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I'd rather read the prompt

claytonwramsey.com

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Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#521

Post by eirikbakke »

Mengkudulangsat wrote: post #431
rohansood15 wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Students want the diploma because it has value. It has value because a student can only get it by learning and problem-solving. If students find a way to get a diploma without doing the work, it will soon be worth less than the paper on which it is printed.

> If students find a way to get a diploma without doing the work, it will soon be worth less than the paper on which it is printed. Amen. I look forward to the era where we train professionals the old fashion way: apprenticeships. It sure worked for blacksmiths and artisans for hundreds of years.

PhDs are apprenticeships. Students perform original research under the supervision of a doctoral advisor, and submit their work to a "guild" of external reviewers (peer reviewed journals or conferences). Once the student has three peer-reviewed publications, they graduate.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#522

Post by necovek »

tptacek wrote: post #150
necovek wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is "what has been my experience" not implied in what I am still waiting for — "someone using an LLM to produce high quality code in the field of their expertise in less time than without an LLM"? So, observing a couple of my colleagues (I am an engineering manager, but have switched back and forth between management and IC roles for the last ~20 years), I've seen them either produce crap, or spend so much time tuning…

LLMs don't make bad programmers into good programmers. If your team is comfortable merging "crap", you have deeper problems.

If you don't want to engage in an honest discussion, please refrain from making assumptions: nobody mentioned "merging crap". I stopped clearly at guiding an LLM to make a code change, which is at best, a pull request.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#523

Post by necovek »

dcre wrote: post #407
necovek wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they summed it up well in the section "Why do we write, anyway?" — they nowhere claimed it was vital for students' success in a robotic class. On the contrary as they title a subsection there with "If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing *badly*" (emphasis mine) — so what they are looking for is to peer into the author's mind and their original thoughts. The implication there is that this is acceptable to pass…

A couple of examples from influential open source developers: Adam Wathan (Tailwind) agreeing with Mitchell Hashimoto that LLMs are making them more productive. "in their area of expertise" is not obvious from this post alone, but I am pretty confident from the way they talk about it that they are not exclusively using LLMs on side projects where they're inexpert. https://x.com/adamwathan/status/1911845073286803923 A…

"Saying" vs "demonstrating": I am careful with the words I am using.

It's not just nitpicking: maybe it's only their perception they are more productive? Or maybe they are. But saying it is not convincing enough for me.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#524

Post by spiderxxxx »

lurking_swe wrote: post #301
soerxpso wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I should hope that the purpose of a class writing exercise is not to create an artifact of text but force the student to think I'm there for the degree. If I wanted to learn and engage with material, I could save $60,000 and do that online for free, probably more efficiently. The purpose of a class writing exercise is to get the university to give me the degree, which I cannot do by actually learning the material (…

That’s a disingenuous argument. You don’t know what you don’t know. Literally. A completely self guided high school graduate following random online materials will not learn nearly as much on their own. Or they will go down rabbit holes and waste countless hours, and not having an expert unblock you or guide you down the right path would waste a lot of time. Further, some high school graduates (like myself at the tim…

>That’s a disingenuous argument. You don’t know what you don’t know. Literally. A completely self guided high school graduate following random online materials will not learn nearly as much on their own. Or they will go down rabbit holes and waste countless hours, and not having an expert unblock you or guide you down the right path would waste a lot of time.

Citation needed. There's great books out there that provide a lot of guidance down a particular path. I'd say a lot of them do, and I can't imagine online learning sources would be worse. There's online communities for learners for specific subjects that are full of people offering good advice.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#525

Post by godelski »

hnfong wrote: post #456
godelski wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm there for the degree Would you hire someone without a degree? When you're in a position to hire or influence hiring, will you consider those without degrees? I ask because I hear this sentiment a lot but we still have a system becoming more reliant on degrees. The universities may be the gatekeepers of those degrees but they're not the ones gatekeeping the jobs. They have no influence there. They were not the o…

Speaking personally, yes, very much so. I see your point, but the issue is that it's quite futile to shame students for playing the game that people in the industry has set up. It doesn't help that in the past, college degrees were in fact more relevant than today, especially before the era of the internet and wikipedia, so if older people who are currently in charge of hiring aren't aware of these changes, they migh…

I do appreciate that you do that! People making change is the only way change can happen.

But I think the second part is amiss. I do agree that educators (being one) need to recognize the reality of the environment. But I think you also can't ignore that the reason the degrees are used to signal qualification is because the degree is intended to signal that some knowledge is held by a specific person. Yes, things have changed. It did used to be that interviews were much shorter, with a degree being a strong signal (at minimum, it is a signal that someone can sufficiently follow directions and manage their time). Should that mean those tasked with ensuring a student gets their education does not get their education? I get your point, but I think it is barking up the wrong tree. Asking academia to change only furthers the problem as it lets employers shift blame. It is like getting upset at a minimum wage worker for increased prices due to tariffs.

The really weird thing is we're now in this bizarroland setting where employers will filter for degree and then spend months and a lot of time and money putting candidates through testing rounds. Making them do tons of leetcode and other things to evaluate their performance. Where the candidates spend months studying to pass the interviews. And the complaints here are probably more apt, about how the material they need to study is not significantly relevant to the skills needed for a job[0]. Worse, it doesn't seem to be achieving the results it is setting out to seek.

As they say about the stock market "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent". My point is that some academics are making classes easier. Grade inflation is a measurable phenomena and it sure got worse with Covid. My point is that employers are acting irrationally.

[0] I'll give an example. I had an interview a few weeks ago and we had run a bit longer than expected prior to getting to the coding portion of the interview and where their coding software crashed a few times, giving us 10 minutes to do what was expected to be 30. Finally coding, the program crashed and I said "I don't use a lot of Juypter Notebooks, does the kernel crash when OOM?" I'm explaining my thought process aloud and frankly, I'd never hit this on the job. No answer. I quickly scroll through logs, say "I'm going to guess that's the issue, I'd normally guess and if wrong google it". Yes, it was the right answer. But there was no reason to do this, especially with me guessing right. This wasn't some dinky startup, it was a multi-trillion dollar company...

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#526

Post by eric-burel »

rocqua wrote: post #514

Is the author forgetting a baby in the bathwater he is throwing out? Especially on coding. He points out that vibe coding is bad, and then concluding that any program written through the use of an AI is bad. For example if you already have a theory of your code, and you want to make some stuff that is verbose but trivial. It is just more efficient to explain the theory to an LLM and extract the code. I do like the id…

A lot of criticism of LLMs is certainly legit and relevant, but are targeting very naive uses of the tools. Post-processing the output with an improvement prompt isn't even mentioned here. I'd rather read a criticism of agents, systems that produce SEO optimized articles etc. The debates would be more interesting.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#527

Post by 6510 »

Teachers lose much if not all of their time teaching while people applying what they've learned spend all of their time applying and advancing the practical side of it. The later don't even know how to use LLM's.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#528

Post by makeitdouble »

bagacrap wrote: post #473
makeitdouble wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably just transparency, because the summary will be written in a different voice and sound AIish either way. If I were to include AI generated stuff into my communication I'd also make it clear as people might guess it anyway.

But if you haven't personally verified the summary is accurate then you should not share it. And if you have verified it, you don't need to disclose.

I'd push back on this: I wouldn't share something I haven't checked, yet my natural writing style is nothing like Gemini, so having a whole paragraph in a different style in my mail requires a disclaimer (I don't want people double guessing what I'm quoting or if I had some different intent writing that paragraph)

Rewriting it in my own words would clear the issue, but then why am I even using an AI in the first place ?

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