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Comment by Filligree

3 hours ago

> I'd argue back that LLMs likely have a better understanding of a11y conventions than I do as well.

To make the obvious counterargument, “then you shouldn’t be creating websites at all”.

I don’t actually believe this, but I know people who do. Some would add “shouldn’t be allowed to”.

I wonder what went so wrong that "if you don't understand [thing] you shouldn't be building [thing]" is now considered a controversial statement.

  • If you're building bridges, this shouldn't be a controversial statement. Same if you're building cryptography software.

    It's debatable if the same should apply to the vast majority of software that is less critical.

  • That's not what I said, I said I likely understand it less than a 635B parameter LLM, and that using the LLM as a shortcut to that knowledge is something I'd consider perfectly acceptable. I might even become better at it through using the LLM.

    • You need a certain understanding to be able to judge whether the output is adequate. I think the argument is against people who lack that understanding.

  • Well, there's degrees of understanding, as well as degrees of seriousness of the project. You can also learn a lot by building something.

    Some people are writing the Netflix homepage (where an outage costs millions of dollars), and some people are writing a blog for three readers.