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by suprjami 20 days ago
When doing this, I particularly like that the LLM sometimes gets things wrong.

It forces me to really understand each thing deeply so that I evaluate it properly.

It is like taking an exam where the exam writer is hostile and sneaks in trick questions. You only spot that the question is wrong when you fully reason through the answer.

1 comments

Huh, good point! When a colleague asks me to review their design or otherwise discuss it, I'm always looking for things they might have missed, assumptions they silently made, or corner cases that could come up. I start from the position that there is likely something missing and I need to find out what. Likewise, when I'm looking at suggestions or code or anything else from an AI, I'm assuming it made some mistakes, made some unstated assumptions, or didn't consider some corner cases, and so I'm having to carefully think through what it says to spot the mistake, rather than casually skimming it and going, "LGTM!" If it were too reliable, I might get lazy and not look too hard knowing that it's probably right anyway so there's no point trying too hard to find something. It's the same thing my juniors will sometimes do to me: don't assume I'm right just because I'm experienced - I still make mistakes too! I want to be questioned on anything that might not make sense, because even if it was intentional, the fact that the reason isn't clear is itself a problem to resolve. And I only know so many things - we all have different experiences and a junior can have just as much they can teach me as a senior.