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LLMs reward expertise

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Re: LLMs reward expertise

#61

Post by QuercusMax »

sramsay wrote: post #14

I do find that "signalling expertise" is important. "I have a significant background in biblical scholarship. You can assume I've read the most important works in NT studies in particular. Do not translate Greek, Latin, Hebrew, or Syriac. Now, I would like to know . . ." That changes things significantly. So does telling it you have 20+ years of experience with C programming, that you have a robust understanding of m…

For sure. On a personal coding project I said "I'm a professional software engineer, and while this is a hobby project I'm not just vibe-coding and want to build reliable software" and the agent suddenly started suggesting all kinds of things to make its code more robust.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#62

Post by travisgriggs »

I totally see this. I just did 3 hours of bot sitting to put together some thrash loops that thrash our provisioning working flow for a BLE gadget we make. It was pretty straightforward and productive. But then, I have a lot of experience with BLE, and a quite a bit of experience with python and shell scripting. So I was able to guide the process through stages, do some intermediate testing, make some adjustments, and proceed. Domain experience made this really easy and straightforward. Me two junior engineers who have only superficial/high level knowledge of BLE and some of the other pieces, couldn't have done this as effectively.

Where my angst comes, is worrying that no one will ever get that experience anymore. They might have had some eventual success, who knows what monstrosity a much less guided LLM would have done, but experential learning may be mostly a thing of the past. And it creates a real tension between the person with experience and the person without.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#64

Post by petres »

Well, nice post. Actually, there may be some truth behind it, but basically, it captures what I—as a programmer—want to read: expertise will remain valuable.

But how I am observing is different, though. Since LLMs the gap between experts and non-experts has been shrinking. And yes, there is still a gap, but vanishing.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#65

Post by j45 »

neilv wrote: post #44

> 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 answ…

Except LLMs will only tend to share the most common or average of what it knows as the standard and deviating from it (including new ways) it can be resistant to.

An expert can lay a different kind of frame to prevent the llm to fell out of its way of being generally too verbose, and that can transfer as well to code generation and complication.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#66

Post by petcat »

neilv wrote: post #44

> 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 answ…

> You could read some general reference/guide/tutorial documentation on CSS, and then probably solve your problem

Hours + Hours of reading and a lot of trial-and-error. The loop was so long and sooo slow. Now it's instant. As if your very first Google search just solved the problem for you immediately.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#67

Post by icameron »

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?

The event could be when fair pricing comes from the model providers. We're still at the cash burning stage. When the economy crashes a little and departments start monitoring their spending, and the prices for inference are 10x what they are, there will be less tolerance for employees to substitute constant AI usage for understanding.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#68

Post by bumblehean »

petcat wrote: post #66
neilv wrote: post #44

> 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 answ…

> You could read some general reference/guide/tutorial documentation on CSS, and then probably solve your problem Hours + Hours of reading and a lot of trial-and-error. The loop was so long and sooo slow. Now it's instant. As if your very first Google search just solved the problem for you immediately.

>Hours + Hours of reading and a lot of trial-and-error. The loop was so long and sooo slow.

But that's how you learn...

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#69

Post by kwakubiney »

Might be a very noob question but in this era of LLMs, let me ask the reverse, how do you gain expertise? It seems this rewards people who had expertise pre LLMs, but what about people who don’t have that in a specific domain? What approaches are viable now in this current system?

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#70

Post by lionkor »

petcat wrote: post #66
neilv wrote: post #44

> 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 answ…

> You could read some general reference/guide/tutorial documentation on CSS, and then probably solve your problem Hours + Hours of reading and a lot of trial-and-error. The loop was so long and sooo slow. Now it's instant. As if your very first Google search just solved the problem for you immediately.

This "instant" loop is so fast because it doesn't involve the part where you learn
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