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Understanding is the new bottleneck

geoffreylitt.com

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Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#241

Post by Forgeties79 »

lanstin wrote: post #234
Forgeties79 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is impossible to duplicate results with an LLM. This strikes me as a serious barrier to calling it a proper skill. If you can’t even somewhat replicate the results you can’t really improve the input consistently. You can’t become “skilled” at it if you can’t even reproduce what you did. If you enter the same prompt 3 times the results are of pretty significantly different quality. ChatGPT literally has you A/B tes…

Me typing into emacs is also not replicable, until I git push. Me with emacs and a good coding LLM can generate systems that I see as good, in my extensive professional judgement. For coding, for production grade code, the LLM will mostly be a tool in the hands of the professional. There is a new category of disposable code, which I think will be useful for many adhoc investigations; in neither case is replicability…

These conversations always veer into “well I find it useful so I disagree.” I’m not saying anything about utility, I just think that system prompting is still very much hopes and prayers. We’re having a discussion about whether or not it’s a hard skill one can learn, I think that’s incredibly debatable

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#242

Post by imtringued »

hk__2 wrote: post #10

For me the solution has been to throw away the code I don’t understand. I let the agent write the code, and if when I read it it seems unclear or needs a lot of explanation from the agent, I just throw it away and start over, or do it by myself.

Something funny happens when you reject code. The agent realises it is garbage.

I'm personally of the opinion that the tools for reviewing LLM generated code are awful. 99% of the time I want to do line by line comments and tell it everything it did wrong. Given that information, the next iteration would be much more up to my standards.

The same also applies to other people's LLM generated code. Yeah sure they can just pass on the comments to the LLM, but that will just mean more iterations and them losing their job.

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#243

Post by keeda »

modo_mario wrote: post #230
simianwords wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And being able to trust the agent when you can makes a good engineer

I think a good engineer still reads the majority of what llm's put out for him and understands it so trust doesn't really come into the picture.

Actually, I would say trust is an intrinsic part of an engineer's job, because the job is to deliver something that can be trusted to do what it says on the tin.

For software engineering, you're perfectly right that reading the code is one way to build that trust. But the industry has evolved many other methods, and I think those (and new methods based on those) will become more and more important in the future.

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#244

Post by Waterluvian »

areactnativedev wrote: post #171
Waterluvian wrote: post #103

I love the idea that understanding is the new bottleneck. Because if we just ignore the potential horrors of cybernetic augments, it suggests the next challenge is how to teach things better. And that’s such a valuable thing to improve. I have a soft spot for when I find a teacher or textbook or interactive website that makes something click . I live for that click . I crave it. I crave seeing it happen in others. Ho…

Would you have any good such resources for “clicking” or expanding one’s understanding to share? From the top of my head and of my Goodreads I have enjoyed The art of Electronics, Understanding Earth, Material World, The world for sale, Beej’s Guide to C, The Five Dysfunctions of a team, Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs, The Lean Startup, Fouché by S. Zweig https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/

https://www.jezzamon.com/fourier/

This one really made Fourier analysis click for me. Beyond that it made the idea of lossy compression (not just JPEGs) click for me.

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#245

Post by epistasis »

t-writescode wrote: post #145
epistasis wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until an AI does that, it won't be able to pass a Turing test.

AI passed the Turing Test empirically long ago. Further and more practically, they consistently convince millions of people that they are a real person with real intentions all the time, every day. They are so convincing that an emergent property of the Turing Test is also being shown: that real humans are called bots by people that genuinely believe the other is a bot. The standard 3-person Turing test with 2 people…

Claude Code won't pass my personal Turing Test until I get a lot more "no" and "can't be done" out of it.

(For the record, my comment above was in jest, to point out the real experience of humanity in most coding environments)

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#246

Post by alecbz »

odshoifsdhfs wrote: post #75
flossly wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

User forgot to tell LLM not to duplicate. LLM produced a lovely, working, big line count PR: manager of LLM was happy, keeps paying for it, so all is good right?

I don't really care about the dev future as a few years ago I started to divert from it and most of my income is in other things. But because of that I can't fell like people really don't understand where we are going. I have a conspiracy theory that even VCs are on it. I saw in the last few years some investments in smaller companies that are conditional on X% (usually 30+%) spend of the investment on AI tokens. I a…

OOC what's your other income from?

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#247

Post by gofreddygo »

madrox wrote: post #82

I think it funny how much average engineers are beginning to discover the challenges of engineering leadership and program management. This has always been the bottleneck. It's why managers and PMs want to be in standup. It's why slack exists and engineers are constantly being poked on it. It's why execs always talk about not getting too far away from the work. It's how seagull management happens. It's why program ma…

Not true.

Engineers are finding a new set of challenges but nothing of the sort that managing real people requires.

PMs, managers and leaders behaving like status update junkies is a side effect and not the reason why those roles exist.

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#248

Post by dofm »

hackmack10 wrote: post #223
dofm wrote: post #192

> Why? Why understand? Because (in the just-barely-possible universe where anyone is stupid enough to make me a manager) I will fire you if I ever find out you don't. What possible good can come from letting people deploy things over which they do not, in any sense, have cognitive ownership?

I'd fire you for having that blanket attitude. People haven't truly known how shit works in this industry for the entire fucking time. People are following patterns set out by arrogant pricks for reasons they don't know or care to know, they are just following orders. That said, someone, somewhere in the chain should understand how the system works. I agree there.

> I'd fire you for having that blanket attitude. People haven't truly known how shit works in this industry for the entire fucking time.

Oh it doesn't sound like I'd be working for you.

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#250

Post by galaxyLogic »

chasd00 wrote: post #205
galaxyLogic wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if you are managing AI agents you dont' need "soft skills" do you? You don't need to be especially nice to the AI, or symphatize with it, or have fun with it to build trust, I would imagine that managing a team of AI-agents is totally different from managing a team of people.

> But if you are managing AI agents you dont' need "soft skills" do you? “Soft skills” in management just means figuring out how to get what you want from the people you have available to you. In that respect those skills translate to using an LLM.

Figuring out how to get what you want from people would seem to me to be a very different skill than figuring out how to get what you want from AI agents.

For instance, how do you motivate people to work long hours, put in extra effort, feel proud of their work? How would you do that with AI?

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