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by thecrumb 526 days ago
This would be like asking a carpenter to build you something without a hammer. At this point we need to realize LLM is a tool like everything else. Maybe give them a LLM challenge - how to do X. What is your prompt. Why?
2 comments

I disagree with the carpenter-hammer analogy here pretty strongly.

We're basically trying to figure out if they can code generally, or if somehow they've skated by in their last positions without the fundamental skills of programming.

I'm not sure how, but we've come across a number of programmers from F1000 companies that can't seem to hit some of the basics in their chosen language.

LLMs have their place as a tool, but before we empower them with the latest and greatest programming assistance, we want to make sure that they have the skills to do things like critically interpret the output of Copilot, etc.

We want to make sure we're that the people we hire possess the skills they claim, and that they won't serve as a very-slow wrapper for the LLM tools we already pay for.

LLM's are absolutely not a hammer. LLM's are an Ikea shelf in a box. You're not a carpenter because you can assemble one.

We'll leave aside the argument of whether or not a carpenter would rather buy a cheap Ikea shelf than build one in some situations, but it's also applicable to this analogy.