3 ms·

Another "LLM skeptic" arguing it is impossible for LLMs to ever reliably answer a certain type of prompt, because they can't answer it reliably in 2024. Every

• lumost 2y ago
  What these arguments usually miss is that precision doesn’t really matter to an expert user. A professional, experienced engineer can filter the crap from the real. LLMs usually get me over the mental hump of project setup/boilerplate. They also let me rapidly prototype vague ideas in record time. They also make the bar for a productive junior engineer much higher, as an LLM can perform a precisely defined task much faster than a junior engineer.
  • valine 2y ago
    Some people are really great at reading code, and they’re the best equipped to take advantage of LLMs in their current slightly unreliable state. If you can read and fix the LLMs code faster than you can write it from scratch then it’s a net win.
  • lukev 2y ago
    Even taking this as completely true, what does it mean for the field? How can one become a professional, experienced engineer if one has not put in multiple years being a productive junior engineer? And what happens if those jobs are no longer available?
    • engfan 2y ago
      The same thing that has happened forever. People practice and gain skills on their own time before being welcomed into the professional community. Skilled new college graduate programmers have often put in a decade or more of learning before they graduate because they start young. They may have taught themselves many programming languages, studied many open source libraries, learned about profiling and efficiency tradeoffs, etc. Companies with serious engineering needs simply don’t want and haven’t wanted those who lack this natural desire to build and iterate. The only change is that the bar continues to rise a bit and all people are now competing at one level or another with machines.
    • lumost 2y ago
      My bet is that LLM tools will do for tech what cloud, SaaS, and other productivity tools did before. Make productive users better and faster. My first job in 2010 required 12 operations personnel to manage a simple app server + database. The db had a dba oncall of 3 people, along with oracle support contracts. These days that job would be done using cloud tools, and that team of 12 people wouldn’t exist. The same story has been true throughout the infrastructure space for 15+ years, with current practices foisting the remaining work on software teams. I suspect junior engineers who can make effective use of LLM tools will be in high demand. LLMs also minimize the benefit of experience provided you can still sift BS vs truth. A firm ultimately only cares about who delivers the most impact.
  • perrygeo 2y ago
    > They also make the bar for a productive junior engineer much higher This is the paradox that I'm seeing everywhere. While LLMs ostensibly make it easier for inexperienced engineers to get started, in practice it makes juniors irrelevant in the market. A senior with an LLM is more productive than a senior with a team of juniors. So while LLMs may make programming accessible to more people, it simultaneously kills their chances of employment. I predict the software market is going to shift away from entry jobs entirely. They can be replaced with LLMs under an experienced hand. Which makes senior engineers more valuable. How are we going to train seniors if we're not hiring juniors? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯