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LLMs reward expertise

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181–190 of 607 posts

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#181

I've been equating them to graphing calculators since the first LLM launched. It's an amazing tool if you know how to use it. If you don't know how to use it, it's still a tool, but you won't be doing anything amazing with it.

Nice analogy.

I loved graphing calculators until I learned tools like Mathematica and Matlab. Still waiting for the Mathematica version of LLMs.

Agents / loop engineering / whatever is hot with the AI Twitter kids still isn’t it.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds useful. Can you share that skill?

Not the OP but you can whack this into your prompt and get most of the way there: "no jargon goes unearned, nothing gets dumbed down, every abstraction touches ground"

A punchy tricolon containing 2 analogies that don’t quite make sense. That’s some S-tier AI-mimicking. Nice!

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the software industry is saying things like "don't look at the code", "LLMs have made developers 10-100x faster", etc. The only way they can make such claims is by saying what you said above: "Claude, make me Microsoft Flight Simulator, make no mistakes". Additionally engineers are facing pressures via deadlines to work in the paradigm of "Claude, make me Microsoft Flight Simulator, make no mistakes"...

The question i wonder about is, when will an event come along that persuades everyone that human understanding is still required? Or will it never come?

You're assuming that LLMs entered a world of people who understood how the systems they're inside of work, why they're setup that way, and that LLMs are displacing them. I sadly don't think that's the case in... well... a lot of the cases.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#184
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP but you can whack this into your prompt and get most of the way there: "no jargon goes unearned, nothing gets dumbed down, every abstraction touches ground"

A punchy tricolon containing 2 analogies that don’t quite make sense. That’s some S-tier AI-mimicking. Nice!

One could say that it being an LLMism is...load-bearing :)

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#185

I've been equating them to graphing calculators since the first LLM launched. It's an amazing tool if you know how to use it. If you don't know how to use it, it's still a tool, but you won't be doing anything amazing with it.

LLMs are golden retrievers that have memorized all of wikipedia

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#186

> Of course both are useful, but I’d rather have familiarity with the codebase than a deep general understanding of software systems. In my experience, getting that familiarity with a particular codebase in a way that isn't surface-level has always been a hands-on process. E.g. just because I know many general things about software, I need to know the particulars of the current codebase I'm in to know what is reasona…

It's not for everyone, but I write all the code and then I ask the LLM for a review. It catches something minor thing every single time (out-of-date comments on a function or method, typo, etc.), something that's clear a mistake maybe a third of the time and, occasionally, points out something that looked fine to me but actually won't work because of some other code that I forgot about. I'm a person, I can't remember everything I guess!

I have to say on those occasional times where it finds something that I totally missed or misunderstood, those are for sure the most productive sessions. I find I'm actually working with the model, while I read the code it's pointing me at, and getting a good solution together. Often the model suggest something that's maybe too simple or, weirdly way way too complicated but it's definitely helps me zero in on a decent solution.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#188
I actually don't feel like Tao's recently published conversation is the best example of this idea. As intelligent as Dr. Tao is, and surely more so than me, I got the feeling that he wasn't running up against failure states of the model, which I'm not sure you could attribute entirely to his expertise. I honestly think it was more a matter of luck that the model apparently had so much training data on the topic or that it was architecturally so well suited for it. On the other hand, I've had really surprising moments where Claude was just failing terribly to execute simple dev ops tasks having to do with log processing. And I'd be so bold to say that I don't think it could have been explained by a lack of expertise on my part, or even a misuse of the model.

So yeah, sometimes LLMs reward expertise, sometimes they don't. I guess either way it helps to have it.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#189
post #179

I've been equating them to graphing calculators since the first LLM launched. It's an amazing tool if you know how to use it. If you don't know how to use it, it's still a tool, but you won't be doing anything amazing with it.

maybe outing myself as a dinosaur, but "back in my day" the calculator came with a book that detailed exactly how to use it. Both the high level basic language and the low level system language. Not knowing how to use it is simply a failure to Read The Fucking Manual.

You can read the manual all you want, but if you don't know basic algebra, trig, calculus, etc, you are not going to have any idea how to apply or use much of anything that the manual describes with regards to actually doing math with a graphing calculator. There is a base level of knowledge required.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#190
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> like centering a div We'll of course you're gonna be frustrated if you start with the hardest problem in HTML :/

Just in HTML?? I think it's up there with naming and cache invalidation!
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