Comment by dns_snek
10 hours ago
I happen to think that's largely a self-delusion which nobody is immune to, no matter how smart you are (or think you are).
I've heard this from a few smart people whom I know really well. They strongly believe this, they also believe that most people are deluding themselves, but not them - they're in the actually-great group, and when I pointed out the sloppiness of their LLM-assisted work they wouldn't have any of it.
I'm specifically talking about experienced programmers who now let LLMs write majority of their code.
All on my own, I hand-craft pretty good code, and I do it pretty fast. But one person is finite, and the amount of software to write is large.
If you add a second, skilled programmer, just having two people communicating imperfectly drops quality to 90% of the base.
If I add an LLM instead, it drops to maybe 80% of my base quality. But it's still not bad. I'm reading the diffs. There are tests and fancy property tests and even more documentation explaining constraints that Claude would otherwise miss.
So the question is if I can get 2x the features at 80% of the quality, how does that 80% compare to what the engineering problem requires?
I was somewhat surprised to find that the differentiator isn't being smart or not, but the ability to accurately assess when they know something.
From my own observations, the types of people I previously observed to be sloppy in their thought processes and otherwise work, correlates almost perfectly with those that seem most eager to praise LLMs.
It's almost as if the ability to identify bullshit, makes you critical of the ultimate bullshit generator.