Comment by brailsafe

Comment by brailsafe 5 days ago

8 replies

> I am guessing: Maybe you are not used to or comfortable with delegating work?

The difference between delegating to a human vs an LLM is that a human is liable for understanding it, regardless of how it got there. Delegating to an LLM means you're just more rapidly creating liabilities for yourself, which indeed is a worthwhile tradeoff depending on the complexity of what you're losing intimate knowledge of.

jstummbillig 5 days ago

The topic of liability is a difference but I think not an important one, if your objective is to get things done. In fact, humans being liable creates high incentives to obscure the truth, deceive, or move slowly to limit personal risk exposure, all of which are very real world hindrances.

In the end the person in charge is liable either way, in different ways.

  • brailsafe 5 days ago

    > all of which are very real world hindrances.

    Real world responsibilities to manage, which sometimes can be hindrances at certain levels, but no functional society lets people just do arbitrary things at any speed regardless of impact to others in the name of a checklist. I mean that if I ask a person on my team that I trust to do something, they'll use a machine to do it, but if it's wrong, they're responsible for fixing it and maintaining the knowledge to know how to fix it. If a bridge fails, it's on the Professional Engineer who has signoff on the project, as well as the others doing the engineering work to make sure they make a bridge that doesn't collapse. If software engineers can remotely call themselves that without laughing, they need to consider their liability along the way, depending on circumstance.

Flere-Imsaho 5 days ago

As a technical manager, I'm liable for every line of code we produce - regardless of who in the team actually wrote the code. This is why I review every pull request :)

  • dynamite-ready 5 days ago

    This is interesting. At what level and team size? There's going to have to be a point where you just give in to the 'vibes' (whether it's from a human, or a machine), otherwise you become the bottleneck, no?

    • 9cb14c1ec0 5 days ago

      Better a bottleneck than constant downtime.

      • [removed] 5 days ago
        [deleted]
    • Flere-Imsaho 5 days ago

      Only 4 or so people...so small, but that's how agile teams should be.

      • brailsafe 5 days ago

        I think there's a place for this, it's not rare for one person to be the PR bottleneck like this, but I don't think it would be for me in either position; people should be able to be responsible for reviewing each others work imo. Incidentally "Agile" with a capital A sucks and should die in a fire, but lowercase a "agile" probably does by necessity mean smaller teams.