alt Hacker NewsThank you for answering. I agree with you that, if used well, LLMs can be useful tools and increase efficiency. Unfortunately, what I am increasingly seeing is an increase in confidence but no increase in knowledge or understanding. I hope this is just a side-effect of the hype and corresponding bubble and not the future trajectory of knowledge work.
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Foundational knowledge can be pretty far upstream of functional knowledge.
Whether you can't describe the analog circuits that correspond to the opcodes of the major mobile architectures running the platform of the app you're designing a UI for, or you couldn't have built any of the services you're hosting on from scratch, no one is going to be disappointed.
There are more people making more money off whatever we're currently calling making computers do things than ever before in history. The rest is largely business as usual.
But it does increase knowledge and understanding.
Not in a deep deep level like "this is the optimal way to manage low level memory access in an Android application" but on a higher level of "It's possible to do a custom Android app in a week that's of decent quality for a small userbase".
Every piece of software doesn't need to be targeted for billion user hockey stick growth and an IPO as a target. It's perfectly fine to build something that's just right for 10 or 20 people. Or just for your immediate family.
For example I have a quiz tool I built with LLM assistance for Christmas that mine and my siblings kids use every December, they get clues appropriate for their level and rewards when they solve the daily task.
It's fine, has custom handling for every user etc. But also something I'd never bothered to build by hand from scratch nor something I'd pay someone to build for me. It was a fun "hmm, I wonder if..." project I started a few years ago on a late evening in November.