4 ms·

Others are disagreeing with you here, and I do too. The difference is profound, and takes more than a couple of days to get your head around the implications.

Others are disagreeing with you here, and I do too. The difference is profound, and takes more than a couple of days to get your head around the implications. I'd summarise it as: "if you give a computer the same input it always produces the same output, but if you give a model the same input it always produces different output". Add to that the output is often wrong and it can't reliably follow instructions, and the difference is so great it breaks most of your intuitions. The reward working with this piece of unreliable jelly is it can be far smarter than you (think the difference between a man with a shovel and a 20 ton excavator - they can literally find bugs in minutes that would take a human hours or days), and they know far more than you. The engineering challenge is to make this near random machine produce a reliable product. It isn't easy. The hype you see around them is it's trivially easy to get it to produce a feature rich but very unreliable product, as Anthropic demonstrates with their vibe coded claude-cli. I refuse to use it now. Among its other charms, it triggers a BSOD on windows: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/30137 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/30137 (Granted, it's just another Windows bug: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-ca/answers/questions/5814272/wof-sys-bsod-0x139-kernel-security-check-failure-i https://learn.microsoft.com/en-ca/answers/questions/5814272/..., but if you are shipping to Windows you should be working around such bugs.)

intended 6mo ago
> The reward ... is it can be far smarter than you.... and they know far more than you I think this solidified an idea for me. A tool being smarter than me but inconsistent, is useless. I can work with people who are smarter than me, because I can trust them, and I can trust them to own up or be held accountable for screw ups. For a calculator, I can only hold myself accountable. However I cannot hold myself accountable for not knowing something I dont know.
- rstuart4133 6mo ago
  > For a calculator, I can only hold myself accountable. However I cannot hold myself accountable for not knowing something I dont know. I thought I could let this fly through keeper, but the idea keeps bugging me. If the programmer does not vet and understand what the LLM has done, we call it vibe coding. If he takes personal responsibility for every line of code, we call it software engineering. Lots of people use LLMs to vibe code (I do), and lots of people use them as a software engineering aid (I do that too). The choice depends on the quality of code you need to produce. If an engineer is designing an aircraft wing, he would choose the highest grade of materials with known parameters. If he is building a kite for his son, an old newspaper would do in a pinch. Using 7075 Aluminium wouldn't just be overkill, it would mean his son doesn't get to see the fun his dad has building a flying machine in an afternoon. A good engineer understands the properties of every tool at his disposal, and knows when to deploy each.

intended 6mo ago

> The reward ... is it can be far smarter than you.... and they know far more than you I think this solidified an idea for me. A tool being smarter than me but inconsistent, is useless. I can work with people who are smarter than me, because I can trust them, and I can trust them to own up or be held accountable for screw ups. For a calculator, I can only hold myself accountable. However I cannot hold myself accountable for not knowing something I dont know.

rstuart4133 6mo ago
> For a calculator, I can only hold myself accountable. However I cannot hold myself accountable for not knowing something I dont know. I thought I could let this fly through keeper, but the idea keeps bugging me. If the programmer does not vet and understand what the LLM has done, we call it vibe coding. If he takes personal responsibility for every line of code, we call it software engineering. Lots of people use LLMs to vibe code (I do), and lots of people use them as a software engineering aid (I do that too). The choice depends on the quality of code you need to produce. If an engineer is designing an aircraft wing, he would choose the highest grade of materials with known parameters. If he is building a kite for his son, an old newspaper would do in a pinch. Using 7075 Aluminium wouldn't just be overkill, it would mean his son doesn't get to see the fun his dad has building a flying machine in an afternoon. A good engineer understands the properties of every tool at his disposal, and knows when to deploy each.