Keep telling yourself that, right up to the layoff.[1]
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ademola-adelakun_pov-you-get-...
LLMs reward expertise
211–220 of 607 posts
Re: LLMs reward expertise
#212Keep telling yourself that, right up to the layoff.[1] [1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ademola-adelakun_pov-you-get-...
I think that’s an influencer making a joke.
Re: LLMs reward expertise
#213I did a test a few months ago. A friend of mine wanted to develop what i understood to be a simple single page web app. But since she didn’t have any software engineering experience she asked me to help. Around that time everyone was talking about how literally anyone can develop software with LLMs i asked her if she could give it a try first, and if I could watch the attempt. I was fully expecting that writing the c…
I’d love to see this experiment executed with Claude design.
Particularly with something static, I don’t think they’d fail to get a result.
But without domain knowledge I think they’d misunderstand prototype with finished product.
Without knowing what it’s doing, it’s hard to know what it’s not doing.
Re: LLMs reward expertise
#214Not 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…
So how many conjectures have you proved in your spare time?...
As the old joke goes, a mechanic charges you $5 for hitting it with a wrench and $495 for knowing what and where to hit.
Re: LLMs reward expertise
#215I did a test a few months ago. A friend of mine wanted to develop what i understood to be a simple single page web app. But since she didn’t have any software engineering experience she asked me to help. Around that time everyone was talking about how literally anyone can develop software with LLMs i asked her if she could give it a try first, and if I could watch the attempt. I was fully expecting that writing the c…
Are you describing a "chat window" experience here? This is apples to oranges.
Not really, for making a single-file anything ex nihilo. I suppose the chat window won't be able to run a linter or make and run tests as a typical "eager" agent might, so maybe it will make more mistakes.
Re: LLMs reward expertise
#216Same thing I personally am not a front end guy but I have dabbled with it in the past but I am writing a front end app and a chrome extension, but besides a few pages of code I have reviewed I really do not know what the fck is written (its for an MVP I am building) and I am feeling really conflicted as to what the fuck do I do. At work, the stuff I write has a decent mix of my code, AI code and a few things I do the old way of copying from stackoverflow and seeing what works/doesn't work.
Re: LLMs reward expertise
#217The amplifying mirror analogy works best here. LLMs are ultimately a reflection of your own interactions with its weights, the tone you use, the structure with which you construct your prompt, aspects of an issue you tend to focus on, your breadth of vocabulary and world knowledge and whatnot. People who (carefully) use it as an extension of their own mind and senses will very likely thrive, and those who use it as a…
ELI5 is the way to go. I have Claude break down high level physics "as if I'm a farmer standing in a field" - works beautifully.
Re: LLMs reward expertise
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I wonder if they had given their friend Claude code or Codex, would it have been more likely to create what she wanted?
Perhaps! But I do think the vocabulary issue is real and I think LLMs are still sycophantic enough that they won’t really challenge someone or offer alternative ideas on how to implement something unless they explicitly ask. Interestingly at my work, Claude Code was available before Claude Desktop, so a number of non-technical PMs tried to use it in order to build… anything, with very mixed success. The “hey guys, ch…
> the terminal is a scary place
Isn't the the powerful, unlimited, unopinionated blank LLM text input waiting for your instructions eerily similar to a scary terminal?
WIMP and GUI paradigms are the exact the opposite: intentional dis-empowering, by design restrictions, enumeration of your few possible options. Those feel more constrained therefore safer.
Re: LLMs reward expertise
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are having trouble onboarding engineers with AI now. Some still struggle after their first year with very basic concepts/patterns we use and make the same mistakes again and again in their PRs because they just ask Claude to fix it and never internalize it. I think using LLMs feels good at first because you can get tickets out the door faster but you never develop enough knowledge to make a big impact or become an…
These would have been good hires before AI but now they struggle?
My guess is they would take longer to ramp up but then have a better understanding of the codebase and domain.
But there’s a lot of pressure to get up to speed as a new hire and it’s easy to move fast with AI
Re: LLMs reward expertise
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are having trouble onboarding engineers with AI now. Some still struggle after their first year with very basic concepts/patterns we use and make the same mistakes again and again in their PRs because they just ask Claude to fix it and never internalize it. I think using LLMs feels good at first because you can get tickets out the door faster but you never develop enough knowledge to make a big impact or become an…
These would have been good hires before AI but now they struggle?
I imagine they are still good hires - however there is a real cognitive debt that happens when we code with LLMs in my experience.
It’s harder to internalise concepts because you don’t go through the struggle of understanding them and finding the mental links you need to remember later.
I notice this with people around me - all of them are doing more things, but I am also catching more issues when reviewing docs and code.
Obviously YMMV.