Comment by o11c
4 days ago
I'm just waiting for the hype-cycle to end. AI might revolutionize some industry (probably natural-language-adjacent), but not ours. COBOL has already been attempted, and far more competently (and with less energy cost).
If people can seriously have an AI do 50% of their work, that's usually a confession that they weren't actually doing real work in the first place. Or, at least, they lacked the basic competence with tools that that any university sophomore should have.
Sometimes, however, it is instead a confession "I previously wasn't allowed to copy the preexisting solutions, but thanks to the magic of copyright laundering, now I can!"
> If people can seriously have an AI do 50% of their work, that's usually a confession that they weren't actually doing real work in the first place. Or, at least, they lacked the basic competence with tools that that any university sophomore should have.
Strongly agree here. I am extremely skeptical of anyone reporting this kind of productivity gain.
I think of LLMs as essentially translators - taking natural language and translating it into something else. It works great with writing HTML for example. The more declarative and high-level the language is, the better it does. Which makes intuitive sense, the closer the output is to the input the better it does imo.
So generally the people getting the most use out of LLMs are people who are using these higher levels of abstractions. And I imagine we will be building more abstractions like HTML to get more use out of it.