I develop AI for a living and I don’t understand the internals of it either, just as I don’t understand the internals of Intel architecture. My job is to build, not to fit information into my mind.
Ask HN: Go deep into AI/LLMs or just use them as tools?
51–60 of 140 posts
Re: Ask HN: Go deep into AI/LLMs or just use them as tools?
#52I come from a more traditional (PhD) ML/DL background. I wouldn't recommend getting into (1) because the field is incredibly saturated. We have hundreds of new, mostly low quality, papers each day. If you want to get into AI/ML on a more fundamental level now is probably the worst time in terms of competition. There are probably 100x more people in this field than there are jobs, and most of them have a stronger back…
If there indeed were 100x people more than jobs the salaries would tank. And this is not the case at all with AI/ML salaries being much higher than regular devs
Re: Ask HN: Go deep into AI/LLMs or just use them as tools?
#53It's your choice, but it's definitely not ,,just another tool''. Most of my LLMs made lots of mistakes, but Codex with $200 subscription changed my workflow totally, and now I'm having 40 pull requests/day merged. Treat LLMs as interns, increase your test coverage with them to the point that they can't ruin your codebase and get really good at reviewing code and splitting tasks up to smaller digestible ones, and prom…
You can review and approve 40 PR's a day from intern quality work?
Sure, LGTMx40 and call it a day .What could possibly go wrong.
Re: Ask HN: Go deep into AI/LLMs or just use them as tools?
#54It's your choice, but it's definitely not ,,just another tool''. Most of my LLMs made lots of mistakes, but Codex with $200 subscription changed my workflow totally, and now I'm having 40 pull requests/day merged. Treat LLMs as interns, increase your test coverage with them to the point that they can't ruin your codebase and get really good at reviewing code and splitting tasks up to smaller digestible ones, and prom…
Ia this a personal project or prod startup with clients?
Re: Ask HN: Go deep into AI/LLMs or just use them as tools?
#553) go back to school and study something that isn't done entirely on a computer and requires human physical presence (for now). Learning plumbing, electrical wiring, welding, etc. are options. Even if you don't make that your primary path, it never hurts to have a fallback plan JUST IN CASE some of the buzz around AI-fueled job displacement turns out to be valid. Or, if you believe there may be some merit to "AI is c…
Going into trades sounds nice on paper but the salaries there were mostly always low because you need only a handful of those to saturate market needs. Its not IT where you can create value from thin air and thus grow the market and increase need for even more professionals. As soon as a tiny percent goes into trades (bet tons of new people already doing this) the market will be oversaturated in a few years when they…
Yes, in the worst case scenario we wind up with basically nobody having jobs. I mean, when humanoid robots get sufficient dexterity, they can even come for the skilled trades folks as well, as far as that goes.
Look, I don't know if any of this is actually going to to come to pass or not. But it seems at least a little bit less like pure sci-fi now than it did a decade or two ago.
Anyway, if we play along with the thought experiment of asking "what happens to our society when a very large swathe of the human population is no longer needed to exchange their labor for wages?" it really leads one to wonder what kind of economic system(s) we'll have and if we'll find a way to avoid a straight up dystopian hellscape.
Re: Ask HN: Go deep into AI/LLMs or just use them as tools?
#56I think about this a lot. If you're early in your career, it must feel like you're staring at a technological fork in the road, with AI standing there ominously, waving both paths like it's the final boss in a RPG game.
Between your two options, I’d lean toward continuing to build what you’re good at and using AI as a powerful tool, unless you genuinely feel pulled toward the internals and research side.
I’ve been lucky to build a fun career in IT, where the biggest threats used to be Y2K, the dot-com bubble, and predictions that mobile phones would kill off PCs. (Spoiler: PCs are still here, and so am I.)
The real question is: what are you passionate enough about to dive into with energy and persistence? That’s what will make the learning worth it. Everything else is noise in my opinion.
If I had to start over today, I'd definitely be in the same uncertain position, but I know I'd still just pick a direction and adapt to the challenges that come with it. That’s the nature of the field.
Definitely learn the fundamentals of how these AI tools work (like understanding how AI tools process context or what transformers actually do). But don’t feel like you need to dive head-first into gradient descent to be part of the future. Focus on building real-world solutions, where AI is a tool, not the objective. And if a cheese grater gets the job done, don’t get bogged down reverse-engineering its rotational torque curves. Just grate the cheese and keep cooking.
That’s my 2 cents, shredded, not sliced.
Re: Ask HN: Go deep into AI/LLMs or just use them as tools?
#57I don't really understand why would you even consider going deep if this is not something you have experience with or strong interest. Sure, it is good to know how some of the things work under the good, but you can be perfectly capable developer by reading docs and knowing how to use tools - without needing to know how to write them or how they do complex things under the hood. Take databases as example, network stack, etc.
Just because a field is popular, doesn't mean you should switch to going deep into it. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't use it - it costs a few dollars to try it out and see whether it fits your workflow. If it does, this is great and you can be more productive and focus on stuff that you can solve and LLM can't, but if it doesn't, that is fine too.
Re: Ask HN: Go deep into AI/LLMs or just use them as tools?
#58Hi, I am working in making the term "llm developer" more popular in France and train people to this new job.
We will need a bunch of them in the months/years to come to implement advanced AI systems after companies manage to properly pick and set up their AI platforms. Currently people would tend to involve data scientists into this job, but data scientists are often less versed into the software engineering aspect, eg when they work more on notebooks than web apps.
The job is akin to being a web developer, so a "normal" developer but specialized in a certain field. Knowing the internals of LLMs is a big bonus, but you can start your journey with treating them as black box tools and still craft relevant solutions. You'll need to learn about running systems with databases (vector, graph, relational and nosql are all useful) and plugging multiple services together (docker, kubernetes, cloud hosting).
Re: Ask HN: Go deep into AI/LLMs or just use them as tools?
#59I come from a more traditional (PhD) ML/DL background. I wouldn't recommend getting into (1) because the field is incredibly saturated. We have hundreds of new, mostly low quality, papers each day. If you want to get into AI/ML on a more fundamental level now is probably the worst time in terms of competition. There are probably 100x more people in this field than there are jobs, and most of them have a stronger back…
If there indeed were 100x people more than jobs the salaries would tank. And this is not the case at all with AI/ML salaries being much higher than regular devs
Really?
Re: Ask HN: Go deep into AI/LLMs or just use them as tools?
#60Depends on what you want to do. But my 2 cents are that like all new technology, LLMs will become a commodity. Which means that everybody uses them but few people are able to develop them from scratch. It's not different from other things like databases, GPU drivers, 3D engines for games, etc. That all involves a lot of hardcore computer science and math. But lots of people use these things without being hindered by…
But the question is what mindset will allow you to put yourself ahead of the rest. Because I suppose the OP doesn't want to end up as just another mediocre programmer.
Do what interests you.