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416 points floverfelt | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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nicwolff ◴[] No.45057148[source]
> I’ve often heard, with decent reason, an LLM compared to a junior colleague.

No, they're like an extremely experienced and knowledgeable senior colleague – who drinks heavily on the job. Overconfident, forgetful, sloppy, easily distracted. But you can hire so many of them, so cheaply, and they don't get mad when you fire them!

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vkou ◴[] No.45057296[source]
Experienced and knowledgeable and they also believe in the technical equivalent of flat-Earthism in many, many non-trivial corners.

And if you push back on that insanity, they'll smile and nod and agree with you and in the next sentence, go right back to pushing that nonsense.

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1. sho_hn ◴[] No.45057917[source]
One good yardstick, if one has to anthropomorphize, is that LLMs know and believe what's popular. If you ask it to do something that popular developer opinion gets right, it will do fine.

Ask it for things that many people get wrong or just do badly, or can be mistakenly likened to a popular thing in a way that produces a wrong result, and it'll often err.

The trick is having an awareness of what correct solutions are prevalent in training data and what the bulk of accessible code used for training probably doesn't have many examples of. And this experience is hard to substitute for.

Juniors therefore use LLMs in a bumbling fashion and are productive either by sheer luck, or because they're more likely to ask for common things and so stay in a lane with the model.

A senior developer who develops a good intuition for when the tool is worth using and when not can be really efficient. Some senior developers however either overestimate or underestimate the tool based on wrong expectations and become really inefficient with them.