"Ask the model" is usually the point where I realize that either what you need is not a specific answer to their specific question, but a tutor to guide you on a personal journey through the underlying fundamentals of more than one prerequisite areas of understanding, or, the question is too niche or domain specific that I would have to 'ask the model' as wel as I do not know. Now I did observe, not just with LLM but also with Google search, that many people struggle with this and never seem to get good results. They need meta-learning on how to ask the right questions, which I can offer, but often I notice at that point their eyes starting to glaze over as they want a 'direct' solution, me searching or llm guiding for them.
Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM
131–140 of 154 posts
Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM
#132>I wanted the thing 30 years had taught him Unpopular answer that the author seems to be dismissing: Maybe the thing that 30 years has taught this guy is that the LLMs can answer the question better than he can. Or that he can't give a substantive answer without doing research into it with an LLM. >LMGTFY I mostly saw LMGTFY used when the question was the sort of thing that a person would have to research but that go…
> Unpopular answer that the author seems to be dismissing: Maybe the thing that 30 years has taught this guy is that the LLMs can answer the question better than he can. Or that he can't give a substantive answer without doing research into it with an LLM.
Just say "I don't know". It is simple and short.
Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM
#133One of the ways not to get LMGTFY / Ask Claude as a response is to provide more information and proof of work when asking a question. Compare: — What's the best way of doing X? — Ask Claude. vs: — I thought about this and found there are options A, B, and C of doing X, I like A more but C is the fastest; what do you think? I believe a normal senior engineer won't suggest to talk to Claude in this case.
— I thought about this and found there are options A, B, and C of doing X, I like A more but C is the fastest; what do you think? — Ask Claude.
This exchange sounds like "eff you". I would much rather hear "I don't have opinion" or "I don't know". A person asked you, because they are interested in your opinion. You dont have duty to provide it, but you can just say that without being jerk.
Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM
#134Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually hate reading posts that go “I can’t understand/fix this problem. Tried LLM…” To me, such screams “I’m too lazy to do anything more than ask a LLM. I’ve tried nothing and I’m all out of ideas” Show me you put a modicum effort and aren’t just looking to be spoon-fed the content from the first Google result that would have been found.
I get exasperated with the inexperience that I have run across for decades. Yes, I frobnicated the frobnitz, I transmogrified the bit twiddler, I wizzled the wobnosticator, (and this decade, I talked the three LLMs), and the problem still exists. What I really need to know is how the transmogrification affects frobnication, but no one has ever touched that configuration. “Why would you even want to do that?” I dunno,…
> Why would you even want to do that?”
> I dunno, man, it’s the job I was given. Do you know or not?
That's pretty sad to hear, and that's the hardest thing about working with junior engineers (or nowadays, with LLMs). Someone made a wrong assumption that a thing is possible, gave the wrong instructions, or simply phrased things badly, and now that person (or LLM) is trying to solve the impossible task instead of exploring the alternative approaches.
If it's LLM, the solution is simple. For a human, I usually bypass them and go to their senior directly: "Hey, did you task jagged-chiesel to transmogricate the frobnicator? This is a pretty complex task and our transmogricators are not trally desinged to work on frobs. What was the task you were trying to solve? Perhaps it's time to look into fizz-buzzing instead?"
(Or alternatively, if I am feeling tired that day, I will simply say that I don't know rather than engage. Because working on complex tasks with someone with "I dunno, man, it’s the job I was given" attitude is an exercise in frustration and will likely increase amount of tech debt too)
Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its a way to say I don't care, don't waste my time
That's the malevolent version of it. The alternative might be, I also don't know this from the top of my head and could spend some time to google/ask Claude/read the documentation/familiarize myself with the concrete code and/or problem at hand, but then again so can you and our collective time is better spent if I take care of my problems and you take care of yours, but if you really can't find a solution on your ow…
Or, in shorter words: "I don't care, stop wasting my time"
I get those kinds of question all the time ("I like A more but C is the fastest; what do you think?"), but when I don't care or don't know, I prefer to say this directly:
"I am not very familiar with this area of the code, so I can't really answer"
"I'd need to do some research for that, but sadly I am pretty busy. But I like simple solutions, it would be nice to do this without yet another microservice of possible"
Just saying "Ask Claude" seems pretty rude.
Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM
#137The subtitle is: > I already did. They repeat multiple times in the article that asking Claude was something they already did. So this isn’t an anti-LLM article. This seems to be a communication problem. The other party either doesn’t know that they’ve put a lot of effort into researching this already, or their trying to give a gentle let-down instead of saying they don’t have time for this. For the first case, the s…
I agree 100%. I've been the resident 'tech guy' among my friends and family for as long as I can remember, and I thought that LLMs would be the definite end to all 'blurry picture of computer screen captioned with "what should I do"' texts, yet that didn't seem to be the case. In fact, LLMs made it worse, as it actually made me seem more knowledgeable; I would be the one asking AI on their behalf and responding with…
>turns out moms of nerds sometimes ask their children tech questions because they miss their voice
This made me feel things. To anyone reading this, go hug your mom (or other sufficiently close parent) if you can
Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
The notion that an experienced person should automatically consider mentorship to be part of their job is not backed by any code or contract that I'm aware of. every job i had, every developer i hired. it is also backed by german law for example, refusing to mentor/train others in the work you do is a fireable offense in germany. in any job. not just software development. i doesn't need to be explicit in the contract…
That's really interesting about German law. I didn't know that, so I appreciate learning. I suspect that if we were having this debate over dinner, we would agree on far more than we disagree on. I think we're speaking past each other because we're operating with slightly different notions of what mentoring implies. From my perspective, I think that there's an obvious and reasonable expectation that you make best eff…
having this talk over dinner sounds nice :-)
german law or courts operate more on common sense than the letter of the law. to be able to reject a task from your boss the task has to be unreasonable. training/mentoring is not unreasonable unless the work is dangerous and/or a trainer needs specific qualifications. running a class that teaches some generic topic like a programming language would probably be unreasonable because you could just hire an external trainer for that. the training has to be rather specific to the individual experience of the senior or some company internal knowledge to be reasonable. so this doesn't apply to the scenarios you seem to have in mind. in any case from what i read it is recommended to talk to a lawyer before refusing.
but also, if the request interferes with your ability to do your normal work then you can and should speak up and you can reasonably refuse if your boss doesn't make accommodations for that. if he doesn't then refusal is reasonable, not because training wouldn't be your job, but because your workload has increased, which is not ok.
Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM
#139[deleted]
Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first paragraph screamed AI to me. I'll try to dissect each bit, see below. It's hard to put it into words... --- Send an e-mail + pick up the phone . Mismatched analog. First one is outgoing, second is incoming. Yes, I know you can pick up "to make a call". In which case, then we have the classic LLM pattern of eliding details that matter to make it sound "smooth" (like blended cardboard smooth, glug glug). some…
Wrong, those were all me. (I just checked the draft.) The only part I tweaked was the conclusion, plus I broke up a few paragraphs that were too long. I often leave out details and specifics or make things purposely vague because I am writing about real people.
I feel sorry for your future writing prospects, because it looked like AI to me too: I insta-slop-back-buttoned on "so I scheduled one with someone senior enough to have real scar tissue, the kind you only get from watching a decision go sideways in a boardroom."
Thanks for the the correction-- often when people say they weren't using AI they are very clearly lying, so it's hard to get useful corrections on this point so I appreciate your candor.