Comment by Kerrick
9 hours ago
For me the speed-up has not been in doing things I was already an expert at doing quickly with high quality. It has been in skipping the learning curve for adjacent things.
9 hours ago
For me the speed-up has not been in doing things I was already an expert at doing quickly with high quality. It has been in skipping the learning curve for adjacent things.
Does it make the curve easier or do you skip learning it entirely and just trust the LLM? I wouldn't do the latter.
So far I've skipped learning it entirely. For things I want to learn, I learn the old school way--maybe with an LLM as an unreliable thesaurus and/or second search engine (where I distrust its output, but read its links). For things I want to just get done, I use an LLM. It's something close to blind trust, but not completely.
For example, I've used LLMs to write ~1600 lines of Rust in the past few days. I'm having it make Ratatui bindings for Ruby. I haven't ever learned Rust, but I can read C-like languages so I kinda understand what's happening. I could tell when it needed to be modularized. I have a sneaking suspicion most of the Rust tests it's written are testing Ratatui, rather than testing its own bindings. But I've had the LLM cover the functionality in Ruby tests, a language I do know. So I've felt comfortable enough to ship it.
Will you remember it if you don't "break your teeth" on it though? At the same level as the things you're already an expert on?
I'm a big believer in desirable difficulty for learning. But I'm a big believer in reduced difficulty for non-learning-oriented getting-things-done.