Comment by lostlogin
2 days ago
> retrofitting very old machine tools with modern motion controls.
I have a friend who has automated an old food production line. Eg peanut butter making, Muslie roasting etc.
With no background in programming he got machines hooked up measuring various things - eg peanut butter levels with ultrasound, roast temps, rotation rates.
Zero version control and eyebrow raising methods but massive improvement in safety and throughput. Really impressive.
I suspect this is where our AI agents will really come to shine: helping people who might have a technical bend but are not programmers do cool things.
Yeah. Anyone who hated writing code but had to, like biologists and chemists, now don't have to.
This is arguably a dangerous fallacy, particularly for anything critical. When the person doesn't know programming, it becomes harder to guide agents and do reviews, leading to overlooking issues and accepting mistakes. This gets amplified for any creative solutions or fixing future problems, where it is something the LLM was not trained on or has limited data about the subject. Plus add how much money spent on tokens.
Maybe a way for non-programmers to better understanding what they are saying, is to think about translation. It's kind of like saying a person doesn't need to know anything about Spanish to now sell LLM translated books from English to Spanish.
Yes, the LLM can do translations for you, and quickly. But, as you don't know Spanish, you won't know how good the translation is. You are less likely to catch all kinds of mistakes, from bad grammar to wrongfully translated idiomatic expressions. The less Spanish that you know, the more likely you are to be impressed or fooled into a false sense of security. Then when native and fluent Spanish speakers read your books, they may rate it as mostly gibberish and nonsense.
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I'm mixed on this. They may not(or may) write elegant code, but they have clear intent about its parameters and purpose. I've seen LLMs mess up numbers by order of magnitude on multiple occasions, which could range anywhere from annoying to fatal, depending on the field.
Like all things, helpful as long as it's checked very carefully.
The less physicist code exists in the world the better.
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They do still write code, to a point, but it's in human language with a humanized feedback loop instead of the lower level of code.
Yes. And in addition, Claude and Kimi and friends will happily do version control and write tests etc.
They'll even volunteer to do so and recommend.
Not really though. There's a whole product segment like LabView, which has existed for over three decades now, for people like biologists and chemists who do not like to code.
Those tools are built for quick iteration. Compared to that, using an LLM surely feels a lot like programming. Also a lot less deterministic.