Over and over again I have witnessed people just drive themselves in circles downstream of a refusal to just step out of the “make the LLM fix the issue for me” loop.
At one point the syntax and the specifics matter! * and + have different meanings in the regex. Overly-specified LLM output is worth trimming down to what your problem actually needed.
I appreciate LLM output able to draft out sketches of results (and yes, a lot of the time, getting exactly the right result). And it’s great as a learning tool (especially if you’re diligent in the trust + verify department). But I worry that people are not taking opportunities to sit down and actually use the output as the sketch, and to insert the sort of precision that comes from the “infinite context” of the human working on the problem. Devs can’t just decide to opt out of getting into the details IMO
> Over and over again I have witnessed people just drive themselves in circles downstream of a refusal to just step out of the “make the LLM fix the issue for me” loop.
You're reminding me of a 1997 talk by an American Airlines trainer about automation dependency and when dropping down a level of automation reduces workload: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WITLR_qSPXk>
> Over and over again I have witnessed people just drive themselves in circles downstream of a refusal to just step out of the “make the LLM fix the issue for me” loop.
I think that's an amazing encapsulation of my experience with LLMs.
They can be great tools, but you need to extremely willing to throw away their output and start over instead of trying to incrementally fix what they give you.
At one point the syntax and the specifics matter! * and + have different meanings in the regex. Overly-specified LLM output is worth trimming down to what your problem actually needed.
I appreciate LLM output able to draft out sketches of results (and yes, a lot of the time, getting exactly the right result). And it’s great as a learning tool (especially if you’re diligent in the trust + verify department). But I worry that people are not taking opportunities to sit down and actually use the output as the sketch, and to insert the sort of precision that comes from the “infinite context” of the human working on the problem. Devs can’t just decide to opt out of getting into the details IMO