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by hashmap
1 day ago
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> I'd be surprised if the approach is really something novel at this point. < this is a very common reaction to people doing things with llms and i think the effects of it can be somewhat insidious. you constantly see people out there vibing their way to something that has already been discovered somewhere else, but they didn't know that and in many cases wouldn't have known how to find that thing even if they did. the framing of "the llm tricked you into thinking you discovered something" while technically true in many cases, very strangely casts the positive outcome of a person being linked in a very engaged manner to something they wouldn't otherwise know or found out into something to be looked down on, and sort of just discourages people from trying stuff themselves that wouldn't be possible for them without something like an agent. it's okay if someone else already found the thing. for areas like science and research, it's actually a good thing if something you did repeated the work of someone else. it validates the original piece of work, and it tells you the things you were trying were on the right track to begin with. |
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They have to be useful, otherwise nobody comes back, and used, not just a starting point that can be bypassed after doing it a couple of time. Instead of pointing out to what exists, basically what a search engine does, it "helps" the user by building. It also gives an amazing sense of agency and power, you "do" get something that seems to come out of nothing, conveniently removing provenance and thus make the user feel quite good about the process.
This is especially poignant to me given this anecdote from a friend I shared just days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48457842 showcasing how we wrote a Wacom driver, on his own, without being a developer, thanks to Claude, and how he even potentially helped others by sharing back what he "built" only for someone to suggest an already existing project https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48459366 .