The Cost of Software
jeferson.me
Software is costly and mechanical parrots won't make it cheaper. Do you want to know why?

As we continue developing our software, we accumulate a growing amount of technical debt just to keep the system running. But I believe we are on the brink of an even larger issue. Cognitive debt.

Hope you enjoy this reading, all feedback is welcome.

  • fruitycoder@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

    I hate to say this but can’t LLMs solve the cognitive debt problem better then people? Wouldn’t having a stochastic machine that can have its state frozen in time, retrived at convience, and fed the same inputs be a potentially more transparent machine, thinking or otherwise?

    I agree with you on stating thr problem though, and the term seems concise enough to me. The gap seems to be not in ability to do this but that creating graspable and reasonable audits for LLM usage is like many risk mitigation systems, an after thought in the industry.

    • Shin@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      […] can’t LLMs solve the cognitive debt problem better then people? […]

      Better, probably not. And I’ll give you one example. In a codebase there was an issue with Auth, after few runs of the LLM, the best suggestion resulted in 30~40% of change in the Auth workflow.

      Took me a couple hours to figure out that the problem was a misconfiguration key (camelCase to snake_case in the vault store). Fixing this on the store (not on the code) fixed the Auth workflow.

      This two hours were the cognitive debt. And keep in mind, I’m familiar with this part of the code. A Mechanical Parrot happy-trigger boyz would accept the change in the codebase as an attempt to fix it.

      So, mechanical parrot can help? Sure. But better than people, probably not. At least not yet, not with the current set of tool, not with the promise of fully solving it.

      […] exact input and node activation is all you’d need for forensics, the only reason to refeed would old input plus new input mix, […]

      This is badly wrong. The same node can point to multiple places depending on the K factor on this. And this isn’t even the T applied to it. So, the same node can infer multiple different others. This is the nature of the probabilistic of LLM.

      • fruitycoder@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        12·
        17 hours ago

        First agreed. Honestly I haven’t an LLM do anything close to an engineer. You can get lucky for a code snippet or two and maybe a few ADRs but even those are fraught with the chance of slop clean up work. I am not arguing that.

        The node is only probalistic because of the random number added. After the fact the number is known.

        • Shin@piefed.socialOPEnglish
          1·
          6 hours ago

          So you are suggesting that we should have the metadata for every decision and direction. This is a N^N amount of data. Keeping this data is wastefull (even more than the usage of LLM right now). Not saying that is is useless, but for sure this won’t help to mitigate the cognition since this data don’t carry meaning for us humans.

    • wholookshere@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      and fed the same inputs be a potentially more transparent machine, thinking or otherwise?

      This is where you go off the rails. LLMs are probalistic, not deterministic. It will probably give the same output, but thats still not actually true. This is where hallucinations come from.

      • fruitycoder@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        0·
        3 days ago

        Tbf the exact input and node activation is all you’d need for forensics, the only reason to refeed would old input plus new input mix, which should be new output.

            • wholookshere@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
              0·
              3 days ago

              For training maybe. But execution as far as i know are just a bunch of probabilities chucked into matrices. Back in my physcos days I could u derstand the math, but not today.

              Also what needs citing, that nodes translate to debugable, reproducible outputs.

              Because again, it’s all probablilties under the hood.

              • fruitycoder@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                0·
                3 days ago

                I mean probabilities in matrices are nodes in a neural net, right?

                The only thing that makes it non-deterministic is the tempature value which is known after the fact from my understanding, so that should be able to deterministic.

                • wholookshere@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
                  0·
                  3 days ago

                  No… No they’re not. Either that or nerual nets are even dumber than I thought. My understanding was emulating nodes of information like brains do. Thats not probabilities. But willing to be wrong if you can bring sources. The connection between points in probability doesn’t make sense. Thats a nonsense statement.

                  Thats also no how simulated annealing works. The temperature value is roughly the probability it will pick a different, less optimal step, in order to try and find better alternative paths. The temperature value is roughly the probability of trying something ‘random’. Not deterministic at all. The temperature value is lowered with time and progression. Its known the entire time, but its still a weighted coin flip that determines which path to take.

                  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing

  • Prox@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    4 days ago

    This is the cognitive debt of the past. We already had it. We just didn’t have the name for it.

    We always called it “domain knowledge” or “tribal knowledge”.

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      4 days ago

      “oral history”.

      “The ropes”

      It’s got many names. Why did this guy not know any of them? Why was “I don’t know the name” suddenly “there is no name”?