this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
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"Every time we use a lever to lift a stone, we're trading long term strength for short term productivity. We're optimizing for today's pyramid at the cost of tomorrow's ability."
LLMs are absolutely not able to create wonders on par with the pyramids. They’re at best as capable as a junior engineer who has read all of Stack Overflow but doesn’t really understand any of it.
Precisely. If you train by lifting stones you can still use the lever later, but you'll be able to lift even heavier things by using both your new strength AND the leaver's mechanical advantage.
By analogy, if you're using LLMs to do the easy bits in order to spend more time with harder problems fuckin a. But the idea you can just replace actual coding work with copy paste is a shitty one. Again by analogy with rock lifting: now you have noodle arms and can't lift shit if your lever breaks or doesn't fit under a particular rock or whatever.
Also: assuming you know what the easy bits are before you actually have experience doing them is a recipe to end up training incorrectly.
I use plenty of tools to assist my programming work. But I learn what I'm doing and why first. Then once I have that experience if there's a piece of code I find myself having to use frequently or having to look up frequently, I make myself a template (vscode's snippet features are fucking amazing when you build your own snips well, btw).
If you don't understand how a lever works, then it's a problem. Should we let any person with an AI design and operate a nuclear power plant?
Actually... Yes? People's health did deteriorate due to over-reliance on technology over the generations. At least, the health of those who have access to that technology.
"If my grandma had wheels she would be a bicycle. We are optimizing today's grandmas at the sacrifice of tomorrow's eco friendly transportation."