If you replace a junior with #LLM and make the senior review output, the reviewer is now scanning for rare but catastrophic errors scattered across a much larger output surface due to LLM "productivity."
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If you replace a junior with #LLM and make the senior review output, the reviewer is now scanning for rare but catastrophic errors scattered across a much larger output surface due to LLM "productivity."
That's a cognitively brutal task.
Humans are terrible at sustained vigilance for rare events in high-volume streams. Aviation, nuclear, radiology all have extensive literature on exactly this failure mode.
I propose any productivity gains will be consumed by false negative review failures.
@pseudonym @mayintoronto … and: there will be no juniors to grow into seniors.
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If you replace a junior with #LLM and make the senior review output, the reviewer is now scanning for rare but catastrophic errors scattered across a much larger output surface due to LLM "productivity."
That's a cognitively brutal task.
Humans are terrible at sustained vigilance for rare events in high-volume streams. Aviation, nuclear, radiology all have extensive literature on exactly this failure mode.
I propose any productivity gains will be consumed by false negative review failures.
@pseudonym We are using AI inexactly the worst ways possible.
Caveat: I am a never AI-er, due to the ethical issues surrounding how training data is gathered, the severe ecological and economic impacts, and the fact that deepfakes are objectively making the world a shittier place.
But pretend for a second, none of those are a problem anymore. We are still using AI wrong. You don't have it produce a mountain of code and have a human review it. You still use humans to produce the code, and have AI help other humans to review it. AI isn't terribly good at writing code, but it has been shown to be effective at finding a few classes of bugs humans are typically very bad at finding.
But that won't allow you to fire people and replace them with monkeys on typewriters, so it'll never happen.
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@pseudonym Especially since the sort of mistake that LLMs make is the sort of mistake that's hardest for humans to spot. They produce bad code that looks like good code, because they were trained on a lot of good code and told "Write code that looks like this".
@robinadams yes
I'm not sure if this is a but or an and...
The recent @squads blogpost by @EmmaDelescolle and @Tiziano notes that LLMs are good at reviews.
In an LLM friendly context, seniors will delegate shit work to LLM of course. So now we have the horrid situation where young coders don't learn coding, and senior teaching skills atrophy. I'm sure retrospectives on this are delegated to an LLM as we speak somewhere 🤪
Isn't this just the absolutely perfect shitstorm?
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If you replace a junior with #LLM and make the senior review output, the reviewer is now scanning for rare but catastrophic errors scattered across a much larger output surface due to LLM "productivity."
That's a cognitively brutal task.
Humans are terrible at sustained vigilance for rare events in high-volume streams. Aviation, nuclear, radiology all have extensive literature on exactly this failure mode.
I propose any productivity gains will be consumed by false negative review failures.
@pseudonym - and by costs of false positives.
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@hopeless @pseudonym you are suggesting that you can just layer more shit onto the shit and after enough layers of shit it becomes not shit.
@nor4 @hopeless @pseudonym if hidden well enough, it's ok to step in it, right 🤪
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@pseudonym I have posed this conundrum before and the answer I received is that there is also an opportunity cost to not moving faster and the risk of a catastrophic bug may not outweigh the risk of being overtaken by competitors, especially since that was already happening before LLMs anyway.
Also, it *seems* models are improving at detecting these bugs, so they are being used to review changes, which, for the reasons you point out, they might be better at than people.
@toldtheworld @pseudonym I didn't think I'd see the day when I'd want to ask CEOs "If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?"
Overtaken by competitors how? How is it "overtaken by" when what is actually happening is "my competitors are introducing fundamental flaws into their business model that will completely vitiate it as a workable product so all I have to do is wait for them to fail"?
Apparently the free market doesn't turn people into money-making machines that build products other people want, it turns CEOs into lemmings. Who knew?
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R relay@relay.mycrowd.ca shared this topicR relay@relay.infosec.exchange shared this topic
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@pseudonym We are using AI inexactly the worst ways possible.
Caveat: I am a never AI-er, due to the ethical issues surrounding how training data is gathered, the severe ecological and economic impacts, and the fact that deepfakes are objectively making the world a shittier place.
But pretend for a second, none of those are a problem anymore. We are still using AI wrong. You don't have it produce a mountain of code and have a human review it. You still use humans to produce the code, and have AI help other humans to review it. AI isn't terribly good at writing code, but it has been shown to be effective at finding a few classes of bugs humans are typically very bad at finding.
But that won't allow you to fire people and replace them with monkeys on typewriters, so it'll never happen.
@nuintari what is AI?
Reason I ask is that for everything containing the least bit of software I can find a techbro willing to confabulate an 'ai' themed pitch deck. I'm not even kidding.
I surely hope to keep my dishwasher, if I promise not to call it 'ai' (but I'm sure someone else will)
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@nuintari what is AI?
Reason I ask is that for everything containing the least bit of software I can find a techbro willing to confabulate an 'ai' themed pitch deck. I'm not even kidding.
I surely hope to keep my dishwasher, if I promise not to call it 'ai' (but I'm sure someone else will)
@iwein Sorry, I've taken to just using the term AI when I mean LLM, even though I actually mean "Almost Incompetent," in my own head.
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If you replace a junior with #LLM and make the senior review output, the reviewer is now scanning for rare but catastrophic errors scattered across a much larger output surface due to LLM "productivity."
That's a cognitively brutal task.
Humans are terrible at sustained vigilance for rare events in high-volume streams. Aviation, nuclear, radiology all have extensive literature on exactly this failure mode.
I propose any productivity gains will be consumed by false negative review failures.
@pseudonym@mastodon.online
Yesterday, I was working on some PowerShell-based automation. I'm a UNIX/Linux guy. I'm used to Bash. I'm used to Python and pythonic DSLs. I'm… You get the drift. I'm not a Windows guy and I'm not PowerShell guy.
A few days ago, I got an email from Google telling me that, because I have a storage plan (mostly for photos storage), that use of Gemini was now included. So, I opted to try to use Gemini to bridge my PowerShell knowledge-gaps. I came to a couple conclusions:
• If you're a truly junior "coder" (haven't mastered at least one "language" and regularly applied that master to "the real world), relying on LLMs is likely to lead you to creating smoking holes
• Those "smoking holes" are the results of the LLM sometimes providing partially or wholly incorrect answers: I've had to correct Gemini several times
• Even where "smoking holes" aren't a risk, LLMs are not adequately speculative. To illustrate, I was trying to solve a problem. Gemini suggested a given path to take. The suggested-path looked more generalizable, so I asked, "I feel like there's a good chance I can do similar within this other, very analogous component. I'm going to run a test to validate." Gemini's response was effectively, "don't bother: the documentation doesn't indicate that that will work." A couple decades' experience under my belt, I know that documentation is sometimes incomplete or wrong (out of date). So, I proceeded to test my suspicion and, lo and behold, it worked. If you're lacking "feel" for things, you'd likely take the LLM's "don't bother" guidance and go down a different path, a path that might be a lot more byzantine. -
If you replace a junior with #LLM and make the senior review output, the reviewer is now scanning for rare but catastrophic errors scattered across a much larger output surface due to LLM "productivity."
That's a cognitively brutal task.
Humans are terrible at sustained vigilance for rare events in high-volume streams. Aviation, nuclear, radiology all have extensive literature on exactly this failure mode.
I propose any productivity gains will be consumed by false negative review failures.
@pseudonym Yes. Very well put. I’m gonna use this …
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@iwein Sorry, I've taken to just using the term AI when I mean LLM, even though I actually mean "Almost Incompetent," in my own head.
@nuintari thanks for that
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If you replace a junior with #LLM and make the senior review output, the reviewer is now scanning for rare but catastrophic errors scattered across a much larger output surface due to LLM "productivity."
That's a cognitively brutal task.
Humans are terrible at sustained vigilance for rare events in high-volume streams. Aviation, nuclear, radiology all have extensive literature on exactly this failure mode.
I propose any productivity gains will be consumed by false negative review failures.
@pseudonym
Looks like Harvard Business Review agrees with you
AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It
One of the promises of AI is that it can reduce workloads so employees can focus more on higher-value and more engaging tasks. But according to new research, AI tools don’t reduce work, they consistently intensify it: In the study, employees worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without being asked to do so. That may sound like a win, but it’s not quite so simple. These changes can be unsustainable, leading to workload creep, cognitive fatigue, burnout, and weakened decision-making. The productivity surge enjoyed at the beginning can give way to lower quality work, turnover, and other problems. To correct for this, companies need to adopt an “AI practice,” or a set of norms and standards around AI use that can include intentional pauses, sequencing work, and adding more human grounding.
Harvard Business Review (hbr.org)
I did not read the whole thing but summary says
"One of the promises of AI is that it can reduce workloads so employees can focus more on higher-value and more engaging tasks. But according to new research, AI tools don’t reduce work, they consistently intensify it ..."
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If you replace a junior with #LLM and make the senior review output, the reviewer is now scanning for rare but catastrophic errors scattered across a much larger output surface due to LLM "productivity."
That's a cognitively brutal task.
Humans are terrible at sustained vigilance for rare events in high-volume streams. Aviation, nuclear, radiology all have extensive literature on exactly this failure mode.
I propose any productivity gains will be consumed by false negative review failures.
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@JizzelEtBass
Thanks
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Yeah. Pretty sure I read that earlier and it influenced my thinking about this, leading to my post.
Thanks for the reference.
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@pseudonym Yes. Very well put. I’m gonna use this …
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@pseudonym@mastodon.online
Yesterday, I was working on some PowerShell-based automation. I'm a UNIX/Linux guy. I'm used to Bash. I'm used to Python and pythonic DSLs. I'm… You get the drift. I'm not a Windows guy and I'm not PowerShell guy.
A few days ago, I got an email from Google telling me that, because I have a storage plan (mostly for photos storage), that use of Gemini was now included. So, I opted to try to use Gemini to bridge my PowerShell knowledge-gaps. I came to a couple conclusions:
• If you're a truly junior "coder" (haven't mastered at least one "language" and regularly applied that master to "the real world), relying on LLMs is likely to lead you to creating smoking holes
• Those "smoking holes" are the results of the LLM sometimes providing partially or wholly incorrect answers: I've had to correct Gemini several times
• Even where "smoking holes" aren't a risk, LLMs are not adequately speculative. To illustrate, I was trying to solve a problem. Gemini suggested a given path to take. The suggested-path looked more generalizable, so I asked, "I feel like there's a good chance I can do similar within this other, very analogous component. I'm going to run a test to validate." Gemini's response was effectively, "don't bother: the documentation doesn't indicate that that will work." A couple decades' experience under my belt, I know that documentation is sometimes incomplete or wrong (out of date). So, I proceeded to test my suspicion and, lo and behold, it worked. If you're lacking "feel" for things, you'd likely take the LLM's "don't bother" guidance and go down a different path, a path that might be a lot more byzantine.Same background (Unix grey beard) with current focus on security, and your experience matched my own.
I was soaking in a lot more AI tools at last job, and experience and insight are key.
Recently I had a system suggest multiple times to do it "the easy way" which emphatically was not how I wanted it to work. I was able to gently guide it back to what I wanted.
Letting a senior dev do the work of a senior guiding a junior is about right. But still can't replace either.
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@pseudonym I have posed this conundrum before and the answer I received is that there is also an opportunity cost to not moving faster and the risk of a catastrophic bug may not outweigh the risk of being overtaken by competitors, especially since that was already happening before LLMs anyway.
Also, it *seems* models are improving at detecting these bugs, so they are being used to review changes, which, for the reasons you point out, they might be better at than people.
The models may indeed get better at finding and fixing their own mistakes, and would not be subject to human fatigue, that's true. But it is never perfect, so you still need a human in the loop. You've just pushed back the time a bit before you missed a harder-to-detect error. Which is inevitable, because hallucinations / confabulations are a feature, not a bug, of essential LLM operations.
So you make more, faster, harder to spot errors. Better LLM checkers increase the risk.
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@pseudonym @mayintoronto … and: there will be no juniors to grow into seniors.
Yup. This is my biggest structural concern, really. But I only had 500 characters to consider the previous post, and wanted to focus on the review cost of any "gains" one might have.
There are more related topics to discuss, but the breaking of the funnel to train the next generation of skilled people is huge.
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@pseudonym This, %100. The Glass Cage by Nicholas Carr dives into this in depth with examples from aviation, and how full-automation of flight, makes it harder to recover from a disaster situation for pilots.
Thanks for the reference. Didn't know that one.
