alt Hacker NewsWhat's easier to use as inspiration for coming up with a list of requirements?:
1. A blank sheet of paper
2. A one-shotted POC in the span of an hour with $4 of tokens that is clearly wrong in 20 different ways?
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> 2. A one-shotted POC in the span of an hour with $4 of tokens that is clearly wrong in 20 different ways?
A meeting between all the stakeholders to agree on requirements easily runs $1,000/hour. Taking your $4 functional PoC into that meeting is going to save so much time...
Sure, the concept of a _Vomit Draft_ is not new, but the ability to come up with one quickly is.
It plays into the generalisation that people aren't good about saying what is the right way to do something, but much more open to saying what something is doing the wrong way.
In a previous job we used to do prototypes in languages like Perl because we couldn't ship them and knocking something non-production ready was easy. We were able to quickly come up with the PoC, iterate on it, and then plan and write the whole thing in $LANGUAGE_OF_CHOICE.
Obviously "a blank sheet of paper" here is meaning thinking about the problem deeply. I'm surprised how dismissive people are to using brainpower whatsoever. I get that juxtaposing paper to LLMs might have triggered some people though.
As a counterpoint, bringing a one-shotted POC without thought may actually do have a shock and awe sort of effect, dazzling the stakeholders to go down the wrong path since the AI prototype was so easy.
The latter, clearly? It is far more valuable to have a (badly) working system you can prod and probe than work from fantasy.
People are much better than saying what they don’t like than what they do.
A one-shotted POC can also put you straight into the very wrong direction, with a very high degree of certainty.
I also prefer doing a POC, but it's not without risk, especially if your stakeholders are just a bit too eager. Another problem I've seen is that a POC can hide complexity, so a lot of weight is on you as the author to do the due diligence before and bring that along.
What's the most soul crushing?
"Oh no problem, I'll just run it again telling the LLM to not do those 20 things, and then we'll have the right answer." /s-mostly
> 2. A one-shotted POC in the span of an hour with $4 of tokens that is clearly wrong in 20 different ways?
Definitely this. I've had plenty of useless meetings with no helpful outcomes that lasted an hour with 6 or more people in them, and a few of them will have had more than $4 spent on snacks, let alone everyone's wages.
That said, poor communication will always get you no matter what: had one day spent going back and forth with a client, they kept saying they wanted a button "wider" each time around, I ended up making it full screen width and they still said "wider", asked them to draw a picture and they finally said "wider vertically". That may or may not have been faster with an LLM, depending on if the LLM ever thought to ask the client to draw what they meant, but fundamentally would have been exactly the same problem.