Comment by teaearlgraycold
6 days ago
The issue is we’re too early in the process to even have a solid education program for using LLMs. I use them all the time and continue to struggle finding an approach that works well. It’s easy to use them for documentation look up. Or filling in boilerplate. Sometimes they nail a transformation/translation task, other times they’re more trouble than they’re worth.
We need to understand what kind of guard rails to put these models on for optimal results.
” we’re too early in the process to even have a solid education program for using LLMs”
We don’t even have a solid education program for software engineering - possibly for the same reason.
The industry loves to run on the bleeding edge, rather than just think for a minute :)
when you stop to think, your fifteen (...thousand) competitors will all attempt a different version of the thing you're thinking about and one of them will be the about the thing you'll come up with, except it'll be built.
it might be ok since what you were thinking about is probably not a good idea in the first place for various reasons, but once in a while stars align to produce the unicorn, which you want to be if you're thinking about building something.
caveat: maybe you just want to build in a niche, it's fine to think hard in such places. usually.
Fwiw a legion of wishfull app developers is not ”the industry”. It’s fine for individuals to move fast.
Institution scale lack of deep thinking is the main issue.
> We don’t even have a solid education program for software engineering - possibly for the same reason.
There's an entire field called computer science. ACM provides curricular recommendations that it updates every few years. People spend years learning it. The same can't be said about the field of, prompting.
But nobody seems to trust any formally specified education, hence practices like whiteboarding as part of job interviews.
How do we know a software engineer is competent? We can’t tell, and damned if we trust that msc he holds.
Computer science, while fundamental, is very little of help in the emergent large scale problems which ”software engineering” tries to tackle.
The key problem is converting capital investment to a working software with given requirements and this is quite unpredictable.
We don’t know how to effectively train software engineers so that software projects would be predictable.
We don’t know how to train software engineers so that employers would trust their degrees as a strong signal of competence.
If there is a university program that, for example FAANGM (or what ever letters forms the pinnacle of markets) companies respect as a clear signal of obvious competence as a software engineer I would like to know what that is.
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