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I am beginning to love working like this. Plan a design for code. Explain to the LLM the steps to arrive to a solution. Work on reading, understanding, fixing,

I am beginning to love working like this. Plan a design for code. Explain to the LLM the steps to arrive to a solution. Work on reading, understanding, fixing, planing, ect. while the LLM is working on the next section of code. We are working in parallel. Think of it like being a cook in a restaurant. The order comes in. The cook plans the steps to complete the task of preparing all the elements for a dish. The cook sears the steak and puts it in the broiler. The cook doesn't stop and wait for the steak to finish before continuing. Rather the cook works on other problems and tasks before returning to observe the steak. If the steak isn't finished the cook will return it to the broiler for more cooking. Otherwise the cook will finish the process of plating the steak with sides and garnishes. The LLM is like the oven, a tool. Maybe grating cheese with a food processor is a better analogy. You could grate the cheese by hand or put the cheese into the food processor port in order to clean up, grab other items from the refrigerator, plan the steps for the next food item to prepare. This is the better analogy because grating cheese could be done by hand and maybe does have a better quality but if it is going into a sauce the grain quality doesn't matter so several minutes are saved by using a food processor which frees up the cook's time while working. Professional cooks multitask using tools in parallel. Maybe coding will move away from being a linear task writing one line of code at a time.

collingreen 1y ago
I like your take and the metaphors are good at helping demonstrate by example. One caveat I wonder about is how this kind of constant context switching combines with the need to think deeply (and defensively with non humans). My gut says I'd struggle at also being the brain at the end of the day instead of just the director/conductor. I've actively paired with multiple people at once before because of a time crunch (and with a really solid team). It was, to this day, the most fun AND productive "I" have ever been and what you're pitching aligns somewhat with that. HOWEVER, the two people who were driving the keyboards were substantially better engineers than me (and faster thinkers) so the burden of "is this right" was not on me in the way it is when using LLMs. I don't have any answers here - I see the vision you're pitching and it's a very very powerful one I hope is or becomes possible for me without it just becoming a way to burn out faster by being responsible for the deep understanding without the time to grok it.
- dataviz1000 1y ago
  > I've actively paired with multiple people at once That was my favorite part of being a professional cook, working closely on a team. Humans are social animals who haven't -- including how our brains are wired -- changed much physiologically in the past 25,000 years. Smart people today are not much smarter than smart people in Greece 3,000 years ago, except for the sample size of 8B people being larger. We are wired to work in groups like hunters taking down a wooly mammoth.[0] [0] https://sc.edu/uofsc/images/feature_story_images/2023/feature_06_hunting_mammoth_2_full.jpg https://sc.edu/uofsc/images/feature_story_images/2023/featur...
  - pineaux 1y ago
    I have always found this idea of not being smarter somewhat baffling. Education makes people smarter does it not? At least that is one of the claims it makes. Do you mean that a baby hunter gatherer from 25000 years ago would be on average just as capable of learning stuff when integrated into society compared to someone born nowadays? For human beings 25.000 years is something like 1000 generations. There will be subtle vgenetic variations and evolutions on that scale of generations. But the real gains in "smartness" will be on a societal level. Remember: humans without society are not very different from "dumber" animals like apes and dogs. You can see this very well with the cases of heavy neglect. Feral children are very animal-like and quite incapable of learning very effective...
    - fragmede 1y ago
      there's intelligence and there's wisdom. I may know how, eg Docker works and an ancient Greek man may not, but I can't remember a 12 digit number I've only seen once, or multiply two three digit numbers in my head without difficulty.
      - gf000 1y ago
        I mean, how docker works (which is mostly a human construct with its own peculiarities) is not what I would use as an example - this is more like a board game that has its own rules and you just learnt them. Ancient people had their own "games" with rulesets. It's not a "fundamental truth". Societal smartness might be something like an average student knowing that we are made from cells, some germ theory over bodily fluid inbalances causing diseases, etc, very crude understanding of more elements of physics (electronics). Though unfortunately intellectualism is on a fall, and people come out dumber and dumber from schools all over the world.

collingreen 1y ago

I like your take and the metaphors are good at helping demonstrate by example. One caveat I wonder about is how this kind of constant context switching combines with the need to think deeply (and defensively with non humans). My gut says I'd struggle at also being the brain at the end of the day instead of just the director/conductor. I've actively paired with multiple people at once before because of a time crunch (and with a really solid team). It was, to this day, the most fun AND productive "I" have ever been and what you're pitching aligns somewhat with that. HOWEVER, the two people who were driving the keyboards were substantially better engineers than me (and faster thinkers) so the burden of "is this right" was not on me in the way it is when using LLMs. I don't have any answers here - I see the vision you're pitching and it's a very very powerful one I hope is or becomes possible for me without it just becoming a way to burn out faster by being responsible for the deep understanding without the time to grok it.

dataviz1000 1y ago
> I've actively paired with multiple people at once That was my favorite part of being a professional cook, working closely on a team. Humans are social animals who haven't -- including how our brains are wired -- changed much physiologically in the past 25,000 years. Smart people today are not much smarter than smart people in Greece 3,000 years ago, except for the sample size of 8B people being larger. We are wired to work in groups like hunters taking down a wooly mammoth.[0] [0] https://sc.edu/uofsc/images/feature_story_images/2023/feature_06_hunting_mammoth_2_full.jpg https://sc.edu/uofsc/images/feature_story_images/2023/featur...
- pineaux 1y ago
  I have always found this idea of not being smarter somewhat baffling. Education makes people smarter does it not? At least that is one of the claims it makes. Do you mean that a baby hunter gatherer from 25000 years ago would be on average just as capable of learning stuff when integrated into society compared to someone born nowadays? For human beings 25.000 years is something like 1000 generations. There will be subtle vgenetic variations and evolutions on that scale of generations. But the real gains in "smartness" will be on a societal level. Remember: humans without society are not very different from "dumber" animals like apes and dogs. You can see this very well with the cases of heavy neglect. Feral children are very animal-like and quite incapable of learning very effective...
  - fragmede 1y ago
    there's intelligence and there's wisdom. I may know how, eg Docker works and an ancient Greek man may not, but I can't remember a 12 digit number I've only seen once, or multiply two three digit numbers in my head without difficulty.
    - gf000 1y ago
      I mean, how docker works (which is mostly a human construct with its own peculiarities) is not what I would use as an example - this is more like a board game that has its own rules and you just learnt them. Ancient people had their own "games" with rulesets. It's not a "fundamental truth". Societal smartness might be something like an average student knowing that we are made from cells, some germ theory over bodily fluid inbalances causing diseases, etc, very crude understanding of more elements of physics (electronics). Though unfortunately intellectualism is on a fall, and people come out dumber and dumber from schools all over the world.