Comment by mediaman
14 days ago
If you make the example any more complicated, it makes sense.
A lathe operator isn’t any good if they don’t frequently operate lathes.
A articulated robot implementer needs frequent experience implementing robots to be any good.
That doesn’t mean lathes or robots are useless. Nor does it mean they have failed as products because they require expertise.
I do think it raises questions as to whether vast swathes of the population will be effective at using LLMs. Are they scissors, or a lathe?
I figure english is the next coolest programming language for scripting and compilation. So far people have been writing fun little demos with it, but now people are starting to place real demands on it, and you're starting to see actual programs needing to be built. Unsurprisingly this requires a bit more craft.
> I figure english is the next coolest programming language for scripting and compilation. So far people have been writing fun little demos with it, but now people are starting to place real demands on it, and you're starting to see actual programs needing to be built. Unsurprisingly this requires a bit more craft.
Perhaps that craft of using the exact subset of English has something to do with the correct selection of words and concise, yet expressive enough, expressions, in a fashion resembling creating a code.
A code that's meant to be understood by machines, we could call it "computer code". And said computer code could be used to create recipes, algorithms, let's call them "programs". Hey, I think I have ideas for 2 possible names for this process!
No wait, you think I'm being silly so that's why you're being a bit sarcastic back.
But seriously, you can put a shebang on an english text file now (if you're sufficiently brave), or feed it through something that spits out code on the other end (so you can proof read the consequences before executing them).
It's crazy, but this is 2026, and that actually ... just works. You can even do it locally, if you don't mind running a space heater.
Thing is, when you have the expressiveness and power of a full natural language (and you're already paying for it), why would you want to constrain yourself to a subset? That's not very practical. Why not use all of it? Computing was never about typing code into machines anyway. "Computer" used to be a human profession, until it got automated.
On the upside, there's thousands of years of documentation. On the downside, a lot said documentation is underspecified and/or straight wishful thinking. It's certainly an interesting avenue to explore.
10 replies →
Everybody seems to want them to be scissors, or at least to treat them as such, but even still the reason everyone can use scissors so well is because they’ve practiced with them, right? You’re probably a lot better at using scissors now than the first time you did it, the functionality is just so simple it’s harder to notice.
To me learning to use LLMs is the same as doing anything else, you have to practice and put in the hours to get good. Maybe some harnesses will eventually allow LLMs to function more as scissors than lathes. This seems to be what Microsoft is trying to do by embedding Copilot in all their products and saying “choose the UI that works best for you”. If that doesn’t end up working we’ll need another paradigm for “non-technical” users to effectively operate computer assistants