Comment by ericmcer
6 hours ago
Heavily agree.
The computer should be a force for order, because being a living creature is chaos.
That said LLMs can be used in ways that promote order. People just got excited and wanted to believe they could be trusted in chaos mode.
For reference chaos mode would be prompting something like: "Look at my journal entries and tell me what I should do to fix my life". Versus using one to build a table of common themes and analyzing the resulting spreadsheet yourself.
I think we got excited / wanted to believe that we won't have to expend any effort whatsoever, and the AI could "do it all".
The reality (as far as I can comprehend it) seems to be that AI expanded the scope of what we can shove into one mouthful, and now it takes much more effort to chew. Metaphorically speaking.
Part of the reason coding agents are widely accepted and used is that human coders are chaos, and human coders have spent a lot of time building tooling to ameliorate chaos. Everything from git to language design, to lint, to profilers, etc. was built to keep the human chaos out. It's pretty good at keeping the LLM chaos out, and when it blows up anyway you can roll it back to the previous commit.