alt Hacker NewsMy work is more data science related, but remember those same struggles where I spent hours, days, weeks, months, even years crashing my head against a problem. A lot of daily hours researching, talking to colleagues, implementing tangential papers that lead to nothing. Most of the time I arrived to a satisfactory solution, but others just have to gave up.
Maybe because I experienced all those struggles I'm confident to delegate a relevant portion of my work to some LLM, being able to validate the results, knowing what to ask and detect easily when something was bad implemented or where I gave ambiguous instructions.
The catch is that I'm starting to do things where I haven't experienced those struggles in prior times, for example, web app development for my data work. I don't feel confident that I'm doing a good work, I'm just vibing, don't know the implications of some decisions. It doesn't makes me feel comfortable shipping things I don't really understand, but also is nice to be able to do things that previously required years of studying and practice.
We are on strange times.
Replies
> I'm just vibing, don't know the implications of some decisions.
I think the blast radius of the surface area of what we don't know is correlated to the determinism around those decisions. I don't care about how compilers these days pack data structures or arrange the assembler to avoid pipeline stalls, unless the domain demands I must really care about that level of performance. When we get to that maturity level with the decisions we make upon LLM outputs, then this concern dissipates. It is early days yet. Even debugging with LLM's is now materially improving year-over-year, one of my earlier concerns.
> The catch is that I'm starting to do things where I haven't experienced those struggles in prior times, for example, web app development for my data work. I don't feel confident that I'm doing a good work, I'm just vibing, don't know the implications of some decisions
The great part about LLMs is that you can chat with them about the design, ask them to compare it best practices, come up with a different approach etc.
> We are on strange times.
Agreed!