[LPisGood]

I have a friend, smart guy, who is writing web services and “connecting them together” for a large firm; he has absolutely no programming experience.

Talking to him, he told me he couldn’t even reverse a string. He is at once many times more valuable than ever before to his company, but also far more dangerous than ever before.

[CSSer]

This is what fascinates me. I have a friend, also a smart guy, who has made it to the point he’s at by being a kind of solutions expert. He’s an IT guy, basically. He’s very technical but has never claimed to be a software engineer. He’s writing software with Claude now. The other day he sent me a screenshot of some other team at his work asking him to shut off something he made that was brutalizing an API of theirs. I asked him if he had ever heard of a 429 or exponential back offs. He said no. How do you meta-prompt for that without knowledge?

[gruzzlymug]

You can create an agent in Claude with the role of Technical Lead / Architect and have it review your code. That depends on your agent specification. Just have ChatGPT generate that first.

If you get the logs you can feed them in and ask for improvements, that sometimes helps.

[CSSer]

But even then, you have to know to do that. It feels like a bit of a turtles all the way down situation, no?

[zahlman]

He's "smart" but he chooses to be in a business where he's presumptively willfully ignorant of the fundamentals (since he surely should be able to learn to reverse a string if he wanted to learn)? He doesn't have a more lucrative opportunity available? Or does he somehow have a skillset that makes him able to "connect web services together" by prompting AIs in ways that other people (including ones who can reverse strings, etc.) couldn't?

This form of being "smart" is a bit difficult for me to comprehend, I must admit.

[sublinear]

> This form of being "smart" is a bit difficult for me to comprehend, I must admit.

I strongly agree with this. Suddenly with the mass adoption of LLMs there are so many smart, yet naive people out there willing to toe the line. Why these smart people couldn't bring value in a million different other ways is, of course, left unsaid.

They're not even trying to dress up these bullshit stories anymore. In truth it doesn't matter if you believe it. So much buzz is people just talking to themselves out loud.

[LPisGood]

Well that’s not his primary job. It’s an extra task he’s doing at his job. At a non-tech company with small/horrific engineering components, someone in the business who can do any programming (or vibeing) is indistinguishable from magic.