4 ms·

Build something with an LLM outside of your comfort zone. I was a pretty early adopter to an LLM based workflow. The more I used it, the worse my project becam

Build something with an LLM outside of your comfort zone. I was a pretty early adopter to an LLM based workflow. The more I used it, the worse my project became, and the more I learned myself. It didn’t take long for my abilities to surpass the LLM, and for the past year my usage of LLMs has been dropping dramatically. These days I spend more time in docs than in a chat conversation. When chatGPT was announced, many people thought programming was over. As in <12 months. Here we are several years later, and my job looks remarkably the same. I would absolutely love to not have to program anymore. For me, programming is a means to an end. However, after having used LLMs pretty much everyday for 2.5 years, it’s very clear to me that software engineering won’t be changing anytime soon. Some things will get easier and workflows may change, but if you want to build and maintain a moderately difficult production grade application with decent performance, you will still be programming in 10 years

Animats 2y ago
> Build something with an LLM outside of your comfort zone. I need to try that. How do LLMs perform writing shaders? I need to modify a shader to add simple order-independent transparency to avoid a depth sort. Are LLMS up to that job? This is a known area, with code samples available, so an LLM might be able to do it. I'm not a shader expert, and if I can avoid the months needed to become one, that's a win.
- barrell 2y ago
  I'm sure LLMs can do it, and I'm sure they will be riddled with mistakes! Especially if you're not competent enough in an area to grok docs (I don't mean that in a condescending way — I would definitely not be competent enough to grok shader docs) then LLMs can be a great way to learn. It won't take long before you see all the mistakes in their responses before trying them, and from there it's just a hop and a skip to it being more efficient to just reading the docs then arguing with an LLM. But that beginning part is where LLMs can provide the most value to programmers. Especially if you go in with the mindset that 90% of what it says will be wrong

Animats 2y ago

> Build something with an LLM outside of your comfort zone. I need to try that. How do LLMs perform writing shaders? I need to modify a shader to add simple order-independent transparency to avoid a depth sort. Are LLMS up to that job? This is a known area, with code samples available, so an LLM might be able to do it. I'm not a shader expert, and if I can avoid the months needed to become one, that's a win.

barrell 2y ago
I'm sure LLMs can do it, and I'm sure they will be riddled with mistakes! Especially if you're not competent enough in an area to grok docs (I don't mean that in a condescending way — I would definitely not be competent enough to grok shader docs) then LLMs can be a great way to learn. It won't take long before you see all the mistakes in their responses before trying them, and from there it's just a hop and a skip to it being more efficient to just reading the docs then arguing with an LLM. But that beginning part is where LLMs can provide the most value to programmers. Especially if you go in with the mindset that 90% of what it says will be wrong