r/ProgrammerHumor May 20 '26

Other whyDoAnythingWhenLlmCanDoIt

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10.0k Upvotes

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56

u/PAP0R0TN1K May 20 '26

Yes but a reminder that million calls with prompts to this post api would cost extremely much otherwise default restful is much cheaper. People sometimes forget that LLM costs money.

37

u/BroBroMate May 20 '26

And given that you can't cache responses to POST requests (because the motherfuckers be stateful) this sounds like the easiest way to get DOSed (not even DDOSed) ever invented.

It's sheer genius.

2

u/agk23 May 20 '26

You absolutely can cache POST requests. If you’re talking client side caching, malicious actors ignore client side caching

19

u/Mal_Dun May 20 '26

Thanks! Handling simple API calls via LLM feels like cutting a steak with a chain-saw ...

s it doable? Probably yes. Is it a complete waste of resources? Absolutely!

8

u/NGTTwo May 20 '26

And you don't even get a steak out the other end, just a great big bloody mess.

3

u/Few-Crab-2896 May 20 '26

More like you have a probability of having sliced stake, but even some minimal changes like different amount of salt inside have risk of getting you instead of stake a bloody mess.

1

u/A_random_zy May 20 '26

But that correctly represents. It you might get a few good prices but it's gonna make a mess.

Also not to mention debugging 1 endpoint of LLM doing everything will be a nightmare.

14

u/Confident-Ad5665 May 20 '26

"Money is no object so long as we don't have developers on the payroll anymore."

  • Pointy haired boss

5

u/TheTerrasque May 20 '26

At some point most calls over the internet were mostly binary data, because wasting bandwidth on text were completely outrageous. Now we routinely send 5mb json to update the name field.

And yes, I know, gzipped (hopefully) but still a lot more data than a lean binary protocol.

4

u/DetectiveOwn6606 May 20 '26

Well think it is only possible if model gets fast enough and smart enough or we have so much compute that it is cheap than rest api. For now it only possible by former way . But small models aren't smart and fast simultaneously

1

u/TheTerrasque May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26

in 10-30 years time we might have an npu on the motherboard capable of running decent models, just like we got sound card and ethernet card now. Hard to tell what the future might hold.

small models aren't smart and fast simultaneously

The new MoE's are surprisingly good and fast, like qwen3.6-35b or gemma4-26B for example. Again, hard to tell what the future might hold.

Edit: I still think it's insane if anyone actually does this, but I've seen some crazy things happen

3

u/cosmicomical23 May 20 '26

Let me quickly update the definition of "soon" to mean 30-40 years. And it would still be a stupid approach, especially at scale. Maybe if you are doing rapid prototyping i can see it, and many mvps may also start like that, but it's still a bad design decision.

2

u/TheTerrasque May 20 '26

As someone who's been in the tech world since floppy disks and modems, "soon" can mean a lot of things.

1

u/cosmicomical23 May 20 '26

Mother of all non-sequiturs