Comment by simonw

1 day ago

I think it is applicable to a much wider range of knowledge work, but it's also harder to apply there.

Software development has the huge advantage that mistakes and hallucinations are very easy to spot: the software works or it doesn't.

Spotting errors in a research report or legal brief is a whole lot harder!

But... non-software professionals spend a huge amount of their time on tasks that can be safely automated - reformatting documents, extracting numbers from PDFs, all kinds of flavor of data entry.

Learning how to use a tool like Claude Cowork can take a big dent out of those.

3 comments

simonw

Reply
slopinthebag  1 day ago

> Software development has the huge advantage that mistakes and hallucinations are very easy to spot: the software works or it doesn't.

Do we not care about code quality, maintainability, performance, extensibility, or understandability anymore? Honest question, not a gotcha, it's just previously getting software to pass all the tests was a small part of what we would consider "working" or perhaps "good" software. Maybe that's different now with LLMs, idk. Maybe we need automated checks for these things as well, like not compiling until the code quality is good enough to let the agent finish it's loop.

  • tracerbulletx  15 hours ago

    What code quality even means is different now, but also LLMs are capable of producing better quality code at scale in my companies experience. We are able to in fact sort of propagate best practices and structure via the llm to all of the teams even when they're working under time pressure.