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Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

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Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#51

Post by fwlr »

The author considers the possibility that this is an outwardly-polite form of “you should be able to solve this yourself”. Another, grimmer possibility is that it’s an inwardly-polite form of “I should have been able to solve this myself”.

That is, the author asked for

    the thing 30 years had taught him that a search engine couldn't
And his real answer is

    I have forgotten that thing

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#52

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Aurornis wrote: post #11

The subtitle is: > I already did. They repeat multiple times in the article that asking Claude was something they already did. So this isn’t an anti-LLM article. This seems to be a communication problem. The other party either doesn’t know that they’ve put a lot of effort into researching this already, or their trying to give a gentle let-down instead of saying they don’t have time for this. For the first case, the s…

> the solution is to explain what you did to reach this point

It's also helpful to the problem-solving and learning processes. For the expert, knowing what you've tried and how it didn't work refines the set of potential problems. For you, it's a free opportunity to get feedback on your methods from someone with domain expertise.

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#53

Post by alightsoul »

wwind123 wrote: post #45

To be honest, I'm more worried about another side of the problem. LLM's are good at learning from whatever humans have posted online. But with the agentic workflows getting more popular, more and more problems those AI agents figure out are not posted online, and the next time another agent running into the same problems they would have to figure it out from the scratch again. It'd be nice if there's a mechanism thes…

There's also projects on hugging face like https://trace-commons-web.hf.space/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1u795pb/donate_...

These should be opt out. Maybe have a skill that is similar and is opt out

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#55

Post by mbf1 »

My answer is usually to make a process.

Do you need to know if X is faster than Y? Do both. Measure. Sometimes the answer requires actual research.

Maybe you need a real Subject Matter Expert because it turns out that nobody ever published something on the internet about something so that an LLM could soak up the real world information.

Before the internet, we would consult with books. After the internet, it seemed faster to search and find answers in things like blog posts, (paid) articles, and CDs. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow are great resources. Maybe you need an answer from Hacker News - ask HN.

By relying on LLMs more than these other sources and allowing LLMs to write articles and posts to these other sources, we lose subject matter experts.

Add to that companies like Microsoft and Meta and others laying off and offering retirement packages to get rid of institutional knowledge as fast as possible, and we are headed towards a gigantic crash of knowledge.

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#56

Post by mlinhares »

voxgen wrote: post #32
Aurornis wrote: post #11

The subtitle is: > I already did. They repeat multiple times in the article that asking Claude was something they already did. So this isn’t an anti-LLM article. This seems to be a communication problem. The other party either doesn’t know that they’ve put a lot of effort into researching this already, or their trying to give a gentle let-down instead of saying they don’t have time for this. For the first case, the s…

There is a third case where the other party doesn't realize that the asker lacks the relevant experience to discern good LLM answers from bad answers for that topic. Same solution as case one though - don't be afraid to say "Claude said X but that doesn't sound right".

Here's the problem, countering a lie or hallucination takes much more energy than asking Claude something and saying its true. Its the same as trying to fight misinformation on the internet, the amount of energy you have to spend to prove someone is lying or fabricating data is very high.

And having to do this on the corporate environment saps the energy and time of people that could be doing something productive by wasting their time answering a clueless person that asked an LLM about something they don't understand, got the answer they wanted (but that isn't real), and now are asking multiple people to prove it can't be done.

Here's an example, a PM decided they wanted to build a metrics framework, to track team success, with high level metrics. They asked claude to build such high level metrics (out of nowhere, these metrics don't exist), it happily produced hallucinated code that said it was collecting the metrics and the PR opened a pull request. Now we have to go there, review, find out is all bullshit and explain to the person that what they're trying to build doesn't exist.

So now we have to fight misinformation even on the clock.

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#57

Post by BobbyTables2 »

Animats wrote: post #21
Aurornis wrote: post #11

The subtitle is: > I already did. They repeat multiple times in the article that asking Claude was something they already did. So this isn’t an anti-LLM article. This seems to be a communication problem. The other party either doesn’t know that they’ve put a lot of effort into researching this already, or their trying to give a gentle let-down instead of saying they don’t have time for this. For the first case, the s…

When I post a technical question in Forums, I usually add something like "Tried Copilot, got useless answer ...". The trouble with asking an LLM is that there are a huge number of people (this predates LLMs) who post answers on forums along the lines of "turn it off and turn it on again" LLMs pick that up as the consensus solution.

I actually hate reading posts that go “I can’t understand/fix this problem. Tried LLM…”

To me, such screams “I’m too lazy to do anything more than ask a LLM. I’ve tried nothing and I’m all out of ideas”

Show me you put a modicum effort and aren’t just looking to be spoon-fed the content from the first Google result that would have been found.

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#58

Post by jibal »

ventana wrote: post #3

One of the ways not to get LMGTFY / Ask Claude as a response is to provide more information and proof of work when asking a question. Compare: — What's the best way of doing X? — Ask Claude. vs: — I thought about this and found there are options A, B, and C of doing X, I like A more but C is the fastest; what do you think? I believe a normal senior engineer won't suggest to talk to Claude in this case.

It's highly unlikely that the conversation actually happened as reported. At the very least, something was said after "Ask Claude".

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#59

Post by jibal »

andy99 wrote: post #24
ventana wrote: post #3

One of the ways not to get LMGTFY / Ask Claude as a response is to provide more information and proof of work when asking a question. Compare: — What's the best way of doing X? — Ask Claude. vs: — I thought about this and found there are options A, B, and C of doing X, I like A more but C is the fastest; what do you think? I believe a normal senior engineer won't suggest to talk to Claude in this case.

I’m assuming this person did ask in the second way, it’s hard to imagine someone working through a problem that has already tried a bunch of stuff just going in cold and not providing any context and saying “How do I do X?” Good advice obviously if it’s not being followed already but also likely over-simplifying the problem. Also a normal person on the receiving end would probe a bit about what has already been tried…

It's highly unlikely that the conversation actually happened as reported. At the very least, something was said after "Ask Claude".

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#60

Post by andersonpico »

zzzeek wrote: post #36

OK here is the thing. Everyone get your downmods ready since my rants on here are always a disaster. People are really really tired. Because of not just Claude, but also "the recession" "the strait of hormuz closed" "we've never recovered our economy from COVID" "everyone works from home now / the company is forcing us to all come back in" "FAANG had 10000 layoffs" "the global warming" "the ", our employers are makin…

That makes sense as well, I think it's a nice human perspective. People really are uniquely tired lately.
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