tsurba 18 hours ago

Gambling is where I end up if I’m tired and try to get an LLM to build my hobby project for me from scratch in one go, not really bothering to read the code properly. It’s stupid and a waste of time. Sometimes it’s easier to get started this way though.

But more seriously, in the ideal case refining a prompt based on a misunderstanding of an LLM due to ambiguity in your task description is actually doing the meaningful part of the work in software development. It is exactly about defining the edge cases, and converting into language what is it that you need for a task. Iterating on that is not gambling.

But of course if you are not doing that, but just trying to get a ”smarter” LLM with (hopefully deprecated study of) ”prompt engineering” tricks, then that is about building yourself a skill that can become useless tomorrow.

chii 17 hours ago

why is the process important? If they can continuously trial and error their way into a good output/result, then it's a fine outcome.

  • suddenlybananas 16 hours ago

    Why is thinking important? Think about it a bit.

    • chii 15 hours ago

      is it more important for a chess engine to be able to think? Or is it able to win by brute force through searching a sufficient outcome?

      If the outcome is indistinguisable from using "thinking" as the process rather than brute force, why would the process matter regarding how the outcome was achieved?

      • suddenlybananas 14 hours ago

        maybe if programming were a well-defined game like chess, but it's not.

        • chii 14 hours ago

          the grammar of a programming language is just as well defined. And the defined-ness of the "game" isn't required for my argument.

          Your concept of thinking is the classic retoric - as soon as some "ai" manages to achieve something which previously wasn't capable, it's no longer AI and is just xyz process. It happened with chess engines, with alphago, and with LLMs. The implication being that human "thinking" is somehow unique and only the AI that replicate it can be considered to have "thinking".