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by patrick451 450 days ago
Previous layers of abstraction were largely reliable and deterministic. Compilers don't just randomly generate assembly. Yes, all abstractions leak, but most of them just drip, while whatever "abstraction" AI provides leaks like a sieve. It would be like if CDK just created or deleted random resources 50% of the time.
1 comments

This is a massively important point. My dad took a programming course back in the day and had to use punchcards. High-level languages make code easier to understand and debug compared to gazing at a stack of "Do not fold, spindle or mutilate." LLMs are the opposite. If you only learn how to use LLMs, you are not going to be able to understand what's happening or why things aren't working.

I've found LLMs making inexplicable mistakes when writing statistical code, but the code will still run and return a confident result. If you can't look at the code, you won't see, e.g., your hourly time series being aggregated on a daily basis.