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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

> "verify it rigorously (which if you cannot do, you should absolutely never touch an LLM!)"

100% this.

I like writing code more than reading it, personally.

Yeah, I think that's pretty common. It took me 15+ years of my own career before I got over my aversion to spending significant amounts of time reading through code that I didn't write myself.

We all do. But more often than not we have to learn to do surgical incisions in order to do our task for the day. It's what truly distinguishes a professional.

You have an automation bias. "Surely this thing knows more than me it must be right." and there is no reason to believe that, but you will.

How did you get there from me agreeing 100% with someone who said that you should be ready to verify everything an LLM does for you and if you're not willing to do that you shouldn't use them at all?

Do you ever read my comments, or do you just imagine what I might have said and reply to that?

There's simply no way to verify everything that comes out of these things. Otherwise why use it? You also can't possibly truly know if you know more about a topic since by definition the models know more than you. This is automation bias. Do you not know the problems with even verifying or watching machines? This is a core part of the discussion of self driving vehicles. I guess I assumed you knew stuff about the field of AI!

"You also can't possibly truly know if you know more about a topic since by definition the models know more than you"

Where does that idea that "by definition the models know more than you" come from?

It's a good question because I also hastily wrote that. You'll come to defer to the model on average when it comes to otherwise coin flip judgements you have make when you yourself are unsure. The model may not have any more information but you don't have any indication that it wouldn't and even suspect that it secretly does and this bias makes you trust the model and accept things that are ultimately bad in possibly ways that you'll not discover for a very long time because it is deep within a specific context.

Totally. And yet rigorous proof is very difficult. Having done some mathematics involving nontrivial proofs, I respect even more how difficult rigor is.

Ah, I absolutely don't verify code in the mathematical sense of the word. More like utilize strong static typing (or hints / linters in weaker typed languages) and write a lot of tests.

Nothing is truly 100% safe or free of bugs. What I meant with my comment up-thread was that I have enough experience to have a fairly quick and critical eye of code, and that has saved my skin many times.

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