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whatever1 • yesterday at 10:52 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

Whoever claims to have skill in AI is very shortsighted. Whatever skill you thought you had six months ago can now be achieved with a simple six-word prompt in a standard workspace.

I literally just ask a frontier model : "Pull the latest log and root cause the issue.". That's it, 10' later it comes back with a correct answer. Sometimes I might have to prompt a second time to steer.

No skills, agent interconnections, graphs, vector search or whatever else.

The progress is very scary.


Replies

Animats • yesterday at 11:08 PM

> Whoever claims to have skill in AI is very shortsighted. Whatever skill you thought you had six months ago can now be achieved with a simple six-word prompt in a standard workspace.

Apparently. Remember "prompt engineering?" That was the next big job for about 15 minutes.

It takes a lot of tokens to run a multi-agent system, though. AI may hit economic limits. Progress was achieved on hard mathematical problems at a high token cost. More than the operating budgets of some college math departments.

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vanuatu • yesterday at 11:23 PM

the bulk of the skill lies in shoring up the fundamental limitations of llms

they cannot be held accountable - therefore, you need the skill and expertise to verify outputs, or set up a verifier

they have a limit to their context window - therefore, you need the skill of knowing what context is useful and exposing that

they cost money and time to run - therefore, you need the skill of learning what parts can be handed off to code, when you can use a cheaper model, when you tradeoff accuracy vs latency

they are nondeterministic - therefore, you need the skill to set up evals, guardrails, knowing when to reach for the llm vs. code depending on the problem

they are not omniscient - therefore, you need the skill of setting up the processes and infra to supply legible context to the llms

etc etc

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onlyrealcuzzo • yesterday at 10:59 PM

It seems to me as though you're describing a skill...

What would happen if you just screamed: "SAVE ME! EVERYTHING IS BROKEN! I'M STUPID MONKEY!"

I mean, sure, this might not seem like a lot of skill to you, but you at least have a clue what you are doing, and not everyone does.

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