Comment by rglover
17 hours ago
> Babysitter: Keep a human in the loop to catch errors before they propagate.
This is the only way to guarantee AI usage doesn't burn you. Any automation beyond this is just theater, no matter how much that hurts to hear/undermines your business model.
A bird sings, a duck quacks. You don't expect the duck to start singing now, do you?
I'm not sure I agree. Like all stochastic processes, LLM errors can be quantified. That makes each use case a risk-reward tradeoff where users can decide if the tradeoff makes sense for them or not. There are scenarios where errors are acceptable because the risks are low or errors are acceptable or the rewards make up for them. This is a process engineer problem where business and technology specifics matter.
I see where you're coming from, but this assumes good behavior and discipline which most people/teams struggle with.
If a business can get away with some margin of error being acceptable, more power to them. But if not (or doing so would cause additional problems; what I'd imagine to be true for a non-trivial number of orgs), it's wise to consider the nature of the tool a lot of people are suggesting is mandatory if you're dependent on consistent, predictable results.
That's fair. A heuristic that leaves some opportunity on the table due to org capability is a reasonable one to have.
I think babysitting LLMs is exactly the thing that burns you.
Presuming you meant burns you out though.
No, "burns you" as in "play with fire and you'll get burned".
It will make a mistake and you will get burned, so you have to babysit it.