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by PartiallyTyped 1285 days ago
Today I built the SSO flow for an application at work, and I learned a lot significantly faster than I could by just searching because it was guided. The generated code had issues, but it felt a lot like rustlings [1]. At many points I felt that my solution and approach was akin to doing gradient descent, with ChatGPT giving me the direction and me doing backtracking to avoid overshooting (glossing what it missed).

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings
1 comments
simonw 1285 days ago
This is something I find really interesting about it: I feel like if you have an intermediate-to-expert level of knowledge it can absolutely amplify that, and make you massively more productive.

The open question for me is how much it can benefit people with a novice level of understanding - that's one of the reasons I'm exploring Rust with Advent of Code using it.

I have 20+ years of non-Rust programming experience though, so I have no idea how well this would work for someone learning to program for the first time. I'd be fascinating to see how well it works (or doesn't) for complete programming newcomers.

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PartiallyTyped 1285 days ago
I recently stumbled on this video [1], where the host and an expert used diffusion models to generate art, had viewers blindly rank them. The tl:dw is that at the hands of an expert, it can be a massive productivity boost, while at the hands of a newbie, it reduces the skill floor.

I think that is very similar to what we are observing, but while it drops the skill floor a bit, meaning that it's easy to make stuff, it also acts as a multiplier for rate of improvement, where people with pre-existing knowledge can quickly adapt to a particular domain by probing further. The pre-existing knowledge serves as the backbone on which new info is added and filled in. Funnily enough this is the same idea as pretraining a model e.g. through self-supervision, hah!

> A skill floor is the counterpart to a skill ceiling. A skill ceiling is the level of play that’s possible with training and mastery. A skill floor is a way of describing how difficult it is to begin the process of mastery. [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiJeB2NJy1A

[2] https://esportsedition.com/general/skill-ceiling-skill-floor...

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