YuukiRey (u/YuukiRey)

YuukiRey commented on Why LLMs can't really build software zed.dev/blog/why-llms-can... · Posted by u/srid

andrewmutz · 14 days ago

The author does not understand what LLMs and coding tools are capable of today.

> LLMs get endlessly confused: they assume the code they wrote actually works; when test fail, they are left guessing as to whether to fix the code or the tests; and when it gets frustrating, they just delete the whole lot and start over. This is exactly the opposite of what I am looking for. Software engineers test their work as they go. When tests fail, they can check in with their mental model to decide whether to fix the code or the tests, or just to gather more data before making a decision. When they get frustrated, they can reach for help by talking things through. And although sometimes they do delete it all and start over, they do so with a clearer understanding of the problem.

My experiences are based on using Cline with Anthropic Sonnet 3.7 doing TDD on Rails, and have a very different experience. I instruct the model to write tests before any code and it does. It works in small enough chunks that I can review each one. When tests fail, it tends to reason very well about why and fixes the appropriate place. It is very common for the LLM to consult more code as it goes to learn more.

It's certainly not perfect but it works about as well, if not better, than a human junior engineer. Sometimes it can't solve a bug, but human junior engineers get in the same situation too.

YuukiRey · 13 days ago

I share examples of LLM fails on our company Slack and every week LLMs do the opposite of what I tell them.

I say capture logs without overriding console methods -> they override console methods.

YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO CHANGE THE TESTS -> test changed

Or they insert various sleep calls into a test to work around race conditions.

This is all from Claude Sonnet 4.

YuukiRey commented on Protecting my attention at the dopamine carnival amirsharif.com/protecting... · Posted by u/overload119

mortsnort · a month ago

Tik Tok is obvious brain rot, but what if one's time at the dopamine carnival is spent consuming "brain-growth" content? Phones essentially put all human knowledge at our fingertips, where is the line of diminishing or negative returns when trying to consume it?

YuukiRey · a month ago

99% of the time it is consumption without ever utilizing the knowledge for any creative endeavor . And without application the knowledge will quickly fade and you’ll find yourself watching the same 10min video on statistics 101 for the 3rd time, because you keep forgetting.

It’s still mindless consumption if you don’t interact with the material in any meaningful way (follow up questions, application, try to refute it, evaluate a hypothesis you had before watching it, …)

YuukiRey commented on Preliminary report into Air India crash released bbc.co.uk/news/live/cx20p... · Posted by u/cjr

burnt-resistor · 2 months ago

> cannot be mistaken for something else

Assumption. Big ass assumption.

Pilot are trained until actions are instinctual and certain memory items are almost unconscious. But pilots are still people and people are fallible and make mistakes, and sometimes act unreasonably. Intent cannot be determined without clear evidence or statements because that's now how thoughts locked away in people's minds work.

> It's not arrogance to assume the most likely conclusion is true

You don't know this. This is beyond the capability to know and is therefore pure speculation. That is the definition of arrogance.

YuukiRey · 2 months ago

It’s the explanation that requires the fewest explanations and assumptions I’d say.

YuukiRey commented on Why Is Fertility So Low in High Income Countries? (NBER) nber.org/papers/w33989... · Posted by u/jmsflknr

Havoc · 2 months ago

Because for most rich countries this graph applies:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/e1jrvw/oc_...

YuukiRey · 2 months ago

I suggest taking a closer look at section 5 ("V. Shifting Priorities and Social Influences"), which starts on page 24 for alternative explanations.

The preceding section does mention studies that show a cause and effect relationship between e.g., income and fertility, but the effect is surprisingly small. The authors conclude the section with:

> “Pro-natal incentives do work: more money does yield more babies… But it takes a lot of money. Truth be told, trying to boost birth rates to replacement rate purely through cash incentives is prohibitively costly.”

YuukiRey commented on Why Is Fertility So Low in High Income Countries? (NBER) nber.org/papers/w33989... · Posted by u/jmsflknr

viraptor · 2 months ago

That implies adult priorities are independent of economic factors. Which is rather weird - many lives would be so different if they involved less future worries and fight for survival.

YuukiRey · 2 months ago

I don't think that's the implication.

So far I've only skimmed the paper, but here's an interesting quote:

> Among respondents of a 2018 survey conducted for the New York Times, the desire to “have more leisure time” is offered as the leading reason for not having children among adults who...

If your assumption is that economic reasons cause the decline in fertility rates, it's tempting (and natural!) to view every alternative explanation in the context of economics. In other words: all alternative explanations are symptoms of economic problems, so the root cause remains money.

But quotes like this can also be interpreted as people changing their priorities regardless of income and worries about housing. Maybe, freed of traditional role models, people would rather watch Netflix all day long in their single person household.

YuukiRey commented on Why Is Fertility So Low in High Income Countries? (NBER) nber.org/papers/w33989... · Posted by u/jmsflknr

YuukiRey · 2 months ago

Fascinating topic. I personally suspect that it has more to do with attitude and life style priorities rather than economics. But I remember reading a very recent article in the Economist that argued that birth rates declined mostly in low income families, which would contradict that.

> Underpinning these policies is an assumption that poorer women are more likely to respond to incentives to have more children. Indeed, their fertility rates do seem more elastic than those of professional women. Whereas the fertility rates of older, college-educated women have remained fairly steady over the past six decades, most of the collapse in fertility in America and Britain since 1980 stems from younger and poorer women having fewer children, particularly from unplanned pregnancies.

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/06/19/why-magas-pro-n...

Just like with many of these topics, most sources seem to contradict each other.

YuukiRey commented on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts fly.io/blog/youre-all-nut... · Posted by u/tabletcorry

YuukiRey · 3 months ago

Adding fuel to the fire. I'm extremely disappointed to see such an inflammatory article on fly.io. I wouldn't want this on my personal blog, let alone on my employers, but I guess they're fine with it.

I've been using Zed and Claude Sonnet 4 (and sometimes trying Opus) heavily over the past weeks. For small edits where I have lots of unit tests, the results were great. So great that they worry me with regards to job security. For exploring a new programming domain it was also somewhat useful. I work a lot with the Typescript compiler API right now, and it has almost no documentation. Since the AI can see into every GitHub repository out there, it's much better, and more efficient, at learning APIs based on code from other folks. On the other hand it means I don't do that job, and I am forced to rely 100% on how the AI presents the Typescript compiler API to me. Are there better methods I could use? Who knows.

Where it's abysmal is code architecture. Sometimes it's almost comical: it adds an if statement to handle one highly specific edge case in a program that only makes sense if it solves the general case. This didn't happen often thought.

The hardest part was to force it to reuse existing code from the same file. My use case is transforming a Typescript AST into a GraphQL AST. The code is one big switch statement with lots of recursive calls. The AI would often add 300 lines of code that duplicate some logic which already exists somewhere else.

In the end I rewrote the whole thing from scratch. At around 900 lines of code the AI was starting to really struggle. When I wanted to take over, I realized that I didn't have the in-depth knowledge to do so. And trying to understand the code the AI had written proved futile.

Ultimately that's on me, I should have been more diligent reviewing the dozens of 300 line of code changes the AI throws at me over the course of a day. But I wasn't, because reviewing is really, really hard. For many reasons. And AI makes it even harder.

Am I therefore nuts? I find this whole article extremely one sided. Surely, based on the sheer amount of both positive and negative press, the answer is somewhere in the middle.

YuukiRey commented on Why Algebraic Effects? antelang.org/blog/why_eff... · Posted by u/jiggawatts

ollysb · 3 months ago

As I understand it this was the inspiration for React's hooks model. The compiler won't give you the same assurances but in practice hooks do at least allow to inject effects into components.

YuukiRey · 3 months ago

I don’t see the similarity. Since hooks aren’t actually passed to, or injected into components, there’s no way to evaluate the same hooks in different ways.

I can’t have a hook that talks to a real API in one environment but to a fake one in another. I’d have to use Jest style mocking, which is more like monkey patching.

From the point of view of a React end user, there’s also no list of effects that I can access. I can’t see which effects or hooks a component carries around, which ones weren’t yet evaluated, and so on.