Comment by Wowfunhappy
14 days ago
Sometimes you hit a wall where something is simply outside of the LLM's ability to handle, and it's best to give up and do it yourself. Knowing when to give up may be the hardest part of coding with LLMs.
Notably, these walls are never where I expect them to be—despite my best efforts, I can't find any sort of pattern. LLMs can find really tricky bugs and get completely stuck on relatively simple ones.
Doing it yourself is how you build and maintain the muscles to do it yourself. If you only do it yourself when the LLM fails, how will you maintain those muscles?
I agree, and I can actively feel myself slipping (and perhaps more critically, not learning new skills I would otherwise have been forced to learn). It's a big problem, but somewhat orthogonal to "what is the quickest way to solve the task currently in front of me."
> but somewhat orthogonal to "what is the quickest way to solve the task currently in front of me."
That depends on if you ignore the future. You are never just solving the problem in front of you; you should always act in a way that propagates positivity forward in time.
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Which needs to be balanced with "How do I maintain my ability to keep solving tasks quickly?"
The thing i struggle with is I feel like it’s hard to lock into which skill to learn properly. Which so much changing so quickly and it becoming easy to learn things superficially.
By moving up a level in the abstraction layer similar to moving from Assembly to C++ to Python (to LLM). There’s speed in delegation (and checking as beneficial).
Moving up abstraction layers really only succeeds with a solid working knowledge of the lower layers. Otherwise, you're just flying blind, operating on faith. A common source of bugs is precisely a result of developers failing to understand the limits of the abstractions they are using.
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If the LLM is able to handle it why do you need to maintain those specific skills?
Should we not teach kids math because calculators can handle it?
Practically, though, how would someone become good at just the skills LLMs don't do well? Much of this discussion is about how that's difficult to predict, but even if you were a reliable judge of what sort of coding tasks LLMs would fail at, I'm not sure it's possible to only be good at that without being competent at it all.
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Sure, I agree with the "levels of automation" thought process. But I'm basically experiencing this from the start.
If at the first step I'm already dealing with a robot in the weeds, I will have to spend time getting it out of the weeds, all for uncertain results afterwards.
Now sometimes things are hard and tricky, and you might still save time... but just on an emotional level, it's unsatisfying