fixing bugs, it’s one shotting making hundreds of new ones every time it writes anything.

AI slop. Prompter probably prompted "don't make it sound like AI slop". But one can still make it out.

move yourself to regenerative ag. take a look.

In my opinion the LLMs in the "cloud" reached plateau. Still the same probabilistic hallucinations. No idea what they gobbled up. It's a non-reliable circus type of thing. In fact I more and more go directly to Wikipedia or Grokipedia (if you want to know about Odin etc). There is more and more guardrails and talkbacks. They try to make it more human which makes it even more unusable. My guess, more and more marketing people get involved and things turn to unusable shit. I am more optimistic about local llms in a few years where there won't be any guardrails and you will be able to tweak the model how you like and not some marketing specialist at OpenAI or Anthropic.