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Understanding is the new bottleneck

geoffreylitt.com

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Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#221

Post by hackmack10 »

euthymiclabs wrote: post #2

"I read the code." -Mitchell Hashimoto Great code needs great understanding and agents need excellent guidance. Even in my current solo-dev work, I can't imagine making a production commit I haven't read until I understand it. I own the consequences of my code; that's a responsibility AI agents can't take.

Yeah, but in the corporate world now, you're being judged by how fast you get shit checked in. So, if you need to understand every line these days... you're going to end up in the bottom 25% of the company pretty quickly. Not saying you're wrong, just saying how fucked things are becoming.

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#222

Post by Forgeties79 »

js8 wrote: post #196
jfyi wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, both of those are skills. Neither are skills that a large portion of users of those services pursue to any meaningful extent, I'll grant you that. They also certainly are not synonymous with the term "soft skills" as I know it. So I think I am on your side of the fence on that part any way.

I feel like if they were skills under a reasonable definition, you should be able to name an expert in these skills, and how do we know they are an expert. But I think you can't. It seems to me, instead, one is better at googling/prompting the better they are in a particular domain, but it only applies in that domain. Like knowing a jargon is not a skill, knowing the domain is.

And of course if you point any of this out people go “Well many people are good at it, people getting bad results are just bad at it.” The constant refrain of “you’re just using it wrong” has become very tiresome.

If you can always say “just use it right” every time a critique comes up, then we aren’t having an honest conversation about the limitations of these tools.

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#223

Post by hackmack10 »

dofm wrote: post #192

> Why? Why understand? Because (in the just-barely-possible universe where anyone is stupid enough to make me a manager) I will fire you if I ever find out you don't. What possible good can come from letting people deploy things over which they do not, in any sense, have cognitive ownership?

I'd fire you for having that blanket attitude. People haven't truly known how shit works in this industry for the entire fucking time. People are following patterns set out by arrogant pricks for reasons they don't know or care to know, they are just following orders.

That said, someone, somewhere in the chain should understand how the system works. I agree there.

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#224

Post by ch4s3 »

stronglikedan wrote: post #25
ch4s3 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overstanding is the new horizon

That's already been co-opted by the sovereign citizen movement, so use with caution lest you be judged for it.

Its been used by a lot of fringe types since the 1960s, and was at one time popular among Rastafarians. It's also a little used sailing term. Here it functions merely as satire.

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#225

Post by theshrike79 »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #164
bmurphy1976 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't change the fact that those soft skills are necessary to use LLMs effectively. You need a mixture of hard and soft skills. Engineers who have avoided learning the soft skills are going to have a harder time adjusting.

But if you are managing AI agents you dont' need "soft skills" do you? You don't need to be especially nice to the AI, or symphatize with it, or have fun with it to build trust, I would imagine that managing a team of AI-agents is totally different from managing a team of people.

Soft skills isn't just about being nice.

It's about knowing the capabilities of people, what can they do, what do they excel at and where they need support.

The exact same applies to LLMs, each of them have their own very distinctive styles as well as strengths and weaknesses.

Just like human engineers, LLMs can't just be plugged in to the same role as the previous one with the same instructions and expect the same results.

Thus: soft skills.

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#226

Post by theshrike79 »

another-dave wrote: post #190
madrox wrote: post #82

I think it funny how much average engineers are beginning to discover the challenges of engineering leadership and program management. This has always been the bottleneck. It's why managers and PMs want to be in standup. It's why slack exists and engineers are constantly being poked on it. It's why execs always talk about not getting too far away from the work. It's how seagull management happens. It's why program ma…

To me, the biggest hurdle to trying to manage agents like humans is that there's no real continuity, out of the box at least. You can trying to get around this with RAG and markdown files and skills but you're basically building from scratch the "tools" on how to remember the codebase that you take for granted with people

There's no continuity with outsourced consultants either. But still people manage to make it work.

With the exact same tools you use with LLMs: proper documentation and detailed instructions.

Then you can grab any random consultant or LLM with a fresh context and get them to work.

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#227

Post by alecbz »

zombot wrote: post #150
SchemaLoad wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a mass psychosis going on in companies right now. Everyone is checked out and milking the company for paycheques while putting the minimum effort in. Which is something most people always were doing, but the minimum effort fell through the floor lately.

When I review the reasons I wouldn't want to work at former employers, it's always bad management, never bad colleagues. If this is what it's like where you work, you should run.

Things like bad management, disillusionment with the company's goals, worries about being automated out of a job, etc. can lead people on the floor to care less and put in less effort.

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#228

Post by Kinrany »

techpression wrote: post #40
iainctduncan wrote: post #3

I am so dying to read more about the new/current/real bottleneck! Where is the bottleneck? WHERE?? Tell me! No evidence needed, just lay it on, man to man, thought-leader to thought-leader!

It doesn’t matter, once you found the bottleneck there is a new one. Seems we changed the supposed bottleneck of writing code (as if it ever were, the world was producing far too much code before LLMs were even a thing) with about ten or so new ones, was it a good trade?

You need to actually remove the bottleneck, after _that_ there'll be a new one

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#229

Post by alecbz »

Avicebron wrote: post #80
dylan604 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the biggest issue I have with current state of affairs. It's not there yet. Because of that, extra work is needed to get them to work that otherwise would not need to be spent. Everyone is shouting from the roof tops about how great things are while suppressing these types of issues. We've seen it here where people release Show HN types of things that are half baked ideas that really make no improvement for p…

I think everyone is coasting while the craze is on. Either it ends up being able to one shot all work and we have bigger problems. Or it can't, definitively, and we have bigger problems.

Honestly, either feels like an improvement over now.

If LLMs actually get good enough to really automate the production of good software, it'll be disruptive for the industry and we'll all have to adjust a lot more than we already are, but I think it'd be on-net good for it to be cheaper and easier to produce good software. And, in the past, such changes have only increased the size of the tech industry.

Or, if we finally realize LLMs aren't going to get there, there'll be at least increased demand for actual software engineers to clean up all the LLM mess.

But right now is the worst, where the industry feels like it's lying to itself about what these tools are capable of.

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#230

Post by modo_mario »

simianwords wrote: post #166
361994752 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. That is what trust means. And being able to trust the right folks makes a good manager.

And being able to trust the agent when you can makes a good engineer

I think a good engineer still reads the majority of what llm's put out for him and understands it so trust doesn't really come into the picture.
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