Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

LLMs reward expertise

seangoedecke.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 606 posts

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#41

Post by antonvs »

postalcoder wrote: post #4

Not sure I agree with this. The math guy at anthropic's prompts are essentially: "suppose you’ve gotta resolve the $CONJECTURE, like absolutely have to, everything depends on it. think really hard, and try to come up with a bunch of ideas to try. but remember to trust yourself and not necessarily in conventional wisdom!!" https://claude.ai/share/25740bd5-aa97-4bd7-bf58-c4df3793fda7 https://xcancel.com/__alpoge__/stat…

> Like all of life, maybe the "winner" is the person who just does stuff.

Someone who just does stuff still has to be able to deal with errors and failures. That’s where an expert or a generalist may have an advantage.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#43

Post by Terr_ »

ofjcihen wrote: post #33
budsniffer952 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This is becoming such a common statement on here it’s almost copy pasta. Maybe the answer is more along the lines of “people are using them for different things and getting different results”? Why does it have to be snark and “these people must be stupid”

Or even that people are using them for the same things, but there is a chaotic element to how it works, and people are getting different outcomes due to small differences that we humans don't think ought to matter.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#44

Post by neilv »

> In the 2010s, if you had technical gaps (say, you couldn’t write CSS), you had to either rely on a skilled colleague or just hope that the answer to your exact problem was out there on the internet.

You could read some general reference/guide/tutorial documentation on CSS, and then probably solve your problem (without searching for "how to center a div", or whatever your exact problem was, and copy&pasting the answer and moving on), also becoming more knowledgeable in the process.

The rest of the short blog post has some good points, but the first sentence sounds like it's targeted at the percentage of developers who did StackOverflow copy&paste to close Jira tickets, never becoming experts.

Delegating to LLM-ish AI is just a natural evolution of that. The question is whether they can still add value if kept in the loop.

The article author suggests that the answer is to be expert, and is addressing people who... "either rely on a skilled colleague or just hope that the answer to your exact problem was out there on the internet."

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#46

Post by wrs »

natsucks wrote: post #13
champagnepapi wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the software industry is saying things like "don't look at the code", "LLMs have made developers 10-100x faster", etc. The only way they can make such claims is by saying what you said above: "Claude, make me Microsoft Flight Simulator, make no mistakes". Additionally engineers are facing pressures via deadlines to work in the paradigm of "Claude, make me Microsoft Flight Simulator, make no mistakes"...

The question i wonder about is, when will an event come along that persuades everyone that human understanding is still required? Or will it never come?

That question makes me think about Boeing. Or NASA. Or Enron. Reality always wins, no matter what management and Investor Relations says.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#48

Post by bonoboTP »

ofjcihen wrote: post #33
budsniffer952 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This is becoming such a common statement on here it’s almost copy pasta. Maybe the answer is more along the lines of “people are using them for different things and getting different results”? Why does it have to be snark and “these people must be stupid”

It's because in many cases it exactly sounds like what happened. They asked something one shot, then seeing that the AI didn't quite solve the same task that the prompter had in mind, he just closes it and decides that AI is stupid and can't even do the task and it's all hype. I say, "what you just told me right now, did you even try typing that into the chat with the AI?", and they just stare at me. You have to iterate! You have to provide context, you have to provide access to the tools you also use to do your job.

The other day someone complained here on HN that AI failed to optimize his code speed. Turns out he just pasted in the code, didn't use an agentic harness with end-to-end benchmarking ability for the model to ground its changes in and to hill-climb on. But even as a human you need to test your hypotheses and measure things, and sometimes something you thought would help actually makes it slower.

It happens over and over, but it's no skin off my nose. If they don't want to learn to use it, it's on them.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#50

Post by zmmmmm »

There's a growing and fascinating divide between people who see LLMs as more of a "bicycle for the mind" in the vein of Jobs vs those who see them as whollly supplanting the role of human intelligence. I can't help but wonder if these aren't primarily two human archetypes more than anything - the LLMs can be both and they erect a mirror of the human using them. Some humans really don't want deep individual expertise and intelligence to be the deciding factor because they don't identify with that. Others are completely the opposite. We really can't tell which will be more effective yet, because LLMs are very good in both modes. But most of the predictions currently are people executing on wishful thinking about what they hope will be the outcome.
Post reply on HN