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I'm Not Consulting an LLM

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Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#41

Post by v3xro »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #37
4ndrewl wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is "not having to think" a good metric now?

I guess, how often do you pay someone to fix your car? Repair something in your house? Give you financial advice? Those are all things many people outsource their thinking to other people with.

No, you outsource it because it's not your core competency. I think humans should be able to do anything and not narrowly specialise as narrow specialisation leads to tunnel vision. Sometimes you need to outsource to someone because of legal reasons (and rightly so, mostly because the complexities involved do require someone who is a professional in that area). Can some things be simplified? Of course they can, and there are many barriers that prevent such simplification. But it's absolutely insane to say - nah, we don't need to think at all, and something else can do all the work.

Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#42

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

v3xro wrote: post #39
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #35

For myself, I’m very much a “results” guy. Have been, for all my career. I’ve been shipping (as opposed to “writing”) software for most of my adult life. People seem to like to stuff I make. I’m currently working on my first major project that incorporates heavy LLM contributions. It’s coming along great. I started with Machine Code and individual gate ICs, so my knowledge goes way down past the roots. I don’t miss i…

> Not being sneered at by some insecure kid is nice. How very adult of you.

I have found that having a humble, generous, and non-caustic approach to other people, has been very good for my personal mental health (and career).

I have spent my entire career, being the dumbest guy in the room, and I’m not exactly a dunce. It can sometimes be quite humbling, but I’ve had great opportunities to learn.

People will often be willing to go out of their way to help you understand, if you treat them with respect; even if they are being jerks.

Life’s too short, to be spending in constant battle.

Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#43

Post by bsza »

po1nt wrote: post #32

I don't think the argument is correct. Reasoning LLM will check itself and search multiple sources. It's essentially doing the same mental process as human would. Also consulting multiple LLMs completely breaks this argument.

IME, even when an LLM is right, a few follow-up questions always lead to some baffling cracks in its reasoning that expose it has absolutely no idea what it's talking about. Not just about the subject but basic common sense. I definitely wouldn't call it the "same mental process" a human does. It is an alien intelligence, and exposing a human mind to it won't necessarily lead to the same (or better) outcome as learning from other humans would.

Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#44

Post by siquick »

perks_12 wrote: post #30

I google a lot (or rather, Kagi). I loved to explore the web when I was younger. But over time I lost any interest in trying to gather informational bits from increasingly shittier websites designed to have more ads and hide relevant information for as many ad slots as possible. These days I hit the quick answer button inside Kagi more often and just accept that I might have some false information in there. If it is…

> These days I hit the quick answer button inside Kagi more often

Just incase you didn’t know you can append ? to any query and get a quick answer straight away

Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#45

Post by cmiles8 »

I see the SDE pushback on LLMs, but most of it is unfounded. Like any new tool, if used irresponsibly of course bad things can happen. Most of the backlash from devs seems rooted in:

1. It causes a step change in productivity for those that use it well, and as a result a step change in the expectations on productivity for dev teams. Folks simply expect things to be done faster now and that’s annoying folks that have to do the building.

2. It’s removed much of the mystique of dev. When the CEO is vibe coding legit apps on their own suddenly the SDE team is no longer this mysterious oracle that one can’t challenge or question because nobody else can do what they do. Now everyone can do what they do. Not to the same degree, yes, but it’s completely changed the dynamic and that’s just annoying some devs.

SDEs aren’t going away, but we will likely need less moving forward and the expectations on how long things take have changed forever. Like anything in tech we’re not going back to the old way so you either evolve or you get cycled out.

I also hear the “but LLMs only produce unrecognizable junk that one can’t maintain” angle, but that implies dev teams have been shipping beautiful artwork. Truth is most dev teams have been shipping undocumented fragile junk for years. While LLMs occasionally do odd things, in my experience LLM code is actually better documented and structured than what most dev teams produce and because of that it’s actually easier to hand off to others vs the typical codebase full of hacky workarounds and half-completed documentation.

Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#46

Post by kolinko »

I think the author just doesn't know how to use LLMs well.

"Because what would be missing isn’t information but the experience. And experience is where intellect actually gets trained."

From my experience, LLMs don't cause this effect. You still get to explore a ton of dead ends and whatnot, just on a much higher level.

"You get the answer but nothing else (keep in mind we are assuming that it's a good answer)."

On the contrary here - you get to answer a ton of followup questions easily, something you don't get to ask books.

"I never so far asked GPT about something that I'm specialized at, and it gave me a sufficient answer that I would expect from someone who is as much as expert as me in that given field."

LLMs are at a level of junior-mid of any field (and going higher every year), not senior-master. Is that anything new? Their strength is, among other things, in making connections between fields, and also the availability.

If you have an option to talk to a specialist in your field that has time 24/7 to discuss ideas with you, that's great, but also highly unusual. If you don't have such a person, an LLM that is junior-mid is way better than plain books.

Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#47

Post by n0on3 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #35

For myself, I’m very much a “results” guy. Have been, for all my career. I’ve been shipping (as opposed to “writing”) software for most of my adult life. People seem to like to stuff I make. I’m currently working on my first major project that incorporates heavy LLM contributions. It’s coming along great. I started with Machine Code and individual gate ICs, so my knowledge goes way down past the roots. I don’t miss i…

Would you be aware of it if that was the case? I don’t mean this to be hostile or anything but the senario in which one does not notice himself and it goes unnoticed or silently accepted externally does not seem too far fetched to me.

Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#48

Post by kolinko »

delusional wrote: post #20
mark_l_watson wrote: post #2

I understand the author’s sentiment but I would like to give a counter example: I like to read philosophy and after I read a passage and think about it, I find it useful to copy the passage into a decent model and ask for its interpretation, or if it is something old ask about word choice or meaning. I realize that I may not be getting perfect information, but LLM output gives me ideas that are a combination of live…

> I realize that I may not be getting perfect information, but LLM output gives me ideas that are a combination of live web searching and whatever innate knowledge the LLM holds in its weights. I don't mean to be judgemental. It's possible this is a personal observation, but I do wonder if it's not universal. I find that if I give an inch to these models thinking, I instantly become lazy. It doesn't really matter if…

For me it's the opposite - sure, for many outputs I don't need to think, but then I end up thinking on a higher level, and doing even more work.

An analogy would be - if GPS allows you to not worry about which turn to take, you can finally focus on where you want to get.

Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#49

Post by cindyllm »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #42
v3xro wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not being sneered at by some insecure kid is nice. How very adult of you.

I have found that having a humble, generous, and non-caustic approach to other people, has been very good for my personal mental health (and career). I have spent my entire career, being the dumbest guy in the room, and I’m not exactly a dunce. It can sometimes be quite humbling, but I’ve had great opportunities to learn. People will often be willing to go out of their way to help you understand, if you treat them wi…

[dead]

Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#50

Post by kator »

The "calculator ruined the world" argument was actually studied to death once the panic subsided. Large meta-analyses of 50 years of data show it was mostly a non-problem. Students using calculators generally developed better attitudes toward math and attempted more complex problems because the mechanical drudgery was gone.

The only real "catch" researchers found was timing. If you introduce them before a kid has "automaticity" (around 4th grade), they never develop a baseline number sense, which makes high-level math harder later on.

It's a pretty clean parallel for LLMs. The tool isn't the problem, but using it to bypass the "becoming" phase of a skill usually backfires. If you use an LLM before you know how to structure an argument or a block of code, you're just building on sand.

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