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by oytis 351 days ago
OK, so we are having two classes of problems here - ones worth solving unreliably, and ones that are better solved without LLMs. Doesn't sound like a next level of abstraction to me
2 comments

The story of programming is not largely one of humans striving to be more reliable when programming but putting up better defenses against our own inherent unreliabilities.

When I watch juniors struggle they seem to think that it's because they dont think hard enough whereas it's usually because they didnt build enough infrastructure that would prevent them from needing to think too hard.

As it happens, when it comes to programming, LLM unreliabilities seem to align quite closely with ours so the same guardrails that protect against human programmers' tendencies to fuck up (mostly tests and types) work pretty well for LLMs too.

I was thinking more along this line: you can solve unreliably 100% of the problem with LLMs, or solve reliably only 80% of the problem.

So you trade reliability to get to that extra 20% of hard cases.