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Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

simonwillison.net

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Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#281

Post by KeplerBoy »

rmgk wrote: post #200
Muromec wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a feeling that "almost getting there" will simply become the norm. I have seen a lot of buggy and almost but not exactly right applications, processes and even laws that people simply have to live with. If US can be the worlds biggest economy while having an opiod epidemy and writing paper cheques, if Germany can be Europes manufacturing hub while using faxes, sure we as a society can live in the unoptimal sta…

Using faxes is much more streamlined than the more modern Scan, Email, Print process.

there shouldn't ever be a print or scan step in the pipeline.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#283

Post by TeMPOraL »

6LLvveMx2koXfwn wrote: post #179
TeMPOraL wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Growing your own muscle mass" is an artificial goal that exists because of tools. Our bodies evolved under the background assumption that daily back-breaking labor is necessary for survival, and rely on it to stay in good operating conditions. We've since all but eliminated most of that labor for most people - so now we're forced to engage in otherwise pointless activity called "exercise" that's physically hard on p…

What on earth are you talking about? - Physical back-breaking work has not been eliminated for most people. - Physical exercise triggers biological reward mechanism which make exercise enjoyable and, er, rewarding for many people (arguable for most people as it is a mammalian trait) ergo it is not undesirable. UK NHS calls physical exercise essential.

> Physical back-breaking work has not been eliminated for most people.

I said most of it for most people specifically to avoid the quibble about mechanization in poorest countries and their relative population sizes.

> Physical exercise triggers biological reward mechanism which make exercise enjoyable and, er, rewarding for many people

I envy them. I'm not one of them.

> ergo it is not undesirable

Again, I specifically said "and for many people, for many reasons, is often undesirable" as to not have to spell out the obvious: you may like the exercise benefits of a physically hard work, but your boss probably doesn't - reducing the need for physical exertion reduces workplace injuries, allows worker to do more for longer, and opens up the labor pool to physically weaker people. So even if people only ever felt pleasure from physical exertion, the market would've been pushing to eliminate it anyway.

> UK NHS calls physical exercise essential.

They wouldn't have to if people actually liked doing it.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#284

Post by hmottestad »

_heimdall wrote: post #249

The irony here is obvious, but what's interesting is that Anthropic is basically asking to not give then a realistic preview of how you will work. This feels similar to asking devs to only use vim during a coding challenge and please refrain from using VS Code or another full featured IDE. If you know, and even encourage, your employees to use LLMs at work you should want to see how well candidates present themselves…

I still don't know how to quit Vim without googling for instructions :P

As an anecdote from my time at uni, I can share that all our exams were either writing code with pen on paper for 3-4 hours, or a take-home exam that would make up 50% of the final grade. There was never any expectation that students would use pen and paper on their take-home exams. You were free to use your books and to search the web for help, but you were not allowed to copy any code you found without citing it. Also not allowed to collaborate with anyone.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#285

Post by gcanyon »

DrNosferatu wrote: post #277
gcanyon wrote: post #248

Everyone arguing for LLMs as a corrupting crutch needs to explain why this time is different: why the grammar-checkers-are-crutches, don't-use-wikipedia, spell-check-is-a-crutch, etc. etc. people were all wrong, but this time the tool really is somehow unacceptable.

You forgot calculators ;)

Definitely agreed. And slide rules, and log tables, and...

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#286

Post by sbarre »

rmgk wrote: post #200
Muromec wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a feeling that "almost getting there" will simply become the norm. I have seen a lot of buggy and almost but not exactly right applications, processes and even laws that people simply have to live with. If US can be the worlds biggest economy while having an opiod epidemy and writing paper cheques, if Germany can be Europes manufacturing hub while using faxes, sure we as a society can live in the unoptimal sta…

Using faxes is much more streamlined than the more modern Scan, Email, Print process.

Only if you're starting with paper?

Years back I worked somewhere where we had to PDF documents to e-fax them to a supplier. We eventually found out that on their end it was just being received digitally and auto-converted to PDF.

It was never made paper.. So we asked if we could just email the PDF instead of paying for this fax service they wanted.

They said no.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#287

Post by luke-stanley »

I'm sure Anthropic have too many applications submitted that are obviously AI generated, and I am sure what they mean by "non-AI-assisted communication", they don't want "slop" applications, that sounds like a LLM wrote it. They want some greater proof of human ability. I expect humans at Anthropic can tell what LLM model was used to rewrite (or polish) applications they get, but if they can't, a basic BERT classifier can (I've trained one for this task, it's not so hard).

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#288

Post by Kye »

skydhash wrote: post #216
Eisenstein wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about people who don't have access to a mentor? If not AI then what is their option? Is doing tutorials on your own a good way to learn?

Mostly by reading a good book to get the fundamentals down, then taking on a project to apply the knowledge and supplement the gap with online ressource. There are good books and nice open source projects out there. You can get far with these by just studying them with determination. Later you can go on the theoretical and philosophical part of the field.

How do you know what a good book is? I've seen recommendations in fields I'm knowledgeable about that were hot garbage. Those were recommendations by reputed people for reputed authors. I don't know how a beginner is supposed to start without trying a few and learning some bad habits.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#289

Post by namaria »

Eisenstein wrote: post #130
sho_hn wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly agree with this comment. Anecdotal evidence time! I'm an experienced dev (20 years of C++ and plenty of other stuff), and I frequently work with younger students in a mentor role, e.g. I've done Google Summer of Code three times as a mentor, and am also in KDE's own mentorship program. In 2023/24, when ChatGPT was looming large, I took on a student who was of course attempting to use AI to learn and who wa…

What about people who don't have access to a mentor? If not AI then what is their option? Is doing tutorials on your own a good way to learn?

There is no 'learning' in the abstract. You learn something. Doing tutorials teach you how to do the thing you do in them.

It all comes down to what you wanna learn. If you want to acquire skills doing the things you can ask AI to do, probably a bad idea to use them. If you want to learn some pointers on a field you don't even know what key words are relevant to take to a library, LLMs can help a lot.

If you wanna learn complex context dependent professional skills, I don't think there's an alternative to an experienced mentor.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#290

Post by layer8 »

jack_pp wrote: post #217
hollowturtle wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember though that lazyness, as I learned in computing, is kinda "doing something later": you might have pushed the change/fix faster than your senior fellow programmer, but you still need to review and test that change right? Maybe the change you're talking about was really trivial and you just needed to refresh your browser to see a trivial change, but when it's not, being lazy about a change will only gets you s…

The problem is he wasn't comfortable with my solution even though it was clearly faster and it could be tested instantly. It's a mental block for him and a lot of people in this industry. I don't advocate blindly trusting LLMs. I don't either and of course test whatever it spits out.

Testing usually isn’t enough if you don’t understand the solution in the first place. Testing is a sanity check for a solution that you do understand. Testing can’t prove correctness, it can only rind (some) errors.

LLMs are fine for inspiration in developing a solution.

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