Comment by BoorishBears
6 days ago
It will, or it might? Because if every time you use an LLM is misinterprets your input as something easier to solve, you might want to brush up on the fundamentals of the tool
(I see some people are quite upset with the idea of having to mean what you say, but that's something that serves you well when interacting with people, LLMs, and even when programming computers.)
Might, of course. And in my experience it's what happens most times I ask a LLM to do something I can't trivially do myself.
Well everyone's experience is different, but that's been a pretty atypical failure mode in my experience.
That being said, I don't primarily lean on LLMs for things I have no clue how to do, and I don't think I'd recommend that as the primary use case either at this point. As the article points out, LLMs are pretty useful for doing tedious things you know how to do.
Add up enough "trivial" tasks and they can take up a non-trivial amount of energy. An LLM can help reduce some of the energy zapped so you can get to the harder, more important, parts of the code.
I also do my best to communicate clearly with LLMs: like I use words that mean what I intend to convey, not words that mean the opposite.
I use words that convey very clearly what I mean, such as "don't invent a function that doesn't exist in your next response" when asking what function a value is coming from. It says it understands, then proceeds to do what I specifically asked it not to do anyway.
The fact that you're responding to someone who found AI non-useful with "you must be using words that are the opposite of what you really mean" makes your rebuttal come off as a little biased. Do you really think the chances of "they're playing opposite day" are higher than the chances of the tool not working well?
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I find this very very much depends on the model and instructions you give the llm. Also you can use other instructions to check the output and have it try again. Definitely with larger codebases it struggles but the power is there.
My favorite instruction is using component A as an example make component B