Comment by johnmaguire
5 days ago
I don't totally understand the parallel you're drawing here. As a manager, I assume you're training more junior (in terms of their career or the company) engineers up so they can perform more autonomously in the future.
But you're not training LLMs as you use them really - do you mean that it's best to develop your own skill using LLMs in an area you already understand well?
I'm finding it a bit hard to square your comment about it being exhausting to catherd the LLM with it being a force multiplier.
No I'm talking about my own skills. How I onboard, structure 1on1s, run meetings, create and reuse certain processes, manage documentation (a form of org memory), check in on status, devise metrics and other indicators of system health. All of these compound and provide leverage even if the person leaves and a new one enters.the 30th person I onboarded and managed was orders of magnitude easier (for both of us) than the first.
With LLMs the better I get at the scaffolding and prompting, the less it feels like catherding (so far at least). Hence the comparison.
Great point.
Humans really like to anthropomorphize things. Loud rumbles in the clouds? There must be a dude on top of a mountain somewhere who's in charge of it. Impressed by that tree? It must have a spirit that's like our spirits.
I think a lot of the reason LLMs are enjoying such a huge hype wave is that they invite that sort of anthropomorphization. It can be really hard to think about them in terms of what they actually are, because both our head-meat and our culture has so much support for casting things as other people.