I was trying to work out yesterday why LLM users annoy me so much and it came back to my basic notion of rudeness: impolite behaviour stems from assuming that your time is worth more than other people's.
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@beeftacos
I've hand written a simple patch. I've been explicit that I don't know what I'm doing, and while it works in basic (mine) usage, I don't know how to test it beyond existing test suite, and what implications it may have on rest of code or performance. I am not a programmer, and I'm the first to admit it.
It was accepted, possibly slightly modified.
@david_chisnall@beeftacos
Arguments I'm currently using is that creators of LLMs have subtlety and consideration of strip mining operations, and any and all usage of their tools makes their number go up and validates their business plans/practices.
@david_chisnall -
@beeftacos
Arguments I'm currently using is that creators of LLMs have subtlety and consideration of strip mining operations, and any and all usage of their tools makes their number go up and validates their business plans/practices.
@david_chisnall@beeftacos
Even if the tools worked perfectly well - that doesn't change the above.
@david_chisnall -
I was trying to work out yesterday why LLM users annoy me so much and it came back to my basic notion of rudeness: impolite behaviour stems from assuming that your time is worth more than other people's.
If someone doesn't bother to write coherent words in a message to you so that they can type faster at the cost of your comprehension speed, they're trading your time for theirs and that's rude.
If someone uses an LLM to create more words from fewer ideas, that saves them time in careful expression at the cost of more work for you. That's rude.
If someone uses an LLM to write code that doesn't work and expects other people to help debugging it, then they're saying that it isn't worth their time to learn but it is worth your time to help them. That's rude.
If someone uses an LLM to write some code that looks like it works and expects you to put effort into reviewing a PR, again, they're saving work for themselves at the expense of your time. That's rude.
Almost all LLM uses are like this: they save the user time (at least, in the short term) by making more work for someone else. They're machines optimised for creating rudeness.
There are a bunch of places where you do trade different people's time. In particular, if tasks A and B need doing, but person 1 can do either and person 2 can do only task B, then it makes sense for person 2 to do task B so that person 1 can do task A. That's not because person 1's time is more valuable, it's because person 1 doing task A is more valuable. It's not that your time is more valuable than the cleaner's time, but the cleaner doing their job means that you can spend my time doing more valuable tasks.
@david_chisnall AI enthusiasts and people who wish they could own slaves: Venn diagram is almost a circle.
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I was trying to work out yesterday why LLM users annoy me so much and it came back to my basic notion of rudeness: impolite behaviour stems from assuming that your time is worth more than other people's.
If someone doesn't bother to write coherent words in a message to you so that they can type faster at the cost of your comprehension speed, they're trading your time for theirs and that's rude.
If someone uses an LLM to create more words from fewer ideas, that saves them time in careful expression at the cost of more work for you. That's rude.
If someone uses an LLM to write code that doesn't work and expects other people to help debugging it, then they're saying that it isn't worth their time to learn but it is worth your time to help them. That's rude.
If someone uses an LLM to write some code that looks like it works and expects you to put effort into reviewing a PR, again, they're saving work for themselves at the expense of your time. That's rude.
Almost all LLM uses are like this: they save the user time (at least, in the short term) by making more work for someone else. They're machines optimised for creating rudeness.
There are a bunch of places where you do trade different people's time. In particular, if tasks A and B need doing, but person 1 can do either and person 2 can do only task B, then it makes sense for person 2 to do task B so that person 1 can do task A. That's not because person 1's time is more valuable, it's because person 1 doing task A is more valuable. It's not that your time is more valuable than the cleaner's time, but the cleaner doing their job means that you can spend my time doing more valuable tasks.
@david_chisnall Not directly related to LLM use but very much related to who does the work: In a communications training I participated in some time ago for me the most impactful thing the teacher said to us was:
"Someone always has to do the work that a message gets understood. It can be either the sender or the receiver. If you are the sender, do you want to leave it up to the receiver, who usually has less incentive to do the work?"
Now this is my north star when writing emails, bulletins, news, etc. You can use LLM to help you with this process (not saying you should use it) but you cannot outsource the provess to an LLM or you are actually moving the work back to the receiver.
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I was trying to work out yesterday why LLM users annoy me so much and it came back to my basic notion of rudeness: impolite behaviour stems from assuming that your time is worth more than other people's.
If someone doesn't bother to write coherent words in a message to you so that they can type faster at the cost of your comprehension speed, they're trading your time for theirs and that's rude.
If someone uses an LLM to create more words from fewer ideas, that saves them time in careful expression at the cost of more work for you. That's rude.
If someone uses an LLM to write code that doesn't work and expects other people to help debugging it, then they're saying that it isn't worth their time to learn but it is worth your time to help them. That's rude.
If someone uses an LLM to write some code that looks like it works and expects you to put effort into reviewing a PR, again, they're saving work for themselves at the expense of your time. That's rude.
Almost all LLM uses are like this: they save the user time (at least, in the short term) by making more work for someone else. They're machines optimised for creating rudeness.
There are a bunch of places where you do trade different people's time. In particular, if tasks A and B need doing, but person 1 can do either and person 2 can do only task B, then it makes sense for person 2 to do task B so that person 1 can do task A. That's not because person 1's time is more valuable, it's because person 1 doing task A is more valuable. It's not that your time is more valuable than the cleaner's time, but the cleaner doing their job means that you can spend my time doing more valuable tasks.
@david_chisnall Can't we say that it's a multiplier of the user's original capabilities and intent?
For each of the complaint, a diligent, caring LLM user could actually use LLM to reduce the burden on others by having the LLM support their thinking.
If you write something, have the LLM take a pass at pointing out lack of clarity, duplication, style problems.
If you write code, have an LLM point out where you overlooked an edge case, missed clarity in a comment, left a bug…
Perhaps it's not so much the tool as the user that is at fault?
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@beeftacos
I've hand written a simple patch. I've been explicit that I don't know what I'm doing, and while it works in basic (mine) usage, I don't know how to test it beyond existing test suite, and what implications it may have on rest of code or performance. I am not a programmer, and I'm the first to admit it.
It was accepted, possibly slightly modified.
@david_chisnallAnd, to me, that is very different from an LLM patch. You have put in the effort. As with everyone, there is a limit to what your effort will achieve that is bracketed by your knowledge, but you’re asking for help after trying, and you’re explicit about where the edges of your knowledge are.
I love getting patches like that because they come from someone who has identified a problem and the kinds of things that they get wrong are predictable and so review is fairly easy. They generally fall into two categories: either they’re nearly right and a small tweak is all that’s needed to land them, or there’s some fundamental misunderstanding that means the code is useless as is, but serves as a very detailed bug report for something people have actually encountered as a problem in real use. And these are both things that have value to me and so make me want to put in the remaining effort to make sure that we have something that benefits us both.
And, if someone who doesn’t think they’re a programmer (you wrote some code and sent it to a real project, you’re a programmer, sorry to be the one to break this to you) put in the effort, that’s also a strong signal to me that this is a fix that actually matters to users.
If you hadn’t bothered to try to understand the codebase at all and just sent an LLM patch, it’s more work to review because LLMs have very different (and far more complex) failure modes than inexperienced programmers. The effort to say ‘Claude, do the thing’ is so low that I don’t know if the person who did it even uses the project or if they were just looking for something to pad their CV, so I have no idea if this is a change anyone wants. And if you don’t understand what the change you’re making does, you’re putting 100% of the cognitive load on me.
Some of the most useful contributions I’ve had to various F/OSS projects have not even been code. Detailed bug reports with test cases that let me reproduce them are incredibly valuable.
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@david_chisnall This all boils down to:" If you didn't care enough about this to write it, why should I care enough to read it?" To make it worse, all too often the sender doesn't even care enough to read it either, so you just get the unfiltered response to some prompt. And I agree, that is a deeply disrespectful waste of my time.
@Gjoel
Texts that are not worth writing are texts that are not worth reading.
@david_chisnall -
I was trying to work out yesterday why LLM users annoy me so much and it came back to my basic notion of rudeness: impolite behaviour stems from assuming that your time is worth more than other people's.
If someone doesn't bother to write coherent words in a message to you so that they can type faster at the cost of your comprehension speed, they're trading your time for theirs and that's rude.
If someone uses an LLM to create more words from fewer ideas, that saves them time in careful expression at the cost of more work for you. That's rude.
If someone uses an LLM to write code that doesn't work and expects other people to help debugging it, then they're saying that it isn't worth their time to learn but it is worth your time to help them. That's rude.
If someone uses an LLM to write some code that looks like it works and expects you to put effort into reviewing a PR, again, they're saving work for themselves at the expense of your time. That's rude.
Almost all LLM uses are like this: they save the user time (at least, in the short term) by making more work for someone else. They're machines optimised for creating rudeness.
There are a bunch of places where you do trade different people's time. In particular, if tasks A and B need doing, but person 1 can do either and person 2 can do only task B, then it makes sense for person 2 to do task B so that person 1 can do task A. That's not because person 1's time is more valuable, it's because person 1 doing task A is more valuable. It's not that your time is more valuable than the cleaner's time, but the cleaner doing their job means that you can spend my time doing more valuable tasks.
@david_chisnall
"Almost all LLM uses are like this: they save the user time (at least, in the short term) by making more work for someone else. They're machines optimised for creating rudeness." -
@david_chisnall Borrowing terminology from distributed denial of service, you could call LLMs a kind of amplification attack.
LLM is a power-amplification tool, like a hammer or a backhoe.
With a skilled operator: A very good thing indeed.
Operated by a careless or clueless person: A danger to life, limb and property.
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J jwcph@helvede.net shared this topic
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I was trying to work out yesterday why LLM users annoy me so much and it came back to my basic notion of rudeness: impolite behaviour stems from assuming that your time is worth more than other people's.
If someone doesn't bother to write coherent words in a message to you so that they can type faster at the cost of your comprehension speed, they're trading your time for theirs and that's rude.
If someone uses an LLM to create more words from fewer ideas, that saves them time in careful expression at the cost of more work for you. That's rude.
If someone uses an LLM to write code that doesn't work and expects other people to help debugging it, then they're saying that it isn't worth their time to learn but it is worth your time to help them. That's rude.
If someone uses an LLM to write some code that looks like it works and expects you to put effort into reviewing a PR, again, they're saving work for themselves at the expense of your time. That's rude.
Almost all LLM uses are like this: they save the user time (at least, in the short term) by making more work for someone else. They're machines optimised for creating rudeness.
There are a bunch of places where you do trade different people's time. In particular, if tasks A and B need doing, but person 1 can do either and person 2 can do only task B, then it makes sense for person 2 to do task B so that person 1 can do task A. That's not because person 1's time is more valuable, it's because person 1 doing task A is more valuable. It's not that your time is more valuable than the cleaner's time, but the cleaner doing their job means that you can spend my time doing more valuable tasks.
@david_chisnall Bad user interface design is the same principle: a company/developer can’t be bothered to think harder about making the app work better; They just need to tick a “shipped app” box on their performance objectives for the quarter.
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I was trying to work out yesterday why LLM users annoy me so much and it came back to my basic notion of rudeness: impolite behaviour stems from assuming that your time is worth more than other people's.
If someone doesn't bother to write coherent words in a message to you so that they can type faster at the cost of your comprehension speed, they're trading your time for theirs and that's rude.
If someone uses an LLM to create more words from fewer ideas, that saves them time in careful expression at the cost of more work for you. That's rude.
If someone uses an LLM to write code that doesn't work and expects other people to help debugging it, then they're saying that it isn't worth their time to learn but it is worth your time to help them. That's rude.
If someone uses an LLM to write some code that looks like it works and expects you to put effort into reviewing a PR, again, they're saving work for themselves at the expense of your time. That's rude.
Almost all LLM uses are like this: they save the user time (at least, in the short term) by making more work for someone else. They're machines optimised for creating rudeness.
There are a bunch of places where you do trade different people's time. In particular, if tasks A and B need doing, but person 1 can do either and person 2 can do only task B, then it makes sense for person 2 to do task B so that person 1 can do task A. That's not because person 1's time is more valuable, it's because person 1 doing task A is more valuable. It's not that your time is more valuable than the cleaner's time, but the cleaner doing their job means that you can spend my time doing more valuable tasks.
@david_chisnall Tightly related, I read this essay a few minutes ago:
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J jeppe@uddannelse.social shared this topic
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I was trying to work out yesterday why LLM users annoy me so much and it came back to my basic notion of rudeness: impolite behaviour stems from assuming that your time is worth more than other people's.
If someone doesn't bother to write coherent words in a message to you so that they can type faster at the cost of your comprehension speed, they're trading your time for theirs and that's rude.
If someone uses an LLM to create more words from fewer ideas, that saves them time in careful expression at the cost of more work for you. That's rude.
If someone uses an LLM to write code that doesn't work and expects other people to help debugging it, then they're saying that it isn't worth their time to learn but it is worth your time to help them. That's rude.
If someone uses an LLM to write some code that looks like it works and expects you to put effort into reviewing a PR, again, they're saving work for themselves at the expense of your time. That's rude.
Almost all LLM uses are like this: they save the user time (at least, in the short term) by making more work for someone else. They're machines optimised for creating rudeness.
There are a bunch of places where you do trade different people's time. In particular, if tasks A and B need doing, but person 1 can do either and person 2 can do only task B, then it makes sense for person 2 to do task B so that person 1 can do task A. That's not because person 1's time is more valuable, it's because person 1 doing task A is more valuable. It's not that your time is more valuable than the cleaner's time, but the cleaner doing their job means that you can spend my time doing more valuable tasks.
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S suneauken@mastodon.world shared this topic
