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LLMs reward expertise

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Re: LLMs reward expertise

#111

Post by willsmith72 »

limitedmage wrote: post #102
petcat wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't need to learn CSS anymore. Just like we don't need to learn ASM since GCC does a great job generating it from higher-level code.

I am a frontend engineer and I see so many bugs from vibe-coded CSS from people who think just like you. CSS is very powerful and easy to get wrong if you don't understand it. Since most CSS code on the internet is not good, LLMs do not generate good CSS code and create a lot of bugs ranging from bad performance to completely broken reflow.

the question is, what's the business cost of some amount of css bugs vs paying specialists or people to learn these details.

the generalists win overall, except of course for specific cases where specialists are great

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#112

Post by gr_norm »

jkhdigital wrote: post #109
postalcoder wrote: post #4

Not sure I agree with this. The math guy at anthropic's prompts are essentially: "suppose you’ve gotta resolve the $CONJECTURE, like absolutely have to, everything depends on it. think really hard, and try to come up with a bunch of ideas to try. but remember to trust yourself and not necessarily in conventional wisdom!!" https://claude.ai/share/25740bd5-aa97-4bd7-bf58-c4df3793fda7 https://xcancel.com/__alpoge__/stat…

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 on such understanding.

I am tempted to say (uncharitably) that the 'No knowledge needed! Just add LLMs!' byline is wishful thinking by non-experts who do not want to confront the reality that they will ultimately need to learn things.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#113

Post by Jtarii »

petcat wrote: post #66
neilv wrote: post #44

> In the 2010s, if you had technical gaps (say, you couldn’t write CSS), you had to either rely on a skilled colleague or just hope that the answer to your exact problem was out there on the internet. You could read some general reference/guide/tutorial documentation on CSS, and then probably solve your problem (without searching for "how to center a div", or whatever your exact problem was, and copy&pasting the answ…

> You could read some general reference/guide/tutorial documentation on CSS, and then probably solve your problem Hours + Hours of reading and a lot of trial-and-error. The loop was so long and sooo slow. Now it's instant. As if your very first Google search just solved the problem for you immediately.

All the boring stuff you skipped to get right to the answer you want was just as important whether you want to admit it or not.

Having to read through a structured resource describing something to figure something out has intrinsic value that an LLM is not going to provide you with.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#114

Post by keeda »

neilv wrote: post #44

> In the 2010s, if you had technical gaps (say, you couldn’t write CSS), you had to either rely on a skilled colleague or just hope that the answer to your exact problem was out there on the internet. You could read some general reference/guide/tutorial documentation on CSS, and then probably solve your problem (without searching for "how to center a div", or whatever your exact problem was, and copy&pasting the answ…

I think you're talking about a different type of expertise from TFA. Consider this: What if I never enjoyed frontend programming and so I never wanted to be an expert on that?

In fact, I never enjoyed frontend programming because it was such a pain to deal with matters I considered trivial yet so frustratingly hard to do right... like centering a div. And yet the slightest misalignment is visually jarring and forces me to get a bit OCD about fixing it, which made it even more frustrating.

I questioned the whole premise of the situation: is working around a bad developer experience something worth spending my time on? Unless I actively wanted to get in there and fix the situation, not really. So yes, in those cases I would outsource my problem to a colleague or StackOverflow and move on. And as a career choice, I preferred to do more backend dev.

I would posit that that was the type of expertise that did not matter. The type of expertise that really matters here is good UI design. That is entirely orthogonal to the drudgery that is implementing and debugging webpage rendering, and I am eternally grateful to LLMs for freeing us from it.

You can extend that line of thought to the entire article. What really matters (and what LLMs reward) is domain expertise rather than technical expertise.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#115

Post by cure_42 »

petcat wrote: post #74
bumblehean wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Hours + Hours of reading and a lot of trial-and-error. The loop was so long and sooo slow. But that's how you learn...

We don't need to learn CSS anymore. Just like we don't need to learn ASM since GCC does a great job generating it from higher-level code.

Define "we".

The people who make the tools that generate your assembly instructions need to learn it. Just like the people who make the browser rendering engine and push CSS forward still need to learn it.

The people who don't need to learn asm never needed to learn it. If you wouldn't code in asm now, you wouldn't have ever.

This " logic" is so irrational.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#116

Post by marssaxman »

bumblehean wrote: post #68
petcat wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could read some general reference/guide/tutorial documentation on CSS, and then probably solve your problem Hours + Hours of reading and a lot of trial-and-error. The loop was so long and sooo slow. Now it's instant. As if your very first Google search just solved the problem for you immediately.

>Hours + Hours of reading and a lot of trial-and-error. The loop was so long and sooo slow. But that's how you learn...

I lost my desire to learn anything about web development twenty years ago and specialized my career in a completely different direction. I had not touched HTML at all since then until earlier this year, when I discovered that AI robots could do it for me. Now I am happy to whip up HTML/CSS/JavaScript visualizers, explorers, and even one-off interactive report presentations whenever they might be useful, precisely because I don't have to learn any of that crap to do it. My time & attention are far more productively spent focused on the work I am actually good at and interested in doing.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#117

Post by jazzyb »

ericd wrote: post #110
limitedmage wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a frontend engineer and I see so many bugs from vibe-coded CSS from people who think just like you. CSS is very powerful and easy to get wrong if you don't understand it. Since most CSS code on the internet is not good, LLMs do not generate good CSS code and create a lot of bugs ranging from bad performance to completely broken reflow.

Funnily enough, I seem to remember some people saying that compiler generated assembly wasn’t as good as handmade assembly.

For early compilers in certain contexts, this was once true.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#118

Post by Jtarii »

hgoel wrote: post #96
lionkor wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This "instant" loop is so fast because it doesn't involve the part where you learn

In a world where there are endless things to do and only limited time to get them done, not every issue needs to be a learning matter.

If you are making something that you care about you should probably understand how it works. I didn't know this was such a hot take.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#119

Post by dymk »

Jtarii wrote: post #113
petcat wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could read some general reference/guide/tutorial documentation on CSS, and then probably solve your problem Hours + Hours of reading and a lot of trial-and-error. The loop was so long and sooo slow. Now it's instant. As if your very first Google search just solved the problem for you immediately.

All the boring stuff you skipped to get right to the answer you want was just as important whether you want to admit it or not. Having to read through a structured resource describing something to figure something out has intrinsic value that an LLM is not going to provide you with.

Well, no, it might not be important. Maybe you won't use that knowledge about CSS grids and flexbox for another year or two, or maybe ever.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#120

Post by daishi55 »

Jtarii wrote: post #113
petcat wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could read some general reference/guide/tutorial documentation on CSS, and then probably solve your problem Hours + Hours of reading and a lot of trial-and-error. The loop was so long and sooo slow. Now it's instant. As if your very first Google search just solved the problem for you immediately.

All the boring stuff you skipped to get right to the answer you want was just as important whether you want to admit it or not. Having to read through a structured resource describing something to figure something out has intrinsic value that an LLM is not going to provide you with.

> All the boring stuff you skipped to get right to the answer you want was just as important

This is obviously not the case. There are mountains and mountains of boring, unimportant stuff that LLMs can do for us now.

For example, at work I can now make a nestJS dashboard without having any idea what nestJS is. I can just tell the LLM what I want, and it makes it so. This allows me to make my tool useful to people without having to become an expert on something unimportant.

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