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LLMs reward expertise
421–430 of 605 posts
Re: LLMs reward expertise
#422If LLMs are good at busy work, and it is expertise that lets you distinguish between busy work and valuable one, then it makes sense that they reward expertise.
Re: LLMs reward expertise
#423Every thing passes through the following stages: 1. AI cannot do something. 2. AI starts being able to do something, but one needs to prompt it carefully, so one needs to be an expert, see, we will always need human experts 3. AI just one-shots it. Why do people still need to say this for each and every task? It's just reliving the bitter lesson over and over again.
Why not not show these kickass one-shots and prove how awesome AI can be?
Re: LLMs reward expertise
#424This is why the chat interface is ultimately not the best option for non-expert users, because they require the user to bring knowledge with them. You can call this the “query” method: you have to know what to ask to get the answer you want.
A real world example might be: I can find any movie DVD you want from our warehouse, but you need to tell me the name of it. Don’t know the name? Tough luck.
Contrast this with a “browse” interface: the options available are presented to you, and you can pick from them. Relevant contextual information is already on-site. The DVD store has shelves of potential movies you can rent, and you don’t need to know their names ahead of time.
The interfaces of future AI will be more browse oriented, with a query viewer available in the settings for advanced users.
Re: LLMs reward expertise
#425Terminology is a crazy lever with AI
Re: LLMs reward expertise
#426Every thing passes through the following stages: 1. AI cannot do something. 2. AI starts being able to do something, but one needs to prompt it carefully, so one needs to be an expert, see, we will always need human experts 3. AI just one-shots it. Why do people still need to say this for each and every task? It's just reliving the bitter lesson over and over again.
You need to define what "one-shotting" is. Some examples would help too.
Re: LLMs reward expertise
#427This is why the chat interface is ultimately not the best option for non-expert users, because they require the user to bring knowledge with them. You can call this the “query” method: you have to know what to ask to get the answer you want. A real world example might be: I can find any movie DVD you want from our warehouse, but you need to tell me the name of it. Don’t know the name? Tough luck. Contrast this with a…
Picking a DVD to watch is a rather inconsequential decision. LLMs already do this sometimes, asking you to pick one of a few options, but without domain expertise you will invariably make worse decisions, but if all the n-th order consequences were first explained to you, that would result in you having built domain expertise, but also erasing most of the speed advantage LLMs give you. Moreover, you will never know about the options that are never presented.
Inevitably, this is the new tradeoff to make, above average quality comes from asking for more, and knowing what to ask for comes from expertise.
Re: LLMs reward expertise
#428I 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…
You can see the same thing with restaurants generating their own menus/pictures. Some of them look absolutely terrible, visually ugly, way too information dense, the classic piss filter, etc. idk how they do it, even the most basic prompt I can come up with makes something 10x better, and when I put in my amateur photography knowledge/keywords in it gets pretty close to what I'd consider a good pre LLM quality menu.…
Complete amateurs without these tools were basically limited to making big text in word processors and maybe pasting an image in there.
Being able to create a basically coherent, polished looking image is what you’d get on Fiverr for a few bucks. Mostly hustlers filling in templates, or people that know the tools but never learned design fundamentals.
Actually being a competent professional: Knowing how to visually communicate showing information hierarchy, what purely visual aspects of an image say, how different things read differently among people who might see it— e.g. does an image of an apple communicate fancy computer? teachers/school? Nutrition? Food? Produce?, etc etc etc (Good kerning and type usage, composition, gestalt, etc all come with that for free. Many think that is the point — those are tools someone can wield to do good design, they aren’t themselves good design.)
These tools let amateurs do what the fiverr crowd used to do. Unfortunately, the fiverr crowd is now being pushed into doing what entry-level new graduate professionals used to do, and the job market is kind of fucked.
Re: LLMs reward expertise
#429I 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…
Interesting, but... wrong tool, wrong job. And by tool, I mean web based chat interface, not LLMs in general. (Maybe wrong delivery mechanism, if you like.)
Your friend needed an agent, not a chatbot. I use Claude within VS Code (as per many others) but I certainly wouldn't recommend that for a beginner. They needed a tool that's specifically aimed at people who want to build software but don't know the first thing about how to do it. I think there are a bunch of these now but the one I'm most aware of is Lovable, and I'm pretty surprised you didn't recommend one of these.
An HR person I know was searching for a way get something build, found Lovable, and managed to build a somewhat functional application with it on their first attempt within an hour or two. It was full of holes and far from perfect but they got something working - at least the outline of a potential solution.
As I say, you should have recommended your friend to try building with a tool like that: a tool that they're a member of the target market for. They would have got a lot further. I'm not vouching for the quality of the result, but they would have got something.
Even for experiened engineers, chatbots have always been a pretty grim experience for software development: from the mind-numbing drudgery of endlessly copying and pasting code, commands, and prompts around, to the fact that they just can't see enough of what you're doing to generate the best quality output or advice. You can do software development with a ChatBot but it seriously sucks, and better tools are (a) probably being shoved at you day in, day out via ads, and (b) only a Google search or a ChatGPT recommendation away.
(Obviously, nobody's going to search for "Lovable" without knowing about Lovable, but they might search, or ask ChatGPT or whatever, something like, "How would I build a website without knowing anything about building websites?", which might get them an advert or recommendation.)
Re: LLMs reward expertise
#430I 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…
>she didn’t find a way to tip the AI into “just do it, write it now” mode worse, the longer an LLM conversation goes on, but especially with constricted/free models (yes the simple chat interface they are likely using) the harder it is to get an LLM into this mode even *IF* you know the right words to say at that point the best way forward is to terminate the exchange entirely, and to start off with the right initial…
A technical person will also have have met those problems related to context and will know to drop a simple
"update an AGENTS file with relevant information"
To be able to navigate that faster on longer tasks. Meanwhile, the lay person does not even conceive of the LLM as a file reading entity. To them, its machinations are its own, so these types of "dumb" (simple) solutions are not even on the deck of cards.