4 ms·
I think the most under-appreciated aspect of LLMs, one on which the article touched on but didn't directly address, is being the "developer that knows everythin
by miki123211 3y ago
I think the most under-appreciated aspect of LLMs, one on which the article touched on but didn't directly address, is being the "developer that knows everything" aspect.
No matter how senior of a programmer you are, you're eventually going to encounter a technology you know very little about. You're always going to be a junior at something. Maybe you're the God of Win32, C++ and COM, but you get stuck on obscure NSIS scripts when packaging your software. Maybe you've been writing web apps for the last 25 years and sit on the PHP language committee, but then you're asked to implement some obscure ISO standard for communicating with credit card networks, and you've never communicated with credit card networks on that level before. Maybe you've been writing iOS apps since the first iPhone and Mac apps before that, spent a few years at Apple, know most iOS APIs by heart and designed quite a few yourself, but then you're asked to implement CalDAV support in your app and you don't know what CalDAV is, much less how to use it. An LLM can help you out in these situations. Maybe it won't write all the code for you, but it'll at least put you on the right track.
- reactordev 3y ago>"No matter how senior of a programmer you are, you're eventually going to encounter a technology you know very little about" Or worse, you've filled your head with different tech and now you need to rehash and brush up on stuff you learned prior but swept under the rug for new stuff. It's a strange sensation. Naturally you just go with the median of whatever your company you work for is doing - then find yourself in this situation where it's "been a while" since you worked on CSS. Or it might take you a weekend of study to bring back those Python dataclass skills.
- sime2009 3y agoI've found LLMs great for vague questions about functions and APIs whose details I've long forgotten. Recognising the right answer when it appears is often faster than digging through random results on google.
- Salgat 3y agoAt its heart GPT is the world's best googler. As long as you can find it on Google, an LLM can probably do a better and faster job of finding and curating the information for you.
- jay_kyburz 3y agoerrr, I don't know about that. I like to ask the AIs about products I built and know everything about as a test, and while they often get the top level facts correct, there is always some crazy hallucination that you won't find googling.
- Lamad1234 3y ago[dead]
- pjmlp 3y agoToday it won't, tomorrow it certainly will, and it is time to look for something else as a job. Thankfully I will most likely already be retired.