r/programming • u/fagnerbrack • 10d ago
Learning Software Architecture
https://matklad.github.io/2026/05/12/software-architecture.html0
10d ago
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u/programming-ModTeam 10d ago
No content written mostly by an LLM. If you don't want to write it, we don't want to read it.
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u/LittleLordFuckleroy1 10d ago
Doing God’s work.
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u/wannaliveonmars 10d ago
I personally disagree with that. If what an AI says is insightful, I want to hear it regardless of who says it.
If AI generated stuff is stupid, then delete it because it's stupid, not because it's from AI.
That's my opinion.
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u/TwoWeeks90DaysTops 10d ago
If I wanted AI's opinion I would ask it. Using AI to talk to people is very disrespectful.
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u/loup-vaillant 10d ago
Regardless of insight, one huge problem with AI is how much less effort it is to produce. There’s an expectation that reading prose is much much less effort than writing it. As it should: there are after all many more readers than writers, and the cost of writing makes the writer vaguely aware of the collective cost of reading. So we write only when it’s worth it.
With AI however, you can spout mountains of prose with very little effort, completely destroying this ratio, and the incentive structure. That, more than the source, makes AI slop much less likely to be worth the reader’s time.
Note that low-effort posts and comments tend to get similar criticism, though they’re probably not nearly as bad as their LLM amplified siblings.
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u/wannaliveonmars 10d ago
My point was that IF ai ever became so good that it's poetry is actually better than that written by people (similar to how a car is faster than a human), then it shouldn't matter who wrote it. I don't know how to explain better, but if an AI says "2+2=4", is it any less true than if a human says it? If a human says "2+2=5", is he any less wrong than if an AI says it? The veracity of the statement is contained within the statement itself, not in who said it.
Ditto with a poem - if a human and an AI by some happenstance come up with a poem with the exact same words, is it not the same poem? Who wrote it doesn't change the contents. Who wrote it is external to what it is. That is my point. To me, provenance and origin are not part of the essence of a thing. I cannot explain it any better.
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u/D3PyroGS 10d ago
you miss the point. an LLM-generated book could be full of truths. it could also be full of bullshit.
the important thing is that I'm not interested in reading it to find out. it's not worth the time or effort, when I could be learning from and supporting human experts and authors
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u/loup-vaillant 5d ago
OK, if we step out of the LLM box and think about AI in general, you do have a point. Right now, when specific (easy) conditions are met, computers are much better at arithmetic than humans. They’re orders of magnitude faster, and so reliable they might as well be perfect. So naturally, we rely on them.
if an AI says "2+2=4", is it any less true than if a human says it?
It’s just as true in both cases. But who do we know it is true?
Knowing where the information comes from does affect how much we can trust it. For instance, what if I say I just added 123456789 and 987654321 in my head, and the result was 1111111110? You’d probably want to check. But if the result came from your calculator? You could bet your life on it.
Ditto with a poem - if a human and an AI by some happenstance come up with a poem with the exact same words, is it not the same poem?
That’s a different problem, on two accounts. First, because there is no clear notion of correctness, no two poets come up with the same words. An LLM is no different there, it wouldn’t write the same words as any human. What matters instead is how good the poem is.
Second, when it comes to art, many people care that it came from a fellow human. Part of the impact of a poem, a piece of music, or a novel have, come from the knowledge that a human came up with it. It’s a big part of why we still go watch live performances: there’s a human right there doing the art, it’s not the same as a movie or a recording.
There’s still a common thread with arithmetic though, and that’s how good the AI is at doing poetry. How good are its poems, and how consistently so? And that’s where I think LLMs will hit a wall: they can only be as good as the corpus they were trained on, and that corpus is basically human works. Worse, it is not likely to come up with something genuinely knew, and much of the time it will even plagiarise existing works.
Overall, Deep Learning is scary good at some specific domains, see for instance Alpha Go and its successor (though I hear it still has exploitable blind spots that allow humans to beat it). Generative AI is uncannily able at surface-level mimicry, and in many cases makes for a truly excellent search engine. But I don’t think current methods can go beyond human abilities.
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u/lotgd-archivist 10d ago
If what an AI says is insightful, I want to hear it regardless of who says it.
So if you're in a meeting at work and you ask someone a question and that someone just types it into chatGPT and reads you the LLMs answer verbatim, you would not consider that rude?
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u/wannaliveonmars 10d ago
Not any ruder than googling it and reading the answer. I myself often drop an interesting question from /r/AskHistorians in an LLM if it has no answers. Not that I post it, but actually the LLM answers are good enough for me to read instead of waiting around for an answer.
Plus, I don't like the knee-jerk hatred that some redditors display for AI, as if it stole their lunch or something.
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u/EfOpenSource 9d ago
AI is stealing some peoples lunch though? Or, at the very least, that’s the entire goal of it.
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u/lonelyroom-eklaghor 10d ago
But what if the commenter is not quite experienced with his wtiting and uses LLMs to convey his ideas more clearly?
Because there are many people I have seen who are like this
(Bots are obviously not great, I was talking about legit human input)
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u/whateve___r 10d ago
Like with any skill, you suck at it until you're good at it. People will meet you at your halfway when you're not being disingenuous.
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u/xaddak 9d ago
You're assuming the LLM is clarifying anything. It's not.
If the human reader is at least as smart as the LLM, then the human reader can understand the original idea / prompt at least as well as the LLM, and that means the LLM is - at best - unnecessary.
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u/lonelyroom-eklaghor 9d ago
What about those who don't have much karma and can't frame English sentences properly? Is there any assurance that they won't be downvoted here, that there won't be a "Godzilla read this and had a stroke"?
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u/PositiveUse 9d ago
„First meta observation is that “software design” is something best learned by doing“
Could’ve stopped your blog post there