alt Hacker NewsAn LLM is a tool and its just as mad as slide rules, calculators and PCs (I've seen them all although slide rules were being phased out in my youth)
Coding via prompt is simply a new form of coding.
Remember that high level programming languages are "merely" a sop for us humans to avoid low level languages. The idea is that you will be more productive with say Python than you would with ASM or twiddling electrical switches that correspond to register inputs.
A purist might note that using Python is not sufficiently close to the bare metal to be really productive.
My recommendation would be to encourage the tutor to ask the student how they use the LLM and to school them in effective use strategies - that will involve problem definition and formulation and then an iterative effort to solve the problem. It will obviously involve how to spot and deal with hallucinations. They'll need to start discovering model quality for differing tasks and all sorts of things that look like sci-fi to me 10 years ago.
I think we are at, for LLMs, the "calculator on digital wrist watch" stage that we had in the mid '80s before the really decent scientific calculators rocked up. Those calculators are largely still what you get nowadays too and I suspect that LLMs will settle into a similar role.
They will be great tools when used appropriately but they will not run the world or if they do, not for very long - bye!
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But, we as humans still have a need to understand the outputs of AI. We can't delegate this understanding task to AI because then we wouldn't understand AI and thus we could not CONTROL what the AI is doing, optimize its behavior so it maximizes our benefit.
Therefore, I still see a need for highlevel and even higher level languages, but ones which are easy for humans to understand. AI can help of course but challenge is how can we unambiguously communicate with machines, and express our ideas concisely and understandably for both us and for the machines.
> My recommendation would be to encourage the tutor to ask the student how they use the LLM and to school them in effective use strategies
It's obviously not quite the same as programming, but my English professor assigned an essay a few weeks ago where we had to ask ChatGPT a question and then analyze its response, check its sources, and try to spot hallucinations. It was worth about 5% of our overall grade. I thought that it was a fascinating exercise in teaching responsible LLM use.
> My recommendation would be to encourage the tutor to ask the student how they use the LLM and to school them in effective use strategies
This reminds me of folks teaching their kids Java ten years ago.
You’re teaching a tool. Versus general tool use.
> Those calculators are largely still what you get nowadays too and I suspect that LLMs will settle into a similar role
If correct, the child will be competent in the new world. If not, they will have wasted time developing general intelligence.
This doesn’t strike me as a good strategy for anything other than time-consuming babysitting.
I agree they are great tools, but they will increasingly do more of the work and will rapidly do almost all work a software engineer currently does, I'd say within 5 years with near certainty but possibly within 1-2
Calculators dont make you forget math.
> Coding via prompt is simply a new form of coding.
No, it isn't. "Write me a parser for language X" is like pressing a button on a photocopier. The LLM steals content from open source creators.
Now the desperate capital starved VC companies can downvote this one too, but be aware that no one outside of this site believes the illusion any longer.
> Remember that high level programming languages are "merely" a sop for us humans to avoid low level languages.
High-level languages are deterministic and reliable, making it possible for developers to be confident that their high-level code is correct. LLMs are anything but deterministic and reliable.