| > Do you think this is actually faster than reading the docs? It depends on your goals, I guess. Do I really need to read the whole D3.js docs just to transform a csv into a pretty map? I'm not arguing against the docs, I genuinely think that by reading the D3.js docs I would become a better professional. But what is the ROI for this effort ? Nowadays learning about a topic is a choice we can make, we can create things that solve real problems without the need to fully understand the solution. This wasn't feasible a couple years back. And choosing 'not to learn' too many times is a great recipe for disaster, so I understand why a lot of people are worried about giving this option to people. Besides that the "always read the docs" theory makes an assumption that isn't always true. This assumes you know what are you looking for and where you can find it. When I was younger I was assigned to a task that required me to put a new feature in a jenga tower of custom bash scripts and I've found a bug that completely stumped me, it took me an entire week to figure out I was missing some quotes around $@ when passing arguments from one script to the next. I've spent several hours trowing random combinations of keywords to try finding something relevant to my problem. Now I know this is a bash-related problem, but at the time this wasn't clear. It might have been something in my logic, or something to do with not being an TTY, or something to do with the version of the tools I was using.... Having a LLM would have saved a week of frustration because I could just vaguely describe my problem and ask questions about my issue to point me to right direction faster. > I never trust the response (it's commonly at best oversimplified/misleading but often wrong) This reminds me of my middle school. When I was there technology and especially Wikipedia was just starting to get popular and almost every week some teacher would lecture us about the dangers of these new technologies and how you should never trust anything on the internet. As time passed the quality of Wikipedia content increased, but this idea of never blindly trusting something you found on the internet really stuck with me. And now LLMs are just another thing on the internet you should never blindly trust for me. Maybe that is part of the reason why I don't get too angry when the LLM tell me something that is wrong. > I'm using LLMs as a fuzzy database That is a really good way of putting it. And I agree this is a great use-case for LMMs. But I think we still have a lot to learn about how to effectively use LLMs. I just hope people don't get too caught up in all the marketing surrounding this AI hype cycle we are living right now. |
When in the "move fast and break things" phase, yeah, LLMs can be useful. But do you ever move out to clear the tech debt or do you just always break things and leave a mess behind?
The issue is that it all depends. If something doesn't matter, then yeah, who fucking cares how inefficient or broken it is. But if it does, it's probably better to go the slow way because that knowledge will compound and be important later. You are going to miss lessons. Maybe you don't need them, maybe you don't need them now. It depends and is hard so say. But I would say that for juniors, it is bad to become reliant upon LLMs.
It's dangerous in exactly the same way as having a solution manual. They can be quite useful and make you learn a lot faster. OR they can completely rob you of the learning experience. It all depends how you use it, right? And for what purpose. That's the point I'm trying to get across.
This is a common issue, and one I faced too (though not that long). But it also led to more understanding. I learned a lot more about the quotes and variable passing. If someone had just given me the answer, I wouldn't have gotten the rest. Don't undermine the utility of second order effects.