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416 points floverfelt | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.499s | 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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furyofantares ◴[] No.45057402[source]
These metaphors all suck. Well, ok, yours is funny. But anyway, LLMs are just very different from any human.

They are extremely shallow, even compared to a junior developer. But extremely broad, even compared to the most experienced developer. They type real fuckin fast compared to anyone on earth, but they need to be told what to do much more carefully than anyone on earth.

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CuriouslyC ◴[] No.45057833[source]
I've gotten Claude Code to make CUDA kernels and all kinds of advanced stuff that there's zero percent chance a junior would pull off.

AI is like a super advanced senior wearing a blindfold. It knows almost everything, it's super fast, and it gets confused pretty quickly about things after you tell it.

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achierius ◴[] No.45058506[source]
You'd be surprised at what juniors can pull off. I have seen fresh-out-of-college new grads write performant GPU kernels that are used in real world library implementations for particular architectures.
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1. CuriouslyC ◴[] No.45058560[source]
Most of the juniors I've worked with would make numerical errors and give up/declare premature victory before getting the implementation to a robust state. I'm sure there are exceptional young folks out there though.
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2. godelski ◴[] No.45059938[source]

  > Most of the juniors
Most senior programmers can't write CUDA kernels either. Even fewer can write ones that are any good.