231–240 of 607 posts
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For many cases like the one described, its true.
It's not. The majority of people regularly using GCC to develop C code (IOW, the primary use case of GCC) are familiar with assembly.
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maybe outing myself as a dinosaur, but "back in my day" the calculator came with a book that detailed exactly how to use it. Both the high level basic language and the low level system language. Not knowing how to use it is simply a failure to Read The Fucking Manual.
You can read the manual all you want, but if you don't know basic algebra, trig, calculus, etc, you are not going to have any idea how to apply or use much of anything that the manual describes with regards to actually doing math with a graphing calculator. There is a base level of knowledge required.
I did a test a few months ago. A friend of mine wanted to develop what i understood to be a simple single page web app. But since she didn’t have any software engineering experience she asked me to help. Around that time everyone was talking about how literally anyone can develop software with LLMs i asked her if she could give it a try first, and if I could watch the attempt. I was fully expecting that writing the c…
I’d love to see this experiment executed with Claude design. Particularly with something static, I don’t think they’d fail to get a result. But without domain knowledge I think they’d misunderstand prototype with finished product. Without knowing what it’s doing, it’s hard to know what it’s not doing.
Apps ain’t static.
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Perhaps! But I do think the vocabulary issue is real and I think LLMs are still sycophantic enough that they won’t really challenge someone or offer alternative ideas on how to implement something unless they explicitly ask. Interestingly at my work, Claude Code was available before Claude Desktop, so a number of non-technical PMs tried to use it in order to build… anything, with very mixed success. The “hey guys, ch…
> the terminal is a scary place Isn't the the powerful, unlimited, unopinionated blank LLM text input waiting for your instructions eerily similar to a scary terminal? WIMP and GUI paradigms are the exact the opposite: intentional dis-empowering, by design restrictions, enumeration of your few possible options. Those feel more constrained therefore safer.
Are you kidding? WIMP and GUI democratized computing!
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Perhaps! But I do think the vocabulary issue is real and I think LLMs are still sycophantic enough that they won’t really challenge someone or offer alternative ideas on how to implement something unless they explicitly ask. Interestingly at my work, Claude Code was available before Claude Desktop, so a number of non-technical PMs tried to use it in order to build… anything, with very mixed success. The “hey guys, ch…
> the terminal is a scary place Isn't the the powerful, unlimited, unopinionated blank LLM text input waiting for your instructions eerily similar to a scary terminal? WIMP and GUI paradigms are the exact the opposite: intentional dis-empowering, by design restrictions, enumeration of your few possible options. Those feel more constrained therefore safer.
The moment you interact with an LLM it gives you feedback that you’re doing things right. It feels like a gradual climb instead of a series of abrupt jumps. People really don’t like feeling like they don’t know what they’re doing, and the terminal constantly reminds you that you are making mistakes.
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But the guy who writes the “just do it” prompt can neither formulate the conjecture in the first place, nor come up with any follow-up questions to build on the result.
Yeah, the people who say no expertise is needed for these things confuse me somewhat. This is indeed the case if you want to be a meat wrapper around an LLM, understanding neither your inputs nor your outputs. But at that point, what is the point of you versus going to the LLM myself? Expertise is necessary because it adds understanding and structure to the blob of text produced by an LLM. Progress can only be built…
You're missing one word, and that word explains why everyone running the companies is so excited. The word is 'paying'. "But at that point, what is the point paying of you versus going to the LLM myself?"
And, yes, I think that LLMs make it a lot easier to hire a minimally trained stooge and get them productive. It's worked for me, and I appreciate being able to pretend to be productive and walk away from the job a bit early every day. I don't think software engineering is likely to be a high status, high income job for very long.
It's pretty obvious that for some questions a novice wont be able to drive the conversation towards an "answer". A novice may also not be able to understand an answer either. But there's a more subtle failure mode.
The vernacular used by an expert and novice to describe the exact same problem lead to different traversals of the information space.
For example, I recently asked ChatGPT a medical question using plain english. It gave me an imprecise vague response and told me to call 911. Repeated prodding did not fix this, so I asked the exact same question using medical jargon and in one shot I got what I wanted.