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Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

blog.yaelwrites.com

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Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#81

Post by vinceguidry »

Author's criticism is valid. Using LLMs, like using search engines before them, is a skill. You have to know what to ask and what to accept as a valid answer, what to push back on and when to throw in the towel and try another approach.

I was talking to a very tired friend of mine and she described renting a small tiller from Home Depot. They didn't know how to set the choke and so flooded the engine. They spent hours troubleshooting, no one at Home Depot knew anything about the equipment they were taking money to rent. They eventually figured it out and were tilling their backyard garden well into the late night.

I told her next time just ask ChatGPT. I would have done it myself if I'd been there. She hadn't even thought of it. But a few pictures and descriptions would have gotten them rolling in half an hour tops.

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#82

Post by II2II »

Animats wrote: post #21
Aurornis wrote: post #11

The subtitle is: > I already did. They repeat multiple times in the article that asking Claude was something they already did. So this isn’t an anti-LLM article. This seems to be a communication problem. The other party either doesn’t know that they’ve put a lot of effort into researching this already, or their trying to give a gentle let-down instead of saying they don’t have time for this. For the first case, the s…

When I post a technical question in Forums, I usually add something like "Tried Copilot, got useless answer ...". The trouble with asking an LLM is that there are a huge number of people (this predates LLMs) who post answers on forums along the lines of "turn it off and turn it on again" LLMs pick that up as the consensus solution.

Something tells me people's milage varies based upon how they prompt the LLM. I spent about half an hour using traditional web searches to tackle a software configuration problem today, then about another half an hour poking around the system to see if I could find a solution, then about half an hour with an LLM. Not once was I told by the LLM to use the consensus solution of reinstalling the operating system even though it was clearly bumbling around much as I was earlier. (Eventually I decided to go with the consensus decision.)

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#84

Post by xdennis »

apical_dendrite wrote: post #27
theorchid wrote: post #12

I once wrote a similar essay on this topic. When I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer: https://orchidfiles.com/im-tired-of-ai-generated-answers/

This drives me absolutely crazy. My colleagues send me huge PRs to review (say 2000+ lines). I don't just paste comments from the LLM, I ask the LLM to review it, but I also review it myself. I only include ideas from the LLM if I think a) the LLM has gotten the issue right and b) it's worth having the developer take the time to address the issue. I always write the comment myself so I can add relevant context and pu…

What's even worse is when you go though such PRs and your comments are handled in minutes, with replies explaining the change with perfect spelling and em dashes. At which point you ask yourself: "What am I doing here? His agent wrote the entire thing, and now I'm going through it and telling his agent what to fix. Why is he even needed?"

Or even, even worse is when you get a PR from a co-worker, you spend a lot of time explaining why that's bad idea, only for the person to say "Sorry, my openclaw/etc posted that. I'll close it." Or even the opposite, you tell a co-worker: "Hey, it was a great idea to change X." and he says "X? What is X?... Oh that must have been my agent."

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#85

Post by aprilthird2021 »

Aurornis wrote: post #11

The subtitle is: > I already did. They repeat multiple times in the article that asking Claude was something they already did. So this isn’t an anti-LLM article. This seems to be a communication problem. The other party either doesn’t know that they’ve put a lot of effort into researching this already, or their trying to give a gentle let-down instead of saying they don’t have time for this. For the first case, the s…

> So this isn’t an anti-LLM article.

It kind of feels like it though. We can be anti-LLM even though it's smart or helpful or whatever. It's reduced so many interesting conversations to this type of boring redirect to just "Ask AI"

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#86

Post by paulhebert »

t-writescode wrote: post #68
apical_dendrite wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This drives me absolutely crazy. My colleagues send me huge PRs to review (say 2000+ lines). I don't just paste comments from the LLM, I ask the LLM to review it, but I also review it myself. I only include ideas from the LLM if I think a) the LLM has gotten the issue right and b) it's worth having the developer take the time to address the issue. I always write the comment myself so I can add relevant context and pu…

Beyond mirroring the engineering practices that you yourself want to see other people perform, have you found any techniques to get people to … in short, do their job again? Understand context, understand what they did, why they did it, what they’re doing, etc. The +/-2000 line MR was bad when humans wrote it. It’s way worse when the human didn’t even write or read it. And just vomiting automated CodeRabbit talking p…

I tried to get our team to enforce a max PR size.

It worked for a while. There is a GitHub action that you can configure to fail if the PR is too large.

But then we started a new project and I didn’t add it right away since it’s a small team and I figured we could use the honor system.

Since then there have been lots of massive PRs but there’s not much willingness to go back to enforcing the rule because it might slow us down…

It’s frustrating.

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#87

Post by queenkjuul »

I asked a question on slack. My coworker forwarded my question to Claude and pasted the response.

15 minutes later a different coworker responded pointing out that everything Claude said was wrong.

I asked on slack for a reason! It's not like i don't know how to ask Claude.

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#88

Post by casey2 »

This is insanely entitled. If you want someone with experience then pay them for it. Likewise if you don't want people to have some experience then don't pay them.

How do people get jobs at jar opening factories by deferring jar opening to someone capable? These are your collages who have full time jobs, not monks at some monastery, go do that if that's what you want.

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#89

Post by bloaf »

linsomniac wrote: post #20

>I wanted the thing 30 years had taught him Unpopular answer that the author seems to be dismissing: Maybe the thing that 30 years has taught this guy is that the LLMs can answer the question better than he can. Or that he can't give a substantive answer without doing research into it with an LLM. >LMGTFY I mostly saw LMGTFY used when the question was the sort of thing that a person would have to research but that go…

I think the other alternative is that the senior guy thinks that the junior guy is working on a problem where the juice isn't worth the squeeze. "Just ask an LLM" can be interpreted as "if the AI can't give you a quick solution, it won't be worth either one of our times to puzzle out the technical details."
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