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The wife finishing your sentences is an interesting analogy... My wife and I are usually on the same page about things, so for many topics we can use short-han

The wife finishing your sentences is an interesting analogy... My wife and I are usually on the same page about things, so for many topics we can use short-hand or otherwise cut discussions short. It's like in the movie _Hackers_: "It's in the place I put that thing that time." We can say just enough between us that we verify we have a shared state, and if we aren't sure we can verify and adjust. With an LLM, if what I'm starting to say gives it a direction on where I'm going, I'd like to see what it thinks, so if it's largely or entirely right I can just continue on. For example, I just asked ChatGPT o3-mini to complete the code "def download_uri_to_file(", and it came up with the entire function including type annotations, a very reasonable docstring, error handling, and streaming download. In fact, reviewing the code I'm sure it's better than I would have written the first pass through (I probably wouldn't have done the error handling or the streaming (unless I knew up front that I was going to be downloading huge files).

aidenn0 2y ago
> The wife finishing your sentences is an interesting analogy... My wife and I are usually on the same page about things, so for many topics we can use short-hand or otherwise cut discussions short. My wife and I are just too different for this to happen. For the first 10 years or so we had the opposite happen a lot (multiple times a day for the first few years), where we thought we were on the same page, but had actually under-communicated. It still happens occasionally, but now we mostly overcommunicate about anything of any importance. Our kids learned pretty quickly that if one parent was helping them with their homework, but had to leave to do something else, that asking the other parent for help was going to confuse them more, since we come at any given problem from a completely different direction.
- linsomniac 2y ago
  Sure, it's not a given that a conversation with a spouse will be at a "we can complete each-others sentences" level every time, or even most of the time. My wife and I are pretty lucky in that regard. And to bring it full circle, the LLMs aren't going to know where you're going in all cases. I've had REALLY poor luck getting LLMs (admittedly, a year ago) to help me with Python Textual UIs. I don't understand Textual enough, and they both don't seem to understand it well enough, and I think they also have a better understanding of archaic use of Textual (a fast moving target I get the impression). My wife and I literally just had a conversation of shared knowledge: "I want to get back into the habit of doing more exercise. Those things like Pikmin and that other thing." "Yeah, I know what you mean." "You know what I'm talking about?" "Yeah, but I can't remember the name." "You know the one?" "Yeah, the insurance exercise incentive one, something-go or something." "Yeah, that's the one."

aidenn0 2y ago

> The wife finishing your sentences is an interesting analogy... My wife and I are usually on the same page about things, so for many topics we can use short-hand or otherwise cut discussions short. My wife and I are just too different for this to happen. For the first 10 years or so we had the opposite happen a lot (multiple times a day for the first few years), where we thought we were on the same page, but had actually under-communicated. It still happens occasionally, but now we mostly overcommunicate about anything of any importance. Our kids learned pretty quickly that if one parent was helping them with their homework, but had to leave to do something else, that asking the other parent for help was going to confuse them more, since we come at any given problem from a completely different direction.

linsomniac 2y ago
Sure, it's not a given that a conversation with a spouse will be at a "we can complete each-others sentences" level every time, or even most of the time. My wife and I are pretty lucky in that regard. And to bring it full circle, the LLMs aren't going to know where you're going in all cases. I've had REALLY poor luck getting LLMs (admittedly, a year ago) to help me with Python Textual UIs. I don't understand Textual enough, and they both don't seem to understand it well enough, and I think they also have a better understanding of archaic use of Textual (a fast moving target I get the impression). My wife and I literally just had a conversation of shared knowledge: "I want to get back into the habit of doing more exercise. Those things like Pikmin and that other thing." "Yeah, I know what you mean." "You know what I'm talking about?" "Yeah, but I can't remember the name." "You know the one?" "Yeah, the insurance exercise incentive one, something-go or something." "Yeah, that's the one."