I do agree. An LLM is like a motorboat that's tends to drift off course. If you know where you want to go, and can steer it to keep it on course, you will get there very fast.
LLMs reward expertise
251–260 of 607 posts
Re: LLMs reward expertise
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are having trouble onboarding engineers with AI now. Some still struggle after their first year with very basic concepts/patterns we use and make the same mistakes again and again in their PRs because they just ask Claude to fix it and never internalize it. I think using LLMs feels good at first because you can get tickets out the door faster but you never develop enough knowledge to make a big impact or become an…
Honestly you should probably invest in baking the basic patterns and concepts of your codebase into shared skills that are applied to everyone's Claude sessions.
Or documentation that everyone could read and refer to
Re: LLMs reward expertise
#253The amplifying mirror analogy works best here. LLMs are ultimately a reflection of your own interactions with its weights, the tone you use, the structure with which you construct your prompt, aspects of an issue you tend to focus on, your breadth of vocabulary and world knowledge and whatnot. People who (carefully) use it as an extension of their own mind and senses will very likely thrive, and those who use it as a…
As an unapologetic generalist[1] this has also been my experience. Many tools that would have been "eh maybe if I get bored over Thanksgiving holiday" have become "hold on, gimme fifteen minutes".
Tiny, isolated, but awesomely useful CLI scriptlets, for me, seem to be the sweet spot. Little shining rays spreading out from the veins of my own familiarity.
The downside, the Achilles Heel of LLMs, so far as I can tell, is using the system to assist in maintaining large, sprawling, and largely pointless legacy codebases. Somewhere you have to keep many many many stupid things alive. I swear I can almost sense Claude's frustration with some of this shit. Then you get frustrated, and then Claude wants to agree with you so it acts even more frustrated, and the gyre thus widens. You're just cussing at everything with a machine. Which can be fun - Claude is often surprisingly funny - but not productive.
[1] I know absolutely nothing about positively everything, but have the attention span of a squirrel.
Re: LLMs reward expertise
#254I 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…
copying and pasting code? a few months ago?
2025 called and wants its test back
Re: LLMs reward expertise
#255The amplifying mirror analogy works best here. LLMs are ultimately a reflection of your own interactions with its weights, the tone you use, the structure with which you construct your prompt, aspects of an issue you tend to focus on, your breadth of vocabulary and world knowledge and whatnot. People who (carefully) use it as an extension of their own mind and senses will very likely thrive, and those who use it as a…
As an unapologetic generalist[1] this has also been my experience. Many tools that would have been "eh maybe if I get bored over Thanksgiving holiday" have become "hold on, gimme fifteen minutes". Tiny, isolated, but awesomely useful CLI scriptlets, for me, seem to be the sweet spot. Little shining rays spreading out from the veins of my own familiarity. The downside, the Achilles Heel of LLMs, so far as I can tell,…
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Re: LLMs reward expertise
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you describing a "chat window" experience here? This is apples to oranges.
As opposed to what? If you ask a non-programmer to install Claude Code, just installing it will be a challenge, then opening the shell and interacting with it. Things as simple as copying and pasting can present roadblocks if you've never used a shell before, and things intuitive to programmers like using up-arrow to go back to a previous prompt would never occur to someone in the field. Claude Code seems so simple a…
Zoom out one step. The experiment should have been searching for "build website with AI", or "build website with ", not "hey use this very specific UI to do something I know will fail"
(FWIW I think people betting their whole companies on AI are trusting shitty one-wish genie goblins, but the terrible irony is that anyone "technical" with years-old knowledge is talking about something else entirely in today's context)
Re: LLMs reward expertise
#257Re: LLMs reward expertise
#258The amplifying mirror analogy works best here. LLMs are ultimately a reflection of your own interactions with its weights, the tone you use, the structure with which you construct your prompt, aspects of an issue you tend to focus on, your breadth of vocabulary and world knowledge and whatnot. People who (carefully) use it as an extension of their own mind and senses will very likely thrive, and those who use it as a…
When I get out of my domain, I always ask it to describe things to me "like I'm a senior CS student who doesn't know any industry terms". I find it really easy to skim past the definitions I know and very useful to get the explicit clarification on unfamiliar terminology. Telling it to talk down to you a little also seems to calm down it's tendency to talk like it's trying really hard to convince you it's smart like…
Sometimes when I want AI to explain something technical, I say "explain it like I'm a junior engineer" -- just to get it to start with the high level like a human being would.
Re: LLMs reward expertise
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you describing a "chat window" experience here? This is apples to oranges.
As opposed to what? If you ask a non-programmer to install Claude Code, just installing it will be a challenge, then opening the shell and interacting with it. Things as simple as copying and pasting can present roadblocks if you've never used a shell before, and things intuitive to programmers like using up-arrow to go back to a previous prompt would never occur to someone in the field. Claude Code seems so simple a…
Claude Cowork is the application aimed at non-developers that gives them a lot of the same functionality. My girlfriend uses it and has gotten quite far in producing her own software.
Re: LLMs reward expertise
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I wonder the same thing. I think we've already seen some of this happening, however the consequences haven't been large enough to the organization, for example: - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/20/meta-ai-a... - https://tech.yahoo.com/articles/ai-code-wreaked-havoc-amazon... - https://alexeyondata.substack.com/p/how-i-dropped-our-produc... We can only hope that engineers working in safety critical sy…
As long as people keep gaslighting by sayting those events are just "skill issues," I doubt there will sadly be a catalyst.