271–280 of 607 posts
Someone with less skill or expertise might still get good results, sure. It would just take longer and it wouldn’t be pretty
The 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…
Claude code is entirely vibed. Someone posted some of the prompts they used: barely comprehensible typo-addled half phrases.
This seems to be the opposite of your experience.
I 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…
Your friend could start with telling the LLM that they are a non technical person who wants to make an app and it will explain all the successive steps.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> But at that point, what is the point of you versus going to the LLM myself? reply You're missing one word, and that word explains why everyone running the companies is so excited. The word is 'paying'. "But at that point, what is the point paying of you versus going to the LLM myself?" And, yes, I think that LLMs make it a lot easier to hire a minimally trained stooge and get them productive. It's worked for me, an…
I 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…
We've seen plenty of examples of apps successfully vibe coded by non technical people, including apps making real revenue. Your friend could start with telling the LLM that they are a non technical person who wants to make an app and it will explain all the successive steps.
Have we? Or is this just something that people say now, without citation?
I believe this works in two different ways.
First, information compression. The use of professional language helps describe problems more densely with minimal information loss/distortions. Verbose output by LLMs (e.g. ELI5) tend to incorporate local chat context, which can destabilize the context (e.g. out-of-topic, irrelevant nitpicking on writing style and wordings) and lead to faulty logic and even hallucination. LLMs are not good enough to look through all the noise, so, sometimes, it's helpful to refine the input data before performing actual tasks.
Second, boosting logical pattern-matching. Using professional language helps drive logical reasoning through simpler pattern-matching b/w texts. This is not about whether LLMs can reason or not; it's about how high-level reasoning is guided by preconception. Even humans tend to consume only textual surface of highly complicated theories (e.g. Adam Smith's "invisible hand"), and use them casually during conversation. It's similar for LLMs: if the conversation is conducted entirely in professional language, LLMs can easily incorporate external professional information into its reasoning. If the text is written in amateurish tongue, translating it into professional language can introduce errors and distortions.
So, yeah, keep your conversation professional, tidy and tight. A large volume of unprofessional text helps no one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We've seen plenty of examples of apps successfully vibe coded by non technical people, including apps making real revenue. Your friend could start with telling the LLM that they are a non technical person who wants to make an app and it will explain all the successive steps.
>We've seen plenty of examples of apps successfully vibe coded by non technical people, including apps making real revenue. Have we? Or is this just something that people say now, without citation?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We've seen plenty of examples of apps successfully vibe coded by non technical people, including apps making real revenue. Your friend could start with telling the LLM that they are a non technical person who wants to make an app and it will explain all the successive steps.
>We've seen plenty of examples of apps successfully vibe coded by non technical people, including apps making real revenue. Have we? Or is this just something that people say now, without citation?