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LLMs are making me lose my savviness

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Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness

#71

Post by nkurz »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #63
titularcomment wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect, what you're describing doesn't quite spell learning in my opinion. Sure, its better to read the code of an application you envisioned to learn a programming language rather than an unrelated convulated program; but you're still offloading your thought process to the LLM. You're not quite seeing why it chose A instead of B, and why it uses that struct instead of the other. And honestly, the LLM d…

> “ honestly, the LLM doesn't quite know why it chose that either.” Uh, have you asked it? These sorts of articles are funny. Like the author assumed that you have to use an LLM in a certain way. “I can just ask the LLM and there it is! I didn’t learn anything! :(“ You can interrogate the LLM. You can ask it all sorts of things. Tell it to justify its decisions. Tell it to give you supporting evidence. Tell it to giv…

> You can interrogate the LLM. You can ask it all sorts of things. Tell it to justify its decisions. Tell it to give you supporting evidence. Tell it to give you options. Tell it to explain things in detail.

Hopefully you realize that it's not actually introspecting into its previous thought process, and instead it is just making up a plausible after-the-fact explanation that matches the format of similar explanations found in its training set?

I too often find these explanations enlightening, but please don't forget that you need to read all such responses as those of a pathologically lying psychopath desparate to trick you, not as a trusted expert who actually understands its internals.

Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness

#74

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

nkurz wrote: post #71
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “ honestly, the LLM doesn't quite know why it chose that either.” Uh, have you asked it? These sorts of articles are funny. Like the author assumed that you have to use an LLM in a certain way. “I can just ask the LLM and there it is! I didn’t learn anything! :(“ You can interrogate the LLM. You can ask it all sorts of things. Tell it to justify its decisions. Tell it to give you supporting evidence. Tell it to giv…

> You can interrogate the LLM. You can ask it all sorts of things. Tell it to justify its decisions. Tell it to give you supporting evidence. Tell it to give you options. Tell it to explain things in detail. Hopefully you realize that it's not actually introspecting into its previous thought process, and instead it is just making up a plausible after-the-fact explanation that matches the format of similar explanation…

Of course. But again this all comes down to how you use it.

If you start blindly accepting everything it says, good luck to you.

But you can do things like get one agent to do something. Spin up another agent to review and critique. Use different LLMs to critique. I’ve had the same agent write piece of code and then come back and say “there are bugs x, y and z”.

For most code, it’s going to do a fairly good job and tell you best practices, give you things to research by yourself.

Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness

#75

Post by grebc »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #69
grebc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is reading example code uncool?

I often find that example code never covers my use cases, and I am left scratching my head over nuances not covered there. With AI, I can describe my exact use case and see what it gives me. Sometimes it will just cough up a furball like a boilerplate example, but usually it gets pretty close, and I can see how my (maybe weird) edge case fits into the framework or API or whatever. It may be that I approach problems i…

Examples are so because they’re just that. Nuance belongs in actual implementation.

I guess what you’re saying is you like reading fully fledged code, almost like an apprentice. I would never think to delegate that responsibility to a next word guesser.

Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness

#76

Post by me2too »

system2 wrote: post #21

This article tells me the author is not that creative. With LLMs, the number of projects I create increases by 1000%.

So for you the point was going from A to B - for me the point is the process for going from A to B. We have different interests. It's not the number of projects - who cares - is the impact every project on you while you build it. At least for me.

Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness

#77

Post by me2too »

jkahrs595 wrote: post #65

Just stop using them ffs. So sick of this “we lost the craft” nonsense. Just do it the way you like doing it.

There's a part in the article about the corporate tech pressure - you can't just stop using them, at least at work.

Moreover, I want to understand them as I did for any other tools in the past, that's why I find myself using and exploring them also outside work. It's just a tool, but with a huge impact of the crafting process (that is the fun part of coding for me).

Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness

#78

Post by me2too »

pintert3 wrote: post #36
dvt wrote: post #28

Have mathematicians become "less savvy" since the invention of the abacus or calculator? The invention of logarithms or analysis? In some ways, the answer is trivially positive. In fact, number crunching was, for most of human history, a key element of being a maths researcher. However, when we look at the claim with a more critical eye, it becomes obvious that this view is myopic. In fact, current progress is in fac…

I think he means the savviness in the art of programming the ideas. The skill and art involved in finding interesting and efficient ways to effect ideas and solutions to problems. It is(or was) fun for a good number of us who joined before AI changed the game. Now its dismissed tending to a waste of time, hence the supposed loss in savviness over time.

Author here. You described it perfectly. That's precisely the idea I wanted to describe in the article

Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness

#79

Post by soulchild77 »

newsomix9xl wrote: post #2

Using AI can open up topics you couldn't work on before. I think you're blaming tools for what are other problems. No carpenter ever said "I used to plane wood by hand and carve magnificent pieces, now that I have an orbital sander and power tools, the love just isn't there". I don't buy this argument at all.

This is comparing apples and powertools. ;-)

Despite now having all these tools, a carpenter still needs a lot of skill to create something. If you hand me all the modern tools in existence, I'll probably still cut off both my thumbs and end up with a chair which breaks the moment I try to sit on it.

LLMs allow any person with no skills whatsoever to create almost anything they want. Quality is often good enough or doesn't matter at all. There's no skill needed because Claude will happily tell the person what they are missing and do it for them in the same step.

I totally feel what's expressed in the article: I've been in web development for 25 years now and I have never been this depressed in my life, because AI took most of what I cared for in my job and left me staring into a bleak future of becoming unemployed or pivoting into something I'm gonna hate doing for the rest of my life.

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