alt Hacker NewsThe difference is that humans can actively seek to acquire the necessary context by themselves. They don't have to passively sit there and wait for someone else to do the tedious work of feeding them all necessary context upfront. And we value humans who are able to proactively do that seeking by themselves, until they are satisfied that they can do a good job.
> The difference is that humans can actively seek to acquire the necessary context by themselves
These days, so can LLM systems. The tool calling pattern got really good in the last six months, and one of the most common uses of that is to let LLMs search for information they need to add to their context.
o3 and o4-mini and Claude 4 all do this with web search in their user-facing apps and it's extremely effective.
The same patterns is increasingly showing up in coding agents, giving them the ability to search for relevant files or even pull in official document documentation for libraries.