> absolutely unacceptable to anyone calling themselves an Engineer
Isn’t that exactly what engineers do? Even very strong bridges aren’t designed to survive every possible eventuality.
Re:LLM Inevitabilism
by bluefirebrand on Tuesday July 15, 2025 @08:02PM
(#44577251)
No
I'm talking about engineering a bridge for 50 cars that collapses at 51, not engineering a bridge for 500 cars that is only expected to get 50
Engineering does require tradeoffs of course. But that's not what the minimum possible quality is
That's what a "margin of error" is. The margin of error of a bridge is predictable thanks to well-established techniques of physical analysis.
An LLM system, on the other hand, can fail because you moved some punctuation around.
Re:LLM Inevitabilism
by bluefirebrand on Wednesday July 16, 2025 @02:08PM
(#44585221)
> An LLM system, on the other hand, can fail because you moved some punctuation around
An LLM system can fail without changing anything, it could just fail more or less randomly without any way to diagnose why it happened
99% or more of software developers behave in ways that would be inconceivable in actual engineering. That's not to say there aren't software engineers, but most developers aren't engineers and aren't held to that standard.
Code is not physical. While computation errors can have real effects, a lot of orgs and people are resilient about them.
I think they pretty strongly do
The solution seems to be "just lower your standards for acceptable margin of error to whatever the LLM is capable of producing" which should be concerning and absolutely unacceptable to anyone calling themselves an Engineer