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> executives, directors and managerial staff think the opposite Executives, directors, and managerial staff have had their heads up their own asses since the d
by feoren 2y ago
> executives, directors and managerial staff think the opposite
Executives, directors, and managerial staff have had their heads up their own asses since the dawn of civilization. Riding the waves of terrible executive decisions is unfortunately part of professional life. Executives like the idea of LLMs because it means they can lay you off; they're not going to care about your opinion on it one way or another.
> Being very anti-LLM code instead of trying to understand how it can improve the speed might be detrimental for your career.
You're making the assumption that LLMs can improve your speed. That's the very assumption being questioned by GP. Heaps of low-quality code do not improve development speed.
- simonw 2y agoI'm willing to stake my reputation on the idea that yes, LLMs can improve your speed. You have to learn how to use them effectively and responsibly but the productivity boosts they can give you once you figure that out are very real.
- chefandy 2y agoMany bosses are willing to stake their subordinates’ reputations on it, too.
- tokioyoyo 2y agoI'm with you on this one. If one's experience is just using it as a general chat bot, then yeah, I can see why people are reluctant thinking it's useless. I have a feeling that a good chunk of people haven't tried to use latest models on a medium-small project from scratch, where you have to play around with its intricacies to build intuition around it. It becomes some sort of muscle memory, where I can predict whether using LLM would be faster or slower. Or where it's more likely to give bad suggestions or not. Basically treating it as googling skills.
- simonw 2y ago"It becomes some sort of muscle memory, where I can predict whether using LLM would be faster or slower" Yeah, that intuition is so important. You have to use the models a whole bunch to develop it, but eventually you get a sort of sixth sense where you can predict if an LLM is going to be useful or harmful on a problem and be right about it 9/10 times. My frustration is that intuition isn't something I can teach! I'd love to be able to explain why I can tell that problem X is a good fit and problem Y isn't, but often the answer is pretty much just "vibes" based on past experience.
- tokioyoyo 2y agoTotally! My current biggest problems: 1) Being up to date with the latest capabilities - this one has slowed down a bit, and my biggest self-learning experience was in August/September, and most of the intuition still works. However, although I had time to do so, it's hard to ask my team to drop 5-6 free weekends of their lives to get up to speed 2) Transition period where not everyone is on the same page about LLM - this I think is much harder, because the expectations from the executives are much different than on the ground developers using LLMs. A lot of people could benefit on alignment of expectations, but once again, it's hard to explain what is possible and not possible if your statements will become nullified a month later with a new AI model/product/feature.
- th0ma5 2y agoYou're confusing intuition of what works or not with being too close to your problem to make a judgement on the general applicability of your techniques.
- simonw 2y agoI don't understand what you mean.
- entropicdrifter 2y agoThey're saying it might work for you, but isn't generally applicable (because most people aren't going to develop this intuition, presumably). Not sure I agree with that. I would say there are classes of problems where LLMs will generally help and a brief training course (1 week, say) would vastly improve the average (non-LLM-trained) engineer's ability to use it productively.
- codr7 2y agoDepends on your skills, and the more you use them the less you learn, the more dependent you become.
- philipwhiuk 2y agoThe problem is, I don't know you well enough for that to be worth much. My experience has been that it's slightly improved code completion and helped with prototyping.
- Aeolun 2y ago> Executives like the idea of LLMs because it means they can lay you off; they're not going to care about your opinion on it one way or another. Probably, but when the time comes for layoffs the ones that will be the first to go are those that are hiding under a rock, claiming that there is no value to those LLM’s even as they’re being replaced.
- BerislavLopac 2y agoIn my mind, this dilemma is actually very simple: First, what LLMs/GenAI do is automated code generation, plain and simple. We've had code generation for a very long time; heck, even compiling is automated generation of code. What is new with LLM code generation is non-deterministic, unlike traditional code generation tools; like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get. So, as long as you have tools and mechanisms to make that non-determinism irrelevant, using LLMs to write code is not a problem at all. In fact, guess what? Hand-coding is also non-deterministic, so we already have plenty of those in place: automated tests, code reviews etc.