alt Hacker NewsI don't think 'software brain' is required for non-coding tasks. Rather, it requires 'manager brain', the ability to delegate, direct, and review the output. Manager brain is more prevalent than software brain and likely learnable by many knowledge workers who don't yet have it.
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You also need the brain of not giving up after 2/3/10 tries. I don't know what the exact numbers are but if something doesn't work properly after the second or third try a huge percentage of people give up.
You have to recognize that it's a problem to delegate in the first place. One example I love to trot out is, do you have any toilet seats in your life that kinda slide around bit and don't seem securely attached? It's absolutely trivial to fix this, and it's really annoying when it happens, yet with shocking frequency I encounter people who've just been dealing with the annoyance because they didn't process it as something they could solve.
You’ve never tried to train the average admin.
Basic forms can be a challenge. Even things like selecting a dropdown menu or pushing a button can be surprisingly hard.
How do you delegate, direct, and validate results if you have no idea what you're looking at?
This is the same issue many managers of people have for the same reason.
The whole point of click and point (gui) was that one barely had to engage the brain vs using a terminal.
The ideal experience is where one’s resources are able to be allocated such that one can achieve some goal with minimal effort. We are very far away from this ideal with llm’s and absurd amounts of money has already been spent.
I think you still need software brain, because ultimately, this stuff still has limitations driven by software constraints, and having the AI try to explain it to them doesn't necessarily help.
I think we all have had experiences with people treating their computers as magic boxes and not understanding why certain requests simply are not possible to satisfy.