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patchulelast Saturday at 12:48 PM1 replyview on HN

“knowledgeable friend who you can ask questions”

A friend who will randomly lie and mislead you in ways you can’t detect. Might be better to use ai for stuff like writing tests, summarizing data, and other low level stuff one can effectively supervise and where errors are low impact.

I would not treat current llm based ai models as an expert or a trusted friend but as the exact opposite, an unfriendly fake-expert. Unfriendly fake experts are still extremely useful if they work for free and can be scaled up, so definitely op should use ai, but he should never trust it.


Replies

mattlondonlast Saturday at 3:45 PM

Knowledgeable human friends also make mistakes! They are not infallible experts who never get things wrong.

Both humans and LLMs may know more than you and may have additional perspectives and experiences to draw on. Just like you'd not trust a knowledgeable friend to be omnipotent and 100% correct 100% of the time when you ask for advice, neither would you an AI.

But the point I was trying to make was to not use AI to implement things for you (even tests) as you're not going to learn if the AI is doing the repetition for you. You can supervise yes, but only when you've been there and learnt the ropes already (i.e. when you are already an experienced software engineer and know the details)