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Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

(worksonmymachine.substack.com)
526 points Stwerner | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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Flatcircle ◴[] No.44616899[source]
My theory on AI is it's the next iteration of google search, a better more conversational, base layer over all the information that exists on the internet.

Of course some people will lose jobs just like what happened to several industries when search became ubiquitous. (newspapers, phone books, encyclopedias, travel agents)

But IMHO this isn't the existential crisis people think it is.

It's just a tool. Smart, clever people can do lots of cool stuff with tools.

But you still have to use it,

Search has just become Chat.

You used to have to search, now you chat and it does the searching, and more!

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ivanjermakov ◴[] No.44616976[source]
> Search has just become Chat

I think chat-like LLM interfacing is not the most efficient way. There has to be a smarter way.

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majormajor ◴[] No.44617074[source]
I think Photoshop is a good guide here.

Famously complicated interface with a million buttons and menus.

Now there's more buttons for the AI tools.

Because at the end of the day, using a "brush" tool to paint over the area containing the thing you want it to remove or change in an image is MUCH simpler than trying to tell it that through chat. Some sort of prompt like "please remove the fifth person from the left standing on the brick path under the bus stop" vs "just explicitly select something with the GUI." The former could have a lot of value for casual amateur use; it's not going to replace the precise, high-functionality tool for professional use.

In software - would you rather chat with an LLM to see the contents of a proposed code change, or use a visual diff tool? "Let the agent run and then treat it's stuff as a PR from a junior dev" has been said so many times recently - which is not suggesting just chatting with it to do the PR instead of using the GUI. I would imagine that this would get extended to something like the input not just being less of a free-form chat, but more of a submission of a Figma mockup + a link to a ticket with specs.

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1. skydhash ◴[] No.44621475{3}[source]
> Famously complicated interface with a million buttons and menus.

Photoshop is quite nice for an expert tool. Blender is the complicated one where you have to get a full-sized keyboard and know a handful of shortcuts to have a normal pace.

> The former could have a lot of value for casual amateur use; it's not going to replace the precise, high-functionality tool for professional use.

I was just discussing that in another thread. Most expert works are routine, and they will build workflows, checklists, and processes to get them to be done with the minimum cognitive load. And for that you need reliability. Their focus are on the high leverage decision points. Take any digital artist's photoshop settings, They will have a specific layout, a few document templates, their tweaked brushes. And most importantly, they know the shortcuts because clicking on the tiny icons takes too much times.

The trick is not about being able to compute, it's knowing the formula and just give the parameters to a computer that will do the menial work. It's also not about generating a formula that may or may not be what we want.