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LLMs reward expertise

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Re: LLMs reward expertise

#471

Post by JadeNB »

nvrmndmnm wrote: post #419
krisoft wrote: post #191

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…

I ran a similar test and got completely different results. My girlfriend (hair stylist/artist) with zero coding background mentioned a Telegram bot idea. I asked "Why not build it yourself?" I gave her a Windows laptop, but she said she wanted what I have instead. So I handed her a USB stick and told her she was on her own now. Fast forward: she now runs Arch Linux with Hyprland (I use Xorg/i3 though), fully riced wi…

What does "fully riced with cats" mean?

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#472

Post by jerf »

jaggederest wrote: post #228
jerf wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using a prompt that comes from the opposite direction for non-programming stuff: "Assume the user is an expert in all fields; while this is clearly logically untrue on a literal level, the user prefers to see a field's technical terminology and then ask the AI about terms the user does not understand rather than get an inaccurate statement about some issue." Whether you have to reassure the LLM that this is…

Off topic, but stretching is absolutely useless for ... stretching. And vital for retaining and enhancing usable range of motion (not static stretching, still, but dynamic stretching / mobility under tension). The wildest thing is, there's no evidence that I can find that static stretching does... anything? It increases pain tolerance through the range of motion, but not any more than just asking people to try harder…

"And vital for retaining and enhancing usable range of motion (not static stretching, still, but dynamic stretching / mobility under tension)."

I'm doing it for knee pain. It's possible it's a placebo because there is a slight strength training component to the whole thing (it's several exercises), although the knee pain has persisted through a lot of strengthening of my leg in general. This falls under "don't care" as the program as a whole works and I'm not worried enough about the details to try to optimize it. All the stretches fall under "dynamic stretching under tension" so maybe it's not something covered by the study you reference last.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#473

Post by JSR_FDED »

daishi55 wrote: post #469
JSR_FDED wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not the only one who doesn’t know what nestJS is

Yes? My point is that for what I do - low level systems and embedded stuff - nestJS is really not something that I need or want to know about. I just want a good dashboard. Now thanks to LLMs, I can focus on the fun and interesting stuff.

My point is that it’s not even called nestJS

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#474

Post by filleokus »

JadeNB wrote: post #471
nvrmndmnm wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ran a similar test and got completely different results. My girlfriend (hair stylist/artist) with zero coding background mentioned a Telegram bot idea. I asked "Why not build it yourself?" I gave her a Windows laptop, but she said she wanted what I have instead. So I handed her a USB stick and told her she was on her own now. Fast forward: she now runs Arch Linux with Hyprland (I use Xorg/i3 though), fully riced wi…

What does "fully riced with cats" mean?

I understand "ricing" to mean customising the appearance of a Linux machine, see e.g https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/top/?sort=top&t=month (SFW). So in this case I assume the UI has a cat theme or cat icons.

I think the etymology is from "rice burner" cars [0]:

> Riced out is an adjective denigrating a badly customized sports car, "usually with oversized or ill-matched exterior appointments".

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#475

Post by socketcluster »

When I use Claude to write code for my own projects, the code it generates is exactly the same code that I would have written had I done it by hand. If there is any deviation, I ask it to adjust but that is rare. At least 95% of the time, it's like it read my mind... Which is quite impressive when it outputs like 500+ lines from a single prompt and then it works straight away without any debugging necessary.

I don't even debug anymore on those projects. If Claude tries to add debugging logic in my code, I tell it not to and just provide additional information and it can usually find the solution faster that way.

This is when working on my own projects. When working on projects created by other people, it's a different story and I have to fight it constantly to stop it from implementing hacks and workarounds... It uses much more tokens to implement basic features. It's more work for both the AI agent and myself.

The project's existing code makes up most of the context so if the code is not great, you have to write long detailed prompts to set it on the right path. You have to make it clear that the existing code isn't good enough and your expectation is higher.

In this case, it usually gets better with more back-and-forth... At the beginning, it can't do anything because you keep pointing out a problem whenever it tries anything at all, but eventually, after a lot of criticism, it starts becoming more careful and adapting to your standards.

So yeah, even same person doing the prompting can lead to two very different experiences depending on who built the foundation.

So my conclusion is that the expertise comes from both the existing codebase and from the person doing the prompting... And TBH, I would say the codebase/foundation carries more weight than the person doing the prompting.

Pretty sure I could put an idiot on one of my codebases with Claude Code and they'd do a decent job.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#476

Post by ghm2199 »

krisoft wrote: post #191

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…

I think this is about teaching problem solving at a young age and it is an abomination that our education system does so poorly at. The key is to know what kind of questions to ask and knowing when to go deeper and what to pay attention to.

But that is not how our education system aligns us. One typical example of problem solving kids, and I too, learn in school is how to apply a concept in physics to a free-body-diagram(Indian and Chinese education cram schools are famously good at teaching kids how to do this, the usefulness of which I debate). But it all stops at the exam room. No architect or jr structural engineer position for you kiddo.

Another kind of problem solving skill might be how to invest money and understand your own risk appetite to construct portfolios to manage your money. All that is taught in school is a dry compound interest formulae, time discounted cash flows and a black scholes model. Only to find out later I don't need most of it to manage my money.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#477

Post by jappgar »

zmmmmm wrote: post #50

There's a growing and fascinating divide between people who see LLMs as more of a "bicycle for the mind" in the vein of Jobs vs those who see them as whollly supplanting the role of human intelligence. I can't help but wonder if these aren't primarily two human archetypes more than anything - the LLMs can be both and they erect a mirror of the human using them. Some humans really don't want deep individual expertise…

There ARE two types of people. Those who ride bicycles and those who prefer a self-driving car.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#478

Post by ghm2199 »

ghm2199 wrote: post #476
krisoft wrote: post #191

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…

I think this is about teaching problem solving at a young age and it is an abomination that our education system does so poorly at. The key is to know what kind of questions to ask and knowing when to go deeper and what to pay attention to. But that is not how our education system aligns us. One typical example of problem solving kids, and I too, learn in school is how to apply a concept in physics to a free-body-dia…

It's also my opinion that Kids should get to do a lot of real work and experimentation at an early age(13 yo IMO) with real responsibilities and prospects of making income. Knowing the failure mode of most real world problems you can solve is the skill you always want but dont nearly get to do enough of until much later in life(sadly true for a large population of kids in the world).

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#479

Post by losvedir »

dmazzoni wrote: post #222
matthew-wegner wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you describing a "chat window" experience here? This is apples to oranges.

As opposed to what? If you ask a non-programmer to install Claude Code, just installing it will be a challenge, then opening the shell and interacting with it. Things as simple as copying and pasting can present roadblocks if you've never used a shell before, and things intuitive to programmers like using up-arrow to go back to a previous prompt would never occur to someone in the field. Claude Code seems so simple a…

With Claude it's actually not that hard. I set up a system for a startup where devs used a full dev environment and non-devs could use the Claude web UI to open rougher PRs, and one of the non-devs asked me what was involved with getting a full dev environment set up, so Claude could iterate and he could test locally, which was faster than the "push to GitHub, use the Vercel/Supabase preview deployment" workflow he was using.

I gave him a link to Ghostty, a link to the claude code copy/paste pipe to bash thing, told him how to cd/ls/pwd into the folder he had locally from the GitHub app, and he was off to the races. I told him to type `claude` to open Claude Code in the terminal and gave him a prompt to use about being a non-dev getting his environment set up to the point of being able to pnpm dev and test, and Claude took it from there. The repo's readme had a setup section which it followed to install brew, asdf, pnpm, etc. With the GitHub MCP he's now opening PRs the same way devs do.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#480

Post by dr0idattack »

I like it. And if you don't know a codebase, like normal, spend some time learning in. Use the LLM to query it, create your own architecture diagrams. Get homey with it before making sweeping changes. Maybe make the first simple changes by hand.
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