I think it's just an unfair comparison in general. The power of the LLM is the zero risk to failure, and lack of consequence when it does. Just try again, using a different prompt, retrain maybe, etc.
Humans make a bad choice, it can end said human's life. The worst choice a LLM makes just gets told "no, do it again, let me make it easier"
But an LLM model could perform poorly in tests that it is not considered and essentially means "death" for it. But begs the question at which scope should we consider an LLM to be similar to identity of a single human. Are you the same you as you were few minutes back or 10 years back? Is LLM the same LLM it is after it has been trained for further 10 hours, what if the weights are copy pasted endlessly, what if we as humans were to be cloned instantly? What if you were teleported from location A to B instantly, being put together from other atoms from elsewhere?
Ultimately this matters from evolutionary evolvement and survival of the fittest idea, but it makes the question of "identity" very complex. But death will matter because this signals what traits are more likely to keep going into new generations, for both humans and LLMs.
Death, essentially for an LLM would be when people stop using it in favour of some other LLM performing better.
My point is that no one is a new user forever and so I think we need to come up with a better solution than UI taking up screen space for things people end up doing via shortcuts. Menus and command palettes are great for this because they are mostly invisible.
The other important thing is learning to fit into the conventions of the platform: for example, Cocoa apps on Mac all inherit a bunch of consistent behaviors.
I started out with gVim with menu and toolbars. I quickly removed toolbars and after a while longer menus, as I didn't need them any more, they had taught me—though I seem to recall temporarily setting guioptions+=m from time to time for a while longer, when I couldn’t remember a thing. I think I had also added some custom menu items.
Being a modal editor probably makes removing all persistent chrome more feasible.
The default should be a clutter for new users, and the customization option should be make the UI customizable by hiding things you won't ever touch because you use shortcut keys.
The other way around is yeah, hostile. But of course it looks sleek and minimalistic!
On the early iPhones, they had to figure out how to move icons around. Their answer was, hold one of the icons down until they all start wiggling, that means you've entered the "rearrange icons" mode... Geezus christ, how intuitive. Having a button on screen, which when pressed offers a description of the mode you've entered would be user-friendly, but I get the lack of appeal, for me it would feel so clunky and like it's UI design from the 80's.
Honestly, if you're not doing it now, you're behind. The sheer amount of time savings using it smartly can give you to allow you to focus on the parts that actually matter is massive.
If progress continues at the rate that AI boosters expect, then soon you won't have to use them smartly to get value (all existing workflows will churn and be replaced by newer, smarter workflows within months), and everybody who is behind will immediately catch up the moment they start to use the tool.
But if it doesn't and you're not using it now then you're gonna be behind and part of the group getting laid off
the people that are good at using these tools now will be better at it later too. you might have closed the gap quite a bit but you will still be behind
using LLMs are they are now requires a certain type of mindset that takes practice to maintain and sharpen. It's just like a competitive game. The more intentionally do it, the better you get. And the meta changes every 6 months to a year.
That's why I scroll and laugh through all the comments on this thread dismissing it, because I know that the people dismissing it are the problem.
the interface is a chatbox with no instructions or guardrails. the fact that folks think that their experience is universal is hilarious. so much of using LLM right now is context management.
I can't take most of yall in this thread seriously
If the "meta" changes so quickly, then that sets an upper bound as to how far behind you are, no? Unless you are doing low-autonomy, non-specialized work or are applying to fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants startup jobs, no hiring manager is going to care if you have three months less experience with Codex than the other candidate.[1]
> so much of using LLM right now is context management
That is because the tooling is incredibly immature. Even if raw LLM capabilities end up plateauing, new and more effective tools are going to proliferate. You won't have to obsess over managing context, just like we don't have to do 2023-level tricks like "you are an expert" or "please explain your thought process" anymore. All of the context management tricks will be obsolete very soon... because AI tooling companies are extremely incentivized to solve it.
I find it implausible that the tech is in a state where full-time prompters are gaining a durable advantage over everyone else. J2ME devs probably thought they were building a snowballing advantage over devs who dismissed mobile development. Then the iPhone came out and totally reset the playing field.
[1] Most employers don't distinguish between three months and nine months of experience with JS framework du jour, no matter what it says on the job listing
Edited to add: Claude Code brought the agentic coding trend to the mainstream. It came out three months ago. You talk about how much you're laughing at the naivete of people here, but are you telling me with a straight face that three months is enough to put a talented engineer "behind"? At risk of being unemployable? The engineers who spent the last three months ping-ponging between Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, etc. can have their experience distilled into like a week of explaining to a newcomer, and I predict that will be true six months from now, or a year from now.
> If the "meta" changes so quickly, then that sets an upper bound as to how far behind you are, no?
No, the top players when the meta changes in competitive games remain the top players. They also figure out the new meta faster than the casual players.
you sound mad you could be spending this time upskilling instead.
but i'll say it again, when the meta changes the people that were at the top will quickly find themselves at the top again.
listen, the reason why they were in the top in the first place and you aren't is a mindset thing. the top are the curious that are experimenting and refining, sharing with each other techniques developed over time.
the complacent just sit around and lets the world happen to them. they, like you are expressing now, think that when the meta switches the bottom will suddenly find themselves at the top and the top will have nothing.
look around you, that's obviously not how the world works.
I do use these tools though! I spent some time with AI. I have coworkers who are more heads-down working on their projects and not tinkering with agents, and they're doing fine. I have coworkers who are on the absolute bleeding edge of AI tools, and they're doing fine. When the tooling matures and the churn lessens and the temperature of the discourse is lowered, I'm confident that we will all be doing great things. I just think that the "anybody not using and optimizing Codex or Claude Code today is not gonna make it" attitude is misguided. I could probably wring out some more utility from these tools if I spent more time with them, but I'd rather spend most of my professional development time working on subject matter expertise. I want to deeply understand my domain, and I trust that AI use will (mostly) become relatively easier to pick up and less of a differentiator as time goes on
I was being sarcastic there, a bad habit of mine. There are some advantages to being an early adopter (you get to reap some of the benefits now), but it doesn't give you a permanent advantage, and the people who aren't closely following and adopting weeks-old tools aren't doomed to irrelevance.
The iPhone was an equalizer. Existing mobile devs did get a genuine head start on mobile app design, but their advantage was fleeting.
The thing is, it is replacing _coders_ in a way. There are millions of people who do (or did) the work that LLMs excel at. Coders who are given a ticket that says "Write this API taking this input and giving this output" who are so far down the chain they don't even get involved in things like requirements analysis, or even interact with customers.
Software engineering, is a different thing, and I agree you're right (for now at least) about that, but don't underestimate the sheer amount of brainless coders out there.
They will also keep going in circles when you rephrase the requirements, unless with every prompt you keep adding to it and mentioning everything they've already suggested that got rejected. While humans occasionally also do this (hey, short memories), LLMs are infuriatingly more prone to it.
A typical interaction with an LLM:
"Hey, how do I do X in Y?"
"That's a great question! A good way to do X in Y is Z!"
"No, Z doesn't work in Y. I get this error: 'Unsupported operation Z'."
"I apologize for making this mistake. You're right to point out Z doesn't work in Y. Let's use W instead!"
"Unfortunately, I cannot use W for company policy reasons. Any other option?"
"Understood: you cannot use W due to company policy. Why not try to do Z?"
"I just told you Z isn't available in Y."
"In that case, I suggest you do W."
"Like I told you, W is unacceptable due to company policy. Neither W nor Z work."
It's my experience that once you are in this territory, the LLM is not going to be helpful and you should abandon the effort to get what you want out of it. I can smell blood now when it's wrong; it'll just keep being wrong, cheerfully, confidently.
Yes, to be honest I've also learned to notice when it's stuck in an infinite loop.
It's just frustrating, but when I'm asking it something within my domain of expertise, of course I can notice, and either call it quits or start a new session with a radically different prompt.
This really grinds my gears. The technology is inherently faulty, but the relentless optimism of its future subtly hiding that by making it the user's mistake instead.
Oh you got a wrong answer? Did you try the new OpenAI v999? Did you prompt it correctly? Its definitely not the model, because it worked for me once last night..
Yeah, it probably "worked for me" because they spent a gazillion hours engaging in what the LLM fanbois call "prompt engineering", but you and I would call "engaging in endless iterative hacky work-arounds until you find a prompt that works".
Unless its something extremely simple, the chances of an LLM giving you a workable answer on the first attempt is microscopic.
Most optimistic text generators do not consider repeating the stuff that was already rejected a desireable path forward. It might be the only path forward they’re aware of though.
In some contexts I got ChatGPT to answer "I don't know" when I crafted a very specific prompt about not knowing being and acceptable and preferable answer to bullshitting. But it's hit and miss, and doesn't always work; it seems LLMs simply aren't trained to model admittance of ignorance, they almost always want to give a positive and confident answer.
Assuming power stayed automated, I wonder if all life on earth just vanished, how long AIs would keep talking to each other on reddit? I have to assume as long as the computers stayed up.
My late father in law worked with them engineering the previous version of this car. It's about maximizing performance and engineering challenges. Many of the engineers are seasoned veterans of large car company's engineering teams, or racing teams. This is a playground for them to figure things out that you just don't justify on consumer cars.
I think his statement could have benefited from and/or implicitly in the list of titles.
I certainly care very deeply about my people, and letting someone go is a last resort after trying to work things out. My boss cares that I care.. their boss.. we're numbers.
Humans make a bad choice, it can end said human's life. The worst choice a LLM makes just gets told "no, do it again, let me make it easier"