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by o11c 219 days ago
If people can't make a good (PR, story, or whatever) without AI, they certainly can't do it with AI, because using the AI is strictly more difficult - it requires all the original skill, plus the skill to work around the AI's quirks.

This is arguably isomorphic to Kernighan's Law:

> Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

1 comments

Are you sure about that? Can you make the opposite case and steel-man it? Until you can, a stupid LLM will be smarter than you are.

I can write a PR now. I can code now. Probably not as good as you can, but before LLMs I couldn't. I tried for decades learning to code. My brain is a Top-down network, I can see the big picture very quickly, but I cannot maintain focus to build bottom-up. Now I don't have to. I use LLMs to set the goal, to examine all corner cases, to define the milestones, to predict the wrong turns, to write a human-readable spec, to break it down to units of test code, to write the blue-prints of units of code. I can test them, and debug them with LLMs. The end result can be sub-optimal, but it runs, it does what I want, is well documented, and is maintainable. Before LLMs I couldn't do any of that. In doing all this, I get better at the bottom-up thing, just by trying.

We are a spectrum of people. Do not assume the world is like you.

It seems either your LLM is 10x better than anything I've ever used or your standards are 10x lower.