erosivesoul (u/erosivesoul)

erosivesoul commented on LLM based agents as Dungeon Masters studenttheses.uu.nl/bitst... · Posted by u/utiiiD

JohnMakin · 8 months ago

> This is so interesting that people want this

I love being a DM but it is no mystery to me. Being a DM is a lot of work. And occasionally, a lot of annoyance. You not only have to facilitate (and sometimes create from scratch) an engaging story that keeps people coming back, you have to wrangle busy schedules and personalities that is often annoying. Lots of times you'll have a bunch of people willing to play, but no one willing to DM. So to me it's not surprising at all, and I experimented with AI in running a game, and quickly concluded it could never be good at it because it's so insanely suggestible and has poor memory.

erosivesoul · 8 months ago

That would be my takeaway too. There is room for AI DMs, but they need to get a lot better before they're really fun to play with. I tried a few AI RP just to see how it works and it was pretty boring.

erosivesoul commented on Be Aware of the Makefile Effect blog.yossarian.net/2025/0... · Posted by u/thunderbong

raverbashing · 8 months ago

Pretty much this

And of course every one of those tools has to have their own special language/syntax that makes sense nowhere else (think of all the tools beyond make, like autotools, etc)

I don't care about make. I don't care learning about make beyond what's needed for my job

Sure, it's a great tool, but I literally have 10 other things that deserve more of my attention than having my makefile work as needed

So yeah I'll copy/paste and be done with it

erosivesoul · 8 months ago

Honestly is this not how it should be done? There's always going to be a more elegant approach for sure. But in general, we don't want developers to keep rewriting the same code again and again. Avoiding that is part of entire design paradigms. I'd like to talk to the dev who doesn't copy-paste and writes everything from scratch.

erosivesoul commented on How I program with LLMs crawshaw.io/blog/programm... · Posted by u/stpn

tikkun · 8 months ago

Intersting.

So engineers that like to iterate and explore are more likely to like LLMs.

Whereas engineers that like have a more rigid specific process are more likely to dislike LLMs.

erosivesoul · 8 months ago

FWIW I find LLMs almost useless for writing novel code. Like it can spit out a serviceable UUID generator when I need it, but try writing something with more than a layer or two of recursion and it gets confused. I turn copilot on for boilerplate and off for solving new problems.

erosivesoul commented on It's okay to code on nights and weekends tej.as/blog/coding-nights... · Posted by u/tejaskumar_

devsda · 8 months ago

> People who are passionate about computer programming and also do it off the job will over time gain more experience and knowledge than their only on the job counterparts.

Those who are passionate also have a tendency to use their personal time to "try/do/fix that one last thing for work" because they are really excited.

The problem is the said extra work gradually eats into personal time & projects and it raises baseline expectations from the employer even when it stops being fun. Then the grind begins with no personal time or projects. That's a common recipe for burn-out.

Those who can have strict separation between work & personal time or projects will obviously not fall into this trap but when you are excited and passionate, its hard to realize and fight against it.

erosivesoul · 8 months ago

This is something I had to learn the hard way. My first job, I didn't even sign up as a programmer. One day someone was like, man, this is such a boring task (setting up excel sheets from one format to another). So I wrote a VBA script to automate it. At the time I was playing with C# and bash at home, setting up a home lab. So when I started getting asked to write other things, I was elated. Fast forward a year or two and now I'm the "VBA/bash/C#/typescript/react/sql/blah" guy and I've gone from solving work problems for fun and doing it just because I have to. That job didn't last long after that point. My current job has pretty clear-cut lines. I only work on work-related stuff at work, and personal stuff at home.

erosivesoul commented on ChatGPT Search openai.com/index/introduc... · Posted by u/thm

Willamin · 10 months ago

I find myself being unable to search for more complex subjects when I don't know the keywords, specialized terminology, or even the title of a work, yet I have a broad understanding of what I'd like to find. Traditional search engines (I'll jump between Kagi, DuckDuckGo, and Google) haven't proved as useful at pointing me in the right direction when I find that I need to spend a few sentences describing what I'm looking for.

LLMs on the other hand (free ChatGPT is the only one I've used for this, not sure which models) give me an opportunity to describe in detail what I'm looking for, and I can provide extra context if the LLM doesn't immediately give me an answer. Given LLM's propensity for hallucinations, I don't take its answers as solid truth, but I'll use the keywords, terms, and phrases in what it gives me to leverage traditional search engines to find a more authoritative source of information.

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Separately, I'll also use LLMs to search for what I suspect is obscure-enough knowledge that it would prove difficult to wade through more popular sites in traditional search engine results pages.

erosivesoul · 10 months ago

I also find some use for this. Or I often ask if there's a specific term for a thing that I only know generally, which usually yields better search results, especially for obscure science and technology things. The newer GPTs are also decent at math, but I still use Wolfram Alpha for most of that stuff just because I don't have to double check it for hallucinations.

erosivesoul commented on TSMC execs allegedly dismissed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as 'podcasting bro' tomshardware.com/tech-ind... · Posted by u/WithinReason

thelastparadise · a year ago

I (20+ years experience programmer) find it leads to a much higher quality output as I can now afford to do all the mundane, time-consuming housekeeping (refactors, more tests, making things testable).

E.g. let's say I'm working on a production thing and features/bugfixes accumulate and some file in the codebase starts to resemble spaghetti. The LLM can help me unfuck that way faster and get to a state of very clean code, across many files at once.

erosivesoul · a year ago

What LLM do you use? I've not gotten a lot of use out of Copilot, except for filling in generic algorithms or setting up boilerplate. Sometimes I use it for documentation but it often overlooks important details, or provides a description so generic as to be pointless. I've heard about Cursor but haven't tried it yet.