Losing focus as a skill is something I see with every batch of new students. It’s not just LLMs, almost every app and startup is competing for the same limited attention from every user.
What LLMs have done for most of my students is remove all the barriers to an answer they once had to work for. It’s easy to get hooked on fast answers and forget to ask why something works. That said, I think LLMs can support exploration—often beyond what Googling ever did—if we approach them the right way.
I’ve seen moments where students pushed back on a first answer and uncovered deeper insights, but only because they chose to dig. The real danger isn’t the tool, it’s forgetting how to use it thoughtfully.
I feel that respecting the focus of others is also an important skill.
If I'm pulled 27 different ways. Then when I finally get around to another engineer’s question “I need help” is a demand for my synchronous time and focus. Versus “I’m having problems with X, I need to Y, can you help me Z” could turn into a chat, or it could mean I’m able to deliver the needed information at once and move on. Many people these days don’t even bother to write questions. They write statements and expect you to infer the question from the statement.
On the flip side, a thing we could learn more from LLMs is how to give a good response by explaining our reasoning out loud. Not “do X” but instead “It sounds like you want to W, and that’s blocked by Y. That is happening because of Z. To fix it you need to X because it …”
Yes and no.
Although I’m a proponent of the “put the pain where it belongs” way of doing things, sometimes a more nuanced way of doing things is needed. This usually involves more communication instead of less.
You can always give them feedback that (may) make them reconsider their approach of just stating things and not asking questions.
Small effort for you, but you might change someone’s way of asking things, both for the good of you and them.
If that doesn’t work, you can always go back to ignoring.
Usually the most frantic and urgent tickets are the ones that also provide the least info too. Which is frustrating as it usually adds some extra back and forth which means it ultimately takes longer to resolve their tickets.
There is also generally a correlation to spend and question quality.
> It’s easy to get hooked on fast answers and forget to ask why something works
This is really a tragedy because the current technology is arguably one of the best things in existence for explaining "why?" to someone in a very personalized way. With application of discipline from my side, I can make the LLM lecture me until I genuinely understand the underlying principles of something. I keep hammering it with edge cases and hypotheticals until it comes back with "Exactly! ..." after reiterating my current understanding.
The challenge for educators seems the same as it has always been - How do you make the student want to dig deeper? What does it take to turn someone into a strong skeptic regarding tools or technology?
I'd propose the use of hallucinations as an educational tool. Put together a really nasty scenario (i.e., provoke a hallucination on purpose on behalf of the students that goes under their radar). Let them run with a misapprehension of the world for several weeks. Give them a test or lab assignment regarding this misapprehension. Fail 100% of the class on this assignment and have a special lecture afterward. Anyone who doesn't "get it" after this point should probably be filtered out anyways.
In a way, I think it shows why "superfluous" things like sports and art are so important in school. In those activities, there are no quick answers. You need to persist through the initial learning curve and slow physical adaptation just to get baseline competency. You're not going to get a violin to stop sounding like a dying cat unless you accept that it's a gradual focused process.
Sports and art aren't superfluous: they teach gross and fine (respectively) motor skills. School isn't just about developing cognitive skills or brainwashing students into political orthodoxies: it's also about teaching students how to control their bodies in general and specific muscle groups, like the hands, in particular. Art is one way of training the hands; music is another (manipulating anything from a triangle to a violin), as is handwriting. Without that training. Students may well not get enough of that dexterity training at home, particularly in the age of tablets [0].
> Losing focus as a skill is something I see with every batch of new students.
Gaining focus as a skill is something to work on with every batch of
new students
We're on the same page. I'm turning that around to say: let's remember
focus isn't something we're naturally born with, it has to be
built. Worked on hard. People coming to that task are increasingly
damaged/injured imho.
This is my constant concern these days and it makes me wonder if grading needs to change in order to alleviate some of the pressure to get the right answer so that students can focus on how.
Using aimbot in Gunbound didn't make players better. Yes, it changed everything: it destroyed the game ecosystem.
Can humanity use "literacy aimbot" responsibly? I don't know.
It's just a cautionary tale. I'm not expecting to win an argument. I could come up with counter anectdotes myself:
ABS made breaking in slippery conditions easier and safer. People didn't learned to brake better, they still pushed the pedal harder thinking it would make it stop faster, not realizing the complex dynamics of "making a car stop". That changed everything. It made cars safer.
Also, just an anecdote.
Sure, a lot of people need focus. Some people don't, they need to branch out. Some systems need aimbot (like ABS), some don't (like Gunbound).
Appreciate the balanced take. An improvement to a technology can be good, or it can be harmful - and beyond a certain point, further amplification can destroy society and the commons which we all benefit from.
Coca leaves are a relatively benign part of daily life in Peru & a few other surrounding countries - they’re on the table in your hotel lobby, ready to be stirred into your tea. But cocaine - same base but made more intense with technology - causes many problems - and don’t even start about crack cocaine.
So when thinking of technology through the lens of what it amplifies we can consider traditional Internet research & writing contrasted vs. using AI - the latter gives instant answers and often an instant first draft.
Great for some; harmful for others. Where that point lies and what factors contribute is different for every individual.
You are right in the sense that addiction and overuse are common concerns regarding new technologies.
Similar concerns existed for the TV and video-games, for example.
The idea of a balance works if you put the problem on a spectrum. "Too much, then it's bad" is a general good advice for anything.
In high school, I started learning geometry. I was puzzled by the angles in the exercises always being 30, 60, 90, 120 (notable angles). I tried a lot to come up with something that could work outside notable angles on my own. I figured that it would be on the next class (it never got there), until I gave up and asked my math teacher. She also didn't knew how to do it by hand. Until this day I don't know.
That's probably due to calculators existing. If they didn't, we would be forced to know. Maybe I would have failed that class and had to work harder, maybe not. I will never know.
There is no such thing as an addiction to calculators. I am not against them. I don't think there are too many calculators in the world. Good, honest tech.
However, I wish doing some math outside notable angles were in my high school curriculum. My teacher was kind and helped curious students. I wish she knew how to do it so she could teach me.
I know that now I could learn that on the internet, or ask an LLM to explain it to me. Notable angles are not the point, right? Just another anecdote.
I chose Gunbound aimbot as an example of something that is not good, not even a little bit. Not because aimbot is addictive (it's the contrary, cheating takes away the reward sensation), but because it unbalanced the game ecosystem. No one could beat the cheaters, who rapidly reached a plateau themselves. If everyone used aimbot, there was no reason to play it, to learn the quirks of each character, to practice, to train your skills.
It's just an anecdote. I tend to stay away from those, but sometimes they're useful.
Regarding focus now, the "skill of the future" and its relation to AI:
We always needed focus. It is as skill of the past too, not tied to a niche tech, not the only human skill, not a point in a spectrum.
Hmm... maybe because these notable angles are also those of which the associated trigonometric values are round(ish), and so it's about first learning those by heart ? (Like you learn the multiplication table by heart before doing multi-digit multiplications.)
I'm definitely gonna get hate for saying this but: the rise of coding with LLM assistants is going to worsen an issue our industry is already struggling with: we have tons of developers out there who do not know their fundamentals in programming, who are utterly rudderless without heaps upon heaps of framework code doing lots of work for them, who are now being further enabled by machines that write even that code for them with some tweaking afterwards.
I have interacted with software developers at conferences who cannot do basic things with computers, like navigate file systems, or make changes to the Windows registry, where to get and how to use environment variables, how to diagnose and fix PC issues... Like in a perfect world your IT department sorts this stuff for you but I struggle to take seriously someone who claims to create software who seemingly lacks basic computer literacy in a number of areas.
And I'm sorry, "it compiles and runs" is the bare fucking minimum for software quality. We have machines these days that would run circles around my first PC in the late 90's, but despite that, everything is slower and runs worse. My desktop messaging apps are each currently sucking up over 600 MB of RAM apiece, which is nearly 3 times what my original PC had total. Everything is some bloated shite that requires internet access now at all times or it utterly crashes and dies, and I'm sorry but I cannot separate in my mind the fact that we have seemingly a large contingent of software developers out there that can't bloody use computers to thank for this. And cheap-ass management, to be clear, but I think these are nested problems.
I don't think it's necessarily worsening, it's just becoming more evident.
The way I conceptualize this is that there are two kinds of knowledge. The first is fundamental knowledge. If you learn what is computational complexity and how to use it, or what is linear algebra and why do we care, then you're left with something. The second is what I call "transient" knowledge (I made up the word). If you learn by heart the DOM manipulation methods you have to invoke to make a webpage shiny (or, let's be real, the API of some framework), or what is the difference between datetime and datetime2 in SQL Server 2017, then it looks like you know how to do stuff, but none of those things are fundamental to the way the underlying technologies work: they are mostly pieces of trivia that are the way they are because of historical happenstance rather than actual technical reasons.
To be effective at any given day job, one might need to learn a few pieces of knowledge of the second kind, but one should never confuse them for actual, real understanding. The problem is that the first kind can't be learned from youtube videos in increments of 15 minutes.
That's what LLMs are exposing, IMO. If you don't know what is the syntax for lambdas in C# or how to structure components in React, any LLM will give you perfectly working code. If your code crumbles to pieces because you didn't design your database correctly or you're doing useless computations, you won't even know what you don't know.
This transcends software development, by the way. We talk about how problem solving is a skill, but in my experience is more like physical form: if you don't keep yourself in shape, you won't be when you need it. I see this a lot in kids: the best ones are much smarter than I was at their age, the average struggles with long division.
A guy I work with calls transient knowledge "arcana," I've come to appreciate the concept. Now I'm aware of when I'm generating arcana for other people to learn :)
…and rapidly becomes deprecated not due to quality but because the requirements for operation or development changed substantially. This second order effects make the “compile and run” focus paradoxically efficient and correct use of resources. Engineers, especially academically experienced ones, prematurely optimize for correctness and arbitrary dimensions of quality because they are disconnected from and motivated by interests orthogonal to their users.
> …and rapidly becomes deprecated not due to quality but because the requirements for operation or development changed substantially.
Did they? Like I have no data for this nor would I know how one would set about getting it, but like, from my personal experience and the experiences of folks I've spoken to for basically my entire career, the requirements we have for our software barely change at all. I do not expect Outlook to have chat and reaction functionality. I do not desire Windows to monitor my ongoing usage of my computer to make suggestions on how I might work more efficiently. These things were not requested by me or any user I have ever spoken to. In fact I would take that a step further and say that if your scope and requirements are shifting that wildly, that often, that you did a poor job of finding them in the first place, irrespective of where they've now landed.
They are far more often the hysterical tinkerings demanded by product managers who must justify their salaries with some notion of what's "next" for Outlook, because for some reason someone at Microsoft decided that Outlook being a feature complete and good email client was suddenly, for no particular reason, not good enough anymore.
And again speaking from my and friend's experiences, I would in fact love it very much thank you if Microsoft would just make their products good, function well, look nice and be nice to use, and then stop. Provide security updates of course, maybe an occasional UI refresh if you've got some really good ideas for it, but apart from that, just stop changing it. Let it be feature complete, quality software.
> Engineers, especially academically experienced ones, prematurely optimize for correctness and arbitrary dimensions of quality because they are disconnected from and motivated by interests orthogonal to their users.
I don't think we're disconnected at all from our users. I want, as a software developer, to turn out quality software that does the job we say it does on the box. My users, citation many conversations with many of them, want the software to do what it says on the box, and do it well. These motivations are not orthogonal at all. Now, certainly it's possible to get so lost in the minutia of design that one loses the plot, that's definitely where a good project manager will shine. However, to say these are different concerns entirely is IMO, a bridge too far. My users probably don't give a shit about the technical minutia of implementing a given feature: they care if it works. However, if I implement it correctly, with the standards I know to work well for that technology, then I will be happy, and they will be happy.
MS produces some very good software, like .net core, garnet etc.
Their biggest asset is however Marketing. They have perfected selling software, no matter how bad it is.
Their end-user software ranges from "bad but could be worse" to "outlandish crap that should be illegal to ship". Their user base however doesn't know much better, and decision makers in commercial settings have different priorities (choosing MS would not be held against you).
But even in tech circles MS Windows is still used. I know the excuses. MS can continue focusing their efforts productising the clueless user that doesn't understand anything and doesn't give a shit about all the leaks, brittle drivers, performance degradation, registry cluttering etc. MS follows the right $$ strategy, their numbers don't lie.
> They have perfected selling software, no matter how bad it is.
I agree in general with that statement, but we also need to acknowledge that those sales occur within a market that unequivocally endorses their products as "the standard," irrespective of quality, and further still the vast, vast, vast majority of their sold licenses are in corporate environments, where the people making the purchasing decisions and the people utilizing the software are rhetorically different species. I would be shocked if you could find a single person who prefers Teams to Slack, yet tons of organizations use Teams, not because it's good, but because it comes bundled with 365 services, and you're already paying for Outlook, OneDrive, Word, and Excel at the minimum. And you're certainly not going to not have those pieces of software... and therein lies the problem.
> MS can continue focusing their efforts productising the clueless user that doesn't understand anything and doesn't give a shit about all the leaks, brittle drivers, performance degradation, registry cluttering etc.
But they do give a shit. There's just no meaningful alternative. I run into people who absolutely 100% give a shit and are incredibly frustrated at just how BAD computing is lately, even if they lack the vocabulary to explain massive memory mismanagement means their phone gets hot in their hand when they're just reading goddamn text messages, they still understand that it sucks and it wasn't always like this.
> MS follows the right $$ strategy, their numbers don't lie.
That statement however is so vague it's unfalsifiable. We do know Microsoft has previously "lost" battles with individual applications in individual fields, it is completely believable that they could again and more (the entire XBox division comes to mind). What Microsoft has truly mastered is anti-competitive business practices that hobble their competition from the word go, and make it more or less impossible to compete with them on a software quality axis.
The only office suites I know of that even have numbers that are visible next to Microsoft are LibreOffice and the Apple suite, neither of which are actually sold at all.
> Search enginers offer a good choice between Exploration (crawl through the list and pages of results) and Exploitation (click on the top result).
LLMs, however, do not give this choice.
I've actually found that LLMs are great at exploration for me. I'd argue, even better than exploitation. I've solved many a complex problem by using an LLM as a thought partner. I've refined many ideas by getting the LLM to brainstorm with me. There's this awesome feedback loop you can create with the LLM when you're in exploration mode that is impossible to replicate on your own, and still somewhat difficult even with a human thought partner.
I've started doing something that I have been meaning to do for years, which is to go through all the seminal papers on concurrency and make a minimal implementation of them. I did Raft recently, then Lamport timestamps, then a lot of the common Mutex algorithms, then Paxos, and now I'm working on Ambient Calculus.
I've attempted this before, but I would always get stuck on some detail that I didn't fully grasp in the paper and would abandon the project. Using ChatGPT, I've been able to unblock myself much easier. I will ask it to clarify stuff in the paper, and sometimes it doesn't even matter if it's "wrong", so much as it's giving me some form of feedback and helps me think of other ideas on how to fix things.
Doing this, I manage to actually finish these projects, and I think I more or less understand them, and I certainly understand them more than I would have had I abandoned them a quarter of the way through like I usually do.
I was a skeptic until I started seeing it this way. I do think that this is exactly why we’ve seen LLMs overtake search engines so quickly in the last 12-18 months. They allow a feedback loop that just doesn’t exist scrolling and clicking.
Being allowed to focus seems to be a privilege these days.
When I started in the 90s I could work on something for weeks without much interruption. These days there is almost always some scrum master, project manager or random other manager who wants to get an update or do some planning. Doing actual work seems to have taken a backseat to talking about work.
The flip side of focus (to me) is responsiveness. A post to SO might deliver me the exact answer I need, but it will take focus to write the correct question and patience to wait for a response and then time spent iterating in the comments. In contrast an LLM will happily tell me the wrong thing, instantaneously. It’s responsive.
Good engineers must also be responsive to their teammates, managers, customers, and the business. Great engineers also find a way to weave in periods of focus.
I’m curious how others navigate these?
It seems there was a large culture shift when Covid hit and non-async non-remote people all moved online and expected online to work like in person. I feel pushed to be more responsive at the cost of focus. On the flip side, I’ve given time and space to engineers so they could focus only to come back and find they had abused that time and trust. Or some well meaning engineers got lost in the weeds and lost the narrative of *why* they were focusing. It is super easy to measure responsiveness: how long did it take to respond. It’s much harder to measure quality and growth. Especially when being vulnerable about what you don’t know or the failure to make progress is a truly senior level skill.
I've been struggling with finding balance for years as a front-line manager who codes. I need to be responsive-ish to incoming queries but also have my own tasks. If I am too responsive, it's easy for my work to become my evening time and my working hours for everybody else.
The "weaving" in of periods of focus is maintained by ignoring notifications and checking them in batches. Nobody gets to interrupt me when I'm in focus mode (much chagrin for my wife) and I can actually get stuff done. This happened a lot by accident, I get enough notifications for long enough that I don't really hear or notice them just like I don't hear or notice the trains that pass near my house.
I built a distributed software engineering firm pre-covid, so all of our clients were onsite even though we were full-remote. My engineers plugged into the engineering teams of our clients, so it's not like we were building on the side and just handing over deliverables, we had to fully integrate into the client teams.
So we had to solve this problem pre-covid, and the solution remained the same during the pandemic when every org went full remote (at least temporarily).
There is no "one size fits all approach" because each engineer is different. We had dozens of engineers on our team, and you learn that people are very diverse in how they think/operate.
But we came up with a framework that was really successful.
1) Good faith is required: you mention personnel abusing time/trust, that's a different issue entirely, no framework will be successful if people refuse to comply. This system only works if teammates trust the person. Terminate someone who can't be trusted.
2) "Know thyself": Many engineers wouldn't necessarily even know how THEY operated best (if they needed large chunks of focus time, or were fine multi-tasking, etc). We'd have them make a best guess when onboarding and then iterate and update as they figured out how they worked best.
3) Proactively Propagate Communication Standard: Most engineers would want large chunks of uninterrupted focus time, so we would tell them to EXPLICITLY tell their teammates or any other stakeholders WHEN they would be focusing and unresponsive (standardize it via schedule), and WHY (ie sell the idea). Bad feelings or optics are ALWAYS simply a matter of miscommunication so long as good faith exists. We'd also have them explain "escalation patterns", ie "if something is truly urgent, DM me on slack a few times and finally, call my phone."
4) Set comms status: Really this is just slack/teams. but basically as a soft reminder to stakeholders, set your slack status to "heads down building" or something so people remember that you aren't available due to focus time. It's really easy to sync slack status to calendar blocks to automate this.
We also found that breaking the day into async task time and sync task time really helped optimize. Async tasks are tasks that can get completed in small chunks of time like code review, checking email, slack, etc. These might be large time sinks in aggregate, but generally you can break into small time blocks and still be successful. We would have people set up their day so all the async tasks would be done when they are already paying a context switching cost. IE, scheduled agile cadence meetings etc. If you're doing a standup meeting, you're already gonna be knocked out of flow so might as well use this time to also do PR review, async comms, etc. Naturally we had people stack their meetings when possible instead of pepper throughout the day (more on how this was accomplished below).
Anyways, sometimes when an engineer of ours joined a new team, there might be a political challenge in not fitting into the existing "mold" of how that team communicated (if that team's comm standard didn't jive with our engineer's). This quickly resolved every single time when our engineer was proven out to be much more productive/effective than the existing engineers (who were kneecapped by the terrible distracting existing standard of meetings, constant slack interruptions, etc). We would even go as far as to tell stakeholders our engineers would not be attending less important meetings (not immediately, once we had already proven ourselves a bit). The optics around this weren't great at first, but again, our engineers would start 1.5-2X'ing productivity of the in-house engineers, and political issues melt away very quickly.
TL;DR - Operate in good faith, decide your own best communication standard, propagate the standard out to your stakeholders explicitly, deliver and people will respect you and also your comms standard.
When you’re on the asking side, sure, instant gratification is great. On the answering side, not so much. Chat interfaces are not a good fit for anything you may have to mull over for a while, or do some investigation before answering, and for anything where multiple such threads may occur in parallel, or that you want to reference later.
The thing is that most people seeking help are not able to form their question effectively. They can’t even identify the key elements of their problem.
They _need_ help with people trying to parse out their actual problem. Stack Overflow actively tells you to fuck off if you can’t form your question to their standards, and unsurprisingly that’s not very helpful to people that are struggling.
You will need to repeat walking people through the same problems over and over. But… that’s what helping people is like. That’s how we teach people in schools. We don’t just point them to textbooks. Active discords tend to have people that are willing to do this.
> They can’t even identify the key elements of their problem.
I wrote the original comment. I also went to therapy where my provider introduced me to a framework called Non-Violent Communication. It’s a four part process and the last is an explicit request. And a valid request is always “help me figure out how to ask a better question.”
Stack overflow culture sucks, but believe it or not it’s better than what came before.
I’m glad that you’re getting help on discord. To me the ultimate goal of writing questions is to never need to post them. In that: once you can craft the perfect question … then the answer becomes self evident. Usually the more effort I put into a question, the more help I get out of an answer. And I feel that’s a good thing.
I feel that you lose that introspection and self iteration when getting help via chat. When I give someone a debugging suggestion (I teach college, elementary school, and have worked in a support role for over a decade) I never want the person to simply tell me what happened. I.e. I don’t want to remote pair program where they run commands and tell me the results. I’m always aiming to teach them via a hypothesis. I want them to take the new evidence and give me their analysis. So I can possibly correct their misunderstandings and get a glimpse into their thought process. While that process can happen in chat. It’s more suited to people who respond quickly rather than those who are looking for maximum depth. You’re also limited to only the people online at that exact moment.
I think there is value in getting help from chat. Developers also need to learn how to deeply inspect and debug complicated issues. I developed those skills as a byproduct of async forum culture and years of self study. I feel we need to find a way to train devs for some of these accidental skills that old timers picked up accidentally.
I’ve never understood how Discord and Slack work. Is the expectation that one is constantly monitoring it? Is the expectation that when one occasionally visits that all unread content is carefully read? Is using search somehow the key?
In a business context yeah it’s an attention stealing notification thing
But I mean more development communities that organize around pieces of tech. The idea is people voluntarily just hang out in the chat and respond to people in real time. There’s no obligation. You probably won’t get an answer if you don’t get one in the first couple hours. But in an active community you’ll likely get acknowledged quickly enough, at least with someone saying that your problem is non-trivial and that you’ll need to look at X to figure it out.
Such communities are often not designed for solving difficult problems so much as helping people get through the basics.
"In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."
Copy-paste, copy-paste. No real understanding of the solutions, even for areas of my expertise. I just don't feel like understanding the flood of information, without any real purpose behind the understanding. While I probably (?) get done more, I also just don't enjoy it. But I also can't go back to googling for hours now that this ready-made solution exists.
I wish it would have never been invented.
(Obviously scoped to my enjoyment of hobbyist projects, let's keep AI cancer research out of the picture..)
I’ve gotten into this mode too, but often when I do this, I eventually find myself in a rabbit hole dead end that the AI unwittingly lead me into. So I’m slowing down and using them to understand the code better. Unfortunately, all the tools are optimized for vibe coding, getting the quick answer without understanding, so it feels like I’m fighting the tools.
I'm old enough to remember myriad of experts 10+ years ago who were active selling a view, that smartphones with constantly connected social media will change everything, we just have to learn to use it wisely.
They weren't wrong. Unfortunately, we didn't use it wisely and obliterated objective reality and allowed people to create spaces where they never have to engage with anything challenging.
This isn't smartphones, it's the Internet. The only reason that smartphones made a difference is that way more people use online services on mobile than would've done the same on the Internet.
The convenience and ubiquity lead to a step change.
And AI will be no different. People will rush head first into the fire and be flabbergasted when all of the hype and promise of utopia results in utter chaos and inequality.
If we assume that civilization is already teetering thanks to the smartphone/social media, the fallout of AI would make Thomas Cole blush.
Technologies are regularly predicted to diminish a capability that was previously considered important.
Babbage came up with the ideas for his engines after getting frustrated with log tables - how many people reading this have used a log table or calculated one recently?
Calculators meant kids wouldn't need to do arithmetic by hand any more and so would not be able to do maths. In truth they just didn't have to do it by hand any more - they still needed the skills to interpret the results, they just didn't have to do the hard work of creating the outputs by pen and paper.
They also lost the skill of using slide rules which were used to give us approximations, because calculators allowed us to be precise - they were no longer needed.
Computers, similar story.
Then the same came with search engines in our pockets. "Oh no, people can find an answer to anything in seconds, they won't remember things". This is borne out, there have been studies that show recall diminishes if your phone is even in the same room. But you still need to know what to look for, and know what to do with what you find.
I think this'll still be true in the future, and I think TFA kind of agrees, but seems to be doing the "all may be lost" vibe by insisting that you still need foundational skills. You don't need to know the foundational skills if you want to know what the answer to 24923 * 923 is, you can quickly find out the answer and use that answer however you need.
I just think the work shifts - you'll still need to know how to craft your inputs carefully (vibe coding works better if you develop a more detailed specification), and you'll still need to process the output, but you'll become less connected to the foundation and for 99% of the time, that's absolutely fine in the same way it has been with calculators, and so on.
> This idea summarizes why I disagree with those who equate the LLM revolution to the rise of search engines, like Google in the 90s. Search enginers offer a good choice between Exploration (crawl through the list and pages of results) and Exploitation (click on the top result).
> LLMs, however, do not give this choice, and tend to encourage immediate exploitation instead. Users may explore if the first solution does not work, but the first choice is always to exploit.
Well said, and an interesting idea, but most of my LLM usage (besides copilot autocomplete) is actually very search-engine-esque. I ask it to explain existing design decisions, or to search for a library that fits my needs, or come up with related queries so I can learn more.
Once I've chosen a library or an approach for the task, I'll have the LLM write out some code. For anything significantly more substantive code than copilot completions, I almost always do some exploring before I exploit.
I’m finding the same usage of LLMs in terms of what actually I use them for day to day. When I need to look up arcane information, an LLM generally does better than a Google search.
How do you verify the accuracy of "arcane information" produced by an LLM?
"Arcane Information" is absolutely the worst possible use case I can imagine for LLMs right now. You might as well ask an intern to just make something up
Phrasing LLMs as encouraging exploitation is important, because they can still be powerful tools for exploration. The difference comes in the interface for LLMs, which is heavily focused on exploitation whereas search engine interfaces encourage exploration.
Newer models often end responses with questions and thoughts that encourage exploration, as do features like ChatGPT's follow up suggestions. However, a lot of work needs to be done with LLM interfaces to balance exploitation and exploration while avoiding limiting AI's capabilities.
> LLMs, however, do not give this choice, and tend to encourage immediate exploitation instead. Users may explore if the first solution does not work, but the first choice is always to exploit.
You can ask the llm to generate a number of solutions though - the exploration is possible and relatively easy then.
And I say that as someone who dislikes llms with a passion.
This article makes no sense. It criticizes current LLMs and then without stopping for a second pretends future LLMs will have these problems. Even though hallucination levels have been going down with every generation. Even though every test and benchmark we can come up with, LLMs do better with every generation.
> Even though hallucination levels have been going down with every generation.
Gonna need a BIG citation on that one, chief.
> Even though every test and benchmark we can come up with, LLMs do better with every generation.
Has it occurred to you the people making the tests and benchmarks are, more often than not, the same people making the LLM? Like yeah if I'm given carte blanche to make my own test cases and I'm accountable to no one and nothing else, my output quality would be steadily going up too.
The other day I tried asking Copilot for a good framework for accomplishing a task, and it made one up. I tried the query again, more specifically, and it referred me to a framework in another language. And yes, I specified.
I frequent Hacker News and have not noticed that much buzz around AI and LLMs. The vast bulk of that buzz is insubstantial and therefore off topic here. Sites like LinkedIn on the other hand are overrun with the swill.
On the other hand: with thinking models, agents, and future models to come we are offloading the exploration phase to the models themselves. It really depends on constraints and pressures.
For new developers wanting to learn to code, AI is great today to help them. For experienced developers AI is also great because it can write tons of code for us that we already know how to evaluate and test, because of years of experience doing it in the "pre-AI" world.
However the future is uncertain, when we reach a point where most developers have used generated code most of their lives, and never developed the coding skills that are required to fully understand the code.
I guess we'll adapt to it. We always do. I mean for example, I can no longer do long division on paper like I did in elementary school, so I rely totally on computers for all calculating.
People will need AI just to communicate in a polite manner! What is todays politically correct language? Who is current approved celebrity? What if you quoted something, that is somehow offensive today?!
No, skill for future is using AI to carve out safe space for yourself, so you can focus without distractions!
Losing focus as a skill is something I see with every batch of new students. It’s not just LLMs, almost every app and startup is competing for the same limited attention from every user.
What LLMs have done for most of my students is remove all the barriers to an answer they once had to work for. It’s easy to get hooked on fast answers and forget to ask why something works. That said, I think LLMs can support exploration—often beyond what Googling ever did—if we approach them the right way.
I’ve seen moments where students pushed back on a first answer and uncovered deeper insights, but only because they chose to dig. The real danger isn’t the tool, it’s forgetting how to use it thoughtfully.
I feel that respecting the focus of others is also an important skill.
If I'm pulled 27 different ways. Then when I finally get around to another engineer’s question “I need help” is a demand for my synchronous time and focus. Versus “I’m having problems with X, I need to Y, can you help me Z” could turn into a chat, or it could mean I’m able to deliver the needed information at once and move on. Many people these days don’t even bother to write questions. They write statements and expect you to infer the question from the statement.
On the flip side, a thing we could learn more from LLMs is how to give a good response by explaining our reasoning out loud. Not “do X” but instead “It sounds like you want to W, and that’s blocked by Y. That is happening because of Z. To fix it you need to X because it …”
> Many people these days don’t even bother to write questions. They write statements and expect you to infer the question from the statement.
This is one of my biggest pet peeves. Not even asking for help just stating a complaint.
Well it seems like an easy way to filter them into the ignore pile…
Yes and no. Although I’m a proponent of the “put the pain where it belongs” way of doing things, sometimes a more nuanced way of doing things is needed. This usually involves more communication instead of less. You can always give them feedback that (may) make them reconsider their approach of just stating things and not asking questions. Small effort for you, but you might change someone’s way of asking things, both for the good of you and them. If that doesn’t work, you can always go back to ignoring.
I can’t ignore customer support tickets.
Usually the most frantic and urgent tickets are the ones that also provide the least info too. Which is frustrating as it usually adds some extra back and forth which means it ultimately takes longer to resolve their tickets.
There is also generally a correlation to spend and question quality.
> It’s easy to get hooked on fast answers and forget to ask why something works
This is really a tragedy because the current technology is arguably one of the best things in existence for explaining "why?" to someone in a very personalized way. With application of discipline from my side, I can make the LLM lecture me until I genuinely understand the underlying principles of something. I keep hammering it with edge cases and hypotheticals until it comes back with "Exactly! ..." after reiterating my current understanding.
The challenge for educators seems the same as it has always been - How do you make the student want to dig deeper? What does it take to turn someone into a strong skeptic regarding tools or technology?
I'd propose the use of hallucinations as an educational tool. Put together a really nasty scenario (i.e., provoke a hallucination on purpose on behalf of the students that goes under their radar). Let them run with a misapprehension of the world for several weeks. Give them a test or lab assignment regarding this misapprehension. Fail 100% of the class on this assignment and have a special lecture afterward. Anyone who doesn't "get it" after this point should probably be filtered out anyways.
I'm not sure if hammering an LLM until it agrees with you is the best way to get to the truth.
> with edge cases and hypotheticals
not
> conclusions I want to see
The point is to be adversarial with your own ideas, not the opposite thing.
So, just persist with your own ideas until it agrees with you, because eventually it always will. Then take that as a lesson?
In a way, I think it shows why "superfluous" things like sports and art are so important in school. In those activities, there are no quick answers. You need to persist through the initial learning curve and slow physical adaptation just to get baseline competency. You're not going to get a violin to stop sounding like a dying cat unless you accept that it's a gradual focused process.
Sports and art aren't superfluous: they teach gross and fine (respectively) motor skills. School isn't just about developing cognitive skills or brainwashing students into political orthodoxies: it's also about teaching students how to control their bodies in general and specific muscle groups, like the hands, in particular. Art is one way of training the hands; music is another (manipulating anything from a triangle to a violin), as is handwriting. Without that training. Students may well not get enough of that dexterity training at home, particularly in the age of tablets [0].
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43230884
With a bit more focus you might not have missed OP's point
> You're not going to get a violin to stop sounding like a dying cat unless you accept that it's a gradual focused process.
You can sample that shit and make some loops in your DAW. Or just use a generative AI nowadays.
There are many ways to be a skillless hack, but why celebrate it?
Using a DAW makes you a "skilless hack"?
Beats me. You might ask Sam Altman and the other AI hype clowns. They're the authors of this hot take.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b9/MagrittePipe....
You can also just sit in the corner and never make anything. So what?
> Losing focus as a skill is something I see with every batch of new students.
Gaining focus as a skill is something to work on with every batch of new students
We're on the same page. I'm turning that around to say: let's remember focus isn't something we're naturally born with, it has to be built. Worked on hard. People coming to that task are increasingly damaged/injured imho.
This is my constant concern these days and it makes me wonder if grading needs to change in order to alleviate some of the pressure to get the right answer so that students can focus on how.
Using aimbot in Gunbound didn't make players better. Yes, it changed everything: it destroyed the game ecosystem.
Can humanity use "literacy aimbot" responsibly? I don't know.
It's just a cautionary tale. I'm not expecting to win an argument. I could come up with counter anectdotes myself:
ABS made breaking in slippery conditions easier and safer. People didn't learned to brake better, they still pushed the pedal harder thinking it would make it stop faster, not realizing the complex dynamics of "making a car stop". That changed everything. It made cars safer.
Also, just an anecdote.
Sure, a lot of people need focus. Some people don't, they need to branch out. Some systems need aimbot (like ABS), some don't (like Gunbound).
The future should be home to all kinds of skills.
Appreciate the balanced take. An improvement to a technology can be good, or it can be harmful - and beyond a certain point, further amplification can destroy society and the commons which we all benefit from.
Coca leaves are a relatively benign part of daily life in Peru & a few other surrounding countries - they’re on the table in your hotel lobby, ready to be stirred into your tea. But cocaine - same base but made more intense with technology - causes many problems - and don’t even start about crack cocaine.
So when thinking of technology through the lens of what it amplifies we can consider traditional Internet research & writing contrasted vs. using AI - the latter gives instant answers and often an instant first draft.
Great for some; harmful for others. Where that point lies and what factors contribute is different for every individual.
You are right in the sense that addiction and overuse are common concerns regarding new technologies.
Similar concerns existed for the TV and video-games, for example.
The idea of a balance works if you put the problem on a spectrum. "Too much, then it's bad" is a general good advice for anything.
In high school, I started learning geometry. I was puzzled by the angles in the exercises always being 30, 60, 90, 120 (notable angles). I tried a lot to come up with something that could work outside notable angles on my own. I figured that it would be on the next class (it never got there), until I gave up and asked my math teacher. She also didn't knew how to do it by hand. Until this day I don't know.
That's probably due to calculators existing. If they didn't, we would be forced to know. Maybe I would have failed that class and had to work harder, maybe not. I will never know.
There is no such thing as an addiction to calculators. I am not against them. I don't think there are too many calculators in the world. Good, honest tech.
However, I wish doing some math outside notable angles were in my high school curriculum. My teacher was kind and helped curious students. I wish she knew how to do it so she could teach me.
I know that now I could learn that on the internet, or ask an LLM to explain it to me. Notable angles are not the point, right? Just another anecdote.
I chose Gunbound aimbot as an example of something that is not good, not even a little bit. Not because aimbot is addictive (it's the contrary, cheating takes away the reward sensation), but because it unbalanced the game ecosystem. No one could beat the cheaters, who rapidly reached a plateau themselves. If everyone used aimbot, there was no reason to play it, to learn the quirks of each character, to practice, to train your skills.
It's just an anecdote. I tend to stay away from those, but sometimes they're useful.
Regarding focus now, the "skill of the future" and its relation to AI:
We always needed focus. It is as skill of the past too, not tied to a niche tech, not the only human skill, not a point in a spectrum.
Hmm... maybe because these notable angles are also those of which the associated trigonometric values are round(ish), and so it's about first learning those by heart ? (Like you learn the multiplication table by heart before doing multi-digit multiplications.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unit_circle_angles_colo...
I'm definitely gonna get hate for saying this but: the rise of coding with LLM assistants is going to worsen an issue our industry is already struggling with: we have tons of developers out there who do not know their fundamentals in programming, who are utterly rudderless without heaps upon heaps of framework code doing lots of work for them, who are now being further enabled by machines that write even that code for them with some tweaking afterwards.
I have interacted with software developers at conferences who cannot do basic things with computers, like navigate file systems, or make changes to the Windows registry, where to get and how to use environment variables, how to diagnose and fix PC issues... Like in a perfect world your IT department sorts this stuff for you but I struggle to take seriously someone who claims to create software who seemingly lacks basic computer literacy in a number of areas.
And I'm sorry, "it compiles and runs" is the bare fucking minimum for software quality. We have machines these days that would run circles around my first PC in the late 90's, but despite that, everything is slower and runs worse. My desktop messaging apps are each currently sucking up over 600 MB of RAM apiece, which is nearly 3 times what my original PC had total. Everything is some bloated shite that requires internet access now at all times or it utterly crashes and dies, and I'm sorry but I cannot separate in my mind the fact that we have seemingly a large contingent of software developers out there that can't bloody use computers to thank for this. And cheap-ass management, to be clear, but I think these are nested problems.
I don't think it's necessarily worsening, it's just becoming more evident.
The way I conceptualize this is that there are two kinds of knowledge. The first is fundamental knowledge. If you learn what is computational complexity and how to use it, or what is linear algebra and why do we care, then you're left with something. The second is what I call "transient" knowledge (I made up the word). If you learn by heart the DOM manipulation methods you have to invoke to make a webpage shiny (or, let's be real, the API of some framework), or what is the difference between datetime and datetime2 in SQL Server 2017, then it looks like you know how to do stuff, but none of those things are fundamental to the way the underlying technologies work: they are mostly pieces of trivia that are the way they are because of historical happenstance rather than actual technical reasons.
To be effective at any given day job, one might need to learn a few pieces of knowledge of the second kind, but one should never confuse them for actual, real understanding. The problem is that the first kind can't be learned from youtube videos in increments of 15 minutes.
That's what LLMs are exposing, IMO. If you don't know what is the syntax for lambdas in C# or how to structure components in React, any LLM will give you perfectly working code. If your code crumbles to pieces because you didn't design your database correctly or you're doing useless computations, you won't even know what you don't know.
This transcends software development, by the way. We talk about how problem solving is a skill, but in my experience is more like physical form: if you don't keep yourself in shape, you won't be when you need it. I see this a lot in kids: the best ones are much smarter than I was at their age, the average struggles with long division.
A guy I work with calls transient knowledge "arcana," I've come to appreciate the concept. Now I'm aware of when I'm generating arcana for other people to learn :)
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> It compiles and runs
…and rapidly becomes deprecated not due to quality but because the requirements for operation or development changed substantially. This second order effects make the “compile and run” focus paradoxically efficient and correct use of resources. Engineers, especially academically experienced ones, prematurely optimize for correctness and arbitrary dimensions of quality because they are disconnected from and motivated by interests orthogonal to their users.
> …and rapidly becomes deprecated not due to quality but because the requirements for operation or development changed substantially.
Did they? Like I have no data for this nor would I know how one would set about getting it, but like, from my personal experience and the experiences of folks I've spoken to for basically my entire career, the requirements we have for our software barely change at all. I do not expect Outlook to have chat and reaction functionality. I do not desire Windows to monitor my ongoing usage of my computer to make suggestions on how I might work more efficiently. These things were not requested by me or any user I have ever spoken to. In fact I would take that a step further and say that if your scope and requirements are shifting that wildly, that often, that you did a poor job of finding them in the first place, irrespective of where they've now landed.
They are far more often the hysterical tinkerings demanded by product managers who must justify their salaries with some notion of what's "next" for Outlook, because for some reason someone at Microsoft decided that Outlook being a feature complete and good email client was suddenly, for no particular reason, not good enough anymore.
And again speaking from my and friend's experiences, I would in fact love it very much thank you if Microsoft would just make their products good, function well, look nice and be nice to use, and then stop. Provide security updates of course, maybe an occasional UI refresh if you've got some really good ideas for it, but apart from that, just stop changing it. Let it be feature complete, quality software.
> Engineers, especially academically experienced ones, prematurely optimize for correctness and arbitrary dimensions of quality because they are disconnected from and motivated by interests orthogonal to their users.
I don't think we're disconnected at all from our users. I want, as a software developer, to turn out quality software that does the job we say it does on the box. My users, citation many conversations with many of them, want the software to do what it says on the box, and do it well. These motivations are not orthogonal at all. Now, certainly it's possible to get so lost in the minutia of design that one loses the plot, that's definitely where a good project manager will shine. However, to say these are different concerns entirely is IMO, a bridge too far. My users probably don't give a shit about the technical minutia of implementing a given feature: they care if it works. However, if I implement it correctly, with the standards I know to work well for that technology, then I will be happy, and they will be happy.
MS produces some very good software, like .net core, garnet etc. Their biggest asset is however Marketing. They have perfected selling software, no matter how bad it is.
Their end-user software ranges from "bad but could be worse" to "outlandish crap that should be illegal to ship". Their user base however doesn't know much better, and decision makers in commercial settings have different priorities (choosing MS would not be held against you).
But even in tech circles MS Windows is still used. I know the excuses. MS can continue focusing their efforts productising the clueless user that doesn't understand anything and doesn't give a shit about all the leaks, brittle drivers, performance degradation, registry cluttering etc. MS follows the right $$ strategy, their numbers don't lie.
> They have perfected selling software, no matter how bad it is.
I agree in general with that statement, but we also need to acknowledge that those sales occur within a market that unequivocally endorses their products as "the standard," irrespective of quality, and further still the vast, vast, vast majority of their sold licenses are in corporate environments, where the people making the purchasing decisions and the people utilizing the software are rhetorically different species. I would be shocked if you could find a single person who prefers Teams to Slack, yet tons of organizations use Teams, not because it's good, but because it comes bundled with 365 services, and you're already paying for Outlook, OneDrive, Word, and Excel at the minimum. And you're certainly not going to not have those pieces of software... and therein lies the problem.
> MS can continue focusing their efforts productising the clueless user that doesn't understand anything and doesn't give a shit about all the leaks, brittle drivers, performance degradation, registry cluttering etc.
But they do give a shit. There's just no meaningful alternative. I run into people who absolutely 100% give a shit and are incredibly frustrated at just how BAD computing is lately, even if they lack the vocabulary to explain massive memory mismanagement means their phone gets hot in their hand when they're just reading goddamn text messages, they still understand that it sucks and it wasn't always like this.
> MS follows the right $$ strategy, their numbers don't lie.
That statement however is so vague it's unfalsifiable. We do know Microsoft has previously "lost" battles with individual applications in individual fields, it is completely believable that they could again and more (the entire XBox division comes to mind). What Microsoft has truly mastered is anti-competitive business practices that hobble their competition from the word go, and make it more or less impossible to compete with them on a software quality axis.
The only office suites I know of that even have numbers that are visible next to Microsoft are LibreOffice and the Apple suite, neither of which are actually sold at all.
> Search enginers offer a good choice between Exploration (crawl through the list and pages of results) and Exploitation (click on the top result). LLMs, however, do not give this choice.
I've actually found that LLMs are great at exploration for me. I'd argue, even better than exploitation. I've solved many a complex problem by using an LLM as a thought partner. I've refined many ideas by getting the LLM to brainstorm with me. There's this awesome feedback loop you can create with the LLM when you're in exploration mode that is impossible to replicate on your own, and still somewhat difficult even with a human thought partner.
I'm kind of in the same boat.
I've started doing something that I have been meaning to do for years, which is to go through all the seminal papers on concurrency and make a minimal implementation of them. I did Raft recently, then Lamport timestamps, then a lot of the common Mutex algorithms, then Paxos, and now I'm working on Ambient Calculus.
I've attempted this before, but I would always get stuck on some detail that I didn't fully grasp in the paper and would abandon the project. Using ChatGPT, I've been able to unblock myself much easier. I will ask it to clarify stuff in the paper, and sometimes it doesn't even matter if it's "wrong", so much as it's giving me some form of feedback and helps me think of other ideas on how to fix things.
Doing this, I manage to actually finish these projects, and I think I more or less understand them, and I certainly understand them more than I would have had I abandoned them a quarter of the way through like I usually do.
I was a skeptic until I started seeing it this way. I do think that this is exactly why we’ve seen LLMs overtake search engines so quickly in the last 12-18 months. They allow a feedback loop that just doesn’t exist scrolling and clicking.
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Being allowed to focus seems to be a privilege these days.
When I started in the 90s I could work on something for weeks without much interruption. These days there is almost always some scrum master, project manager or random other manager who wants to get an update or do some planning. Doing actual work seems to have taken a backseat to talking about work.
The flip side of focus (to me) is responsiveness. A post to SO might deliver me the exact answer I need, but it will take focus to write the correct question and patience to wait for a response and then time spent iterating in the comments. In contrast an LLM will happily tell me the wrong thing, instantaneously. It’s responsive.
Good engineers must also be responsive to their teammates, managers, customers, and the business. Great engineers also find a way to weave in periods of focus.
I’m curious how others navigate these?
It seems there was a large culture shift when Covid hit and non-async non-remote people all moved online and expected online to work like in person. I feel pushed to be more responsive at the cost of focus. On the flip side, I’ve given time and space to engineers so they could focus only to come back and find they had abused that time and trust. Or some well meaning engineers got lost in the weeds and lost the narrative of *why* they were focusing. It is super easy to measure responsiveness: how long did it take to respond. It’s much harder to measure quality and growth. Especially when being vulnerable about what you don’t know or the failure to make progress is a truly senior level skill.
How do we find balance?
Notification blindness.
I've been struggling with finding balance for years as a front-line manager who codes. I need to be responsive-ish to incoming queries but also have my own tasks. If I am too responsive, it's easy for my work to become my evening time and my working hours for everybody else.
The "weaving" in of periods of focus is maintained by ignoring notifications and checking them in batches. Nobody gets to interrupt me when I'm in focus mode (much chagrin for my wife) and I can actually get stuff done. This happened a lot by accident, I get enough notifications for long enough that I don't really hear or notice them just like I don't hear or notice the trains that pass near my house.
This also worked for me. I flipped to permanent DND mode with clear communication I check notifications at specific times of day.
There are very few notifications that can’t wait a few hours for my attention and those that cannot have the expectation of being a phone call.
I built a distributed software engineering firm pre-covid, so all of our clients were onsite even though we were full-remote. My engineers plugged into the engineering teams of our clients, so it's not like we were building on the side and just handing over deliverables, we had to fully integrate into the client teams.
So we had to solve this problem pre-covid, and the solution remained the same during the pandemic when every org went full remote (at least temporarily).
There is no "one size fits all approach" because each engineer is different. We had dozens of engineers on our team, and you learn that people are very diverse in how they think/operate.
But we came up with a framework that was really successful.
1) Good faith is required: you mention personnel abusing time/trust, that's a different issue entirely, no framework will be successful if people refuse to comply. This system only works if teammates trust the person. Terminate someone who can't be trusted.
2) "Know thyself": Many engineers wouldn't necessarily even know how THEY operated best (if they needed large chunks of focus time, or were fine multi-tasking, etc). We'd have them make a best guess when onboarding and then iterate and update as they figured out how they worked best.
3) Proactively Propagate Communication Standard: Most engineers would want large chunks of uninterrupted focus time, so we would tell them to EXPLICITLY tell their teammates or any other stakeholders WHEN they would be focusing and unresponsive (standardize it via schedule), and WHY (ie sell the idea). Bad feelings or optics are ALWAYS simply a matter of miscommunication so long as good faith exists. We'd also have them explain "escalation patterns", ie "if something is truly urgent, DM me on slack a few times and finally, call my phone."
4) Set comms status: Really this is just slack/teams. but basically as a soft reminder to stakeholders, set your slack status to "heads down building" or something so people remember that you aren't available due to focus time. It's really easy to sync slack status to calendar blocks to automate this.
We also found that breaking the day into async task time and sync task time really helped optimize. Async tasks are tasks that can get completed in small chunks of time like code review, checking email, slack, etc. These might be large time sinks in aggregate, but generally you can break into small time blocks and still be successful. We would have people set up their day so all the async tasks would be done when they are already paying a context switching cost. IE, scheduled agile cadence meetings etc. If you're doing a standup meeting, you're already gonna be knocked out of flow so might as well use this time to also do PR review, async comms, etc. Naturally we had people stack their meetings when possible instead of pepper throughout the day (more on how this was accomplished below).
Anyways, sometimes when an engineer of ours joined a new team, there might be a political challenge in not fitting into the existing "mold" of how that team communicated (if that team's comm standard didn't jive with our engineer's). This quickly resolved every single time when our engineer was proven out to be much more productive/effective than the existing engineers (who were kneecapped by the terrible distracting existing standard of meetings, constant slack interruptions, etc). We would even go as far as to tell stakeholders our engineers would not be attending less important meetings (not immediately, once we had already proven ourselves a bit). The optics around this weren't great at first, but again, our engineers would start 1.5-2X'ing productivity of the in-house engineers, and political issues melt away very quickly.
TL;DR - Operate in good faith, decide your own best communication standard, propagate the standard out to your stakeholders explicitly, deliver and people will respect you and also your comms standard.
This is why I honestly like discord over forums
When you’re on the asking side, sure, instant gratification is great. On the answering side, not so much. Chat interfaces are not a good fit for anything you may have to mull over for a while, or do some investigation before answering, and for anything where multiple such threads may occur in parallel, or that you want to reference later.
I don’t agree
The thing is that most people seeking help are not able to form their question effectively. They can’t even identify the key elements of their problem.
They _need_ help with people trying to parse out their actual problem. Stack Overflow actively tells you to fuck off if you can’t form your question to their standards, and unsurprisingly that’s not very helpful to people that are struggling.
You will need to repeat walking people through the same problems over and over. But… that’s what helping people is like. That’s how we teach people in schools. We don’t just point them to textbooks. Active discords tend to have people that are willing to do this.
> They can’t even identify the key elements of their problem.
I wrote the original comment. I also went to therapy where my provider introduced me to a framework called Non-Violent Communication. It’s a four part process and the last is an explicit request. And a valid request is always “help me figure out how to ask a better question.”
Stack overflow culture sucks, but believe it or not it’s better than what came before.
I’m glad that you’re getting help on discord. To me the ultimate goal of writing questions is to never need to post them. In that: once you can craft the perfect question … then the answer becomes self evident. Usually the more effort I put into a question, the more help I get out of an answer. And I feel that’s a good thing.
I feel that you lose that introspection and self iteration when getting help via chat. When I give someone a debugging suggestion (I teach college, elementary school, and have worked in a support role for over a decade) I never want the person to simply tell me what happened. I.e. I don’t want to remote pair program where they run commands and tell me the results. I’m always aiming to teach them via a hypothesis. I want them to take the new evidence and give me their analysis. So I can possibly correct their misunderstandings and get a glimpse into their thought process. While that process can happen in chat. It’s more suited to people who respond quickly rather than those who are looking for maximum depth. You’re also limited to only the people online at that exact moment.
I think there is value in getting help from chat. Developers also need to learn how to deeply inspect and debug complicated issues. I developed those skills as a byproduct of async forum culture and years of self study. I feel we need to find a way to train devs for some of these accidental skills that old timers picked up accidentally.
I’ve never understood how Discord and Slack work. Is the expectation that one is constantly monitoring it? Is the expectation that when one occasionally visits that all unread content is carefully read? Is using search somehow the key?
In a business context yeah it’s an attention stealing notification thing
But I mean more development communities that organize around pieces of tech. The idea is people voluntarily just hang out in the chat and respond to people in real time. There’s no obligation. You probably won’t get an answer if you don’t get one in the first couple hours. But in an active community you’ll likely get acknowledged quickly enough, at least with someone saying that your problem is non-trivial and that you’ll need to look at X to figure it out.
Such communities are often not designed for solving difficult problems so much as helping people get through the basics.
"In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."
Herbert Simon (1971)
When I use LLMs, I quickly lose focus.
Copy-paste, copy-paste. No real understanding of the solutions, even for areas of my expertise. I just don't feel like understanding the flood of information, without any real purpose behind the understanding. While I probably (?) get done more, I also just don't enjoy it. But I also can't go back to googling for hours now that this ready-made solution exists.
I wish it would have never been invented.
(Obviously scoped to my enjoyment of hobbyist projects, let's keep AI cancer research out of the picture..)
I’ve gotten into this mode too, but often when I do this, I eventually find myself in a rabbit hole dead end that the AI unwittingly lead me into. So I’m slowing down and using them to understand the code better. Unfortunately, all the tools are optimized for vibe coding, getting the quick answer without understanding, so it feels like I’m fighting the tools.
I recommend using them to ask questions about why something works rather than spit out code. They excel at that a lot of the time.
I'm old enough to remember myriad of experts 10+ years ago who were active selling a view, that smartphones with constantly connected social media will change everything, we just have to learn to use it wisely.
They weren't wrong. Unfortunately, we didn't use it wisely and obliterated objective reality and allowed people to create spaces where they never have to engage with anything challenging.
This isn't smartphones, it's the Internet. The only reason that smartphones made a difference is that way more people use online services on mobile than would've done the same on the Internet.
The convenience and ubiquity lead to a step change.
And AI will be no different. People will rush head first into the fire and be flabbergasted when all of the hype and promise of utopia results in utter chaos and inequality.
If we assume that civilization is already teetering thanks to the smartphone/social media, the fallout of AI would make Thomas Cole blush.
It did change everything
[dead]
It's going to be a different kind of focus.
Technologies are regularly predicted to diminish a capability that was previously considered important.
Babbage came up with the ideas for his engines after getting frustrated with log tables - how many people reading this have used a log table or calculated one recently?
Calculators meant kids wouldn't need to do arithmetic by hand any more and so would not be able to do maths. In truth they just didn't have to do it by hand any more - they still needed the skills to interpret the results, they just didn't have to do the hard work of creating the outputs by pen and paper.
They also lost the skill of using slide rules which were used to give us approximations, because calculators allowed us to be precise - they were no longer needed.
Computers, similar story.
Then the same came with search engines in our pockets. "Oh no, people can find an answer to anything in seconds, they won't remember things". This is borne out, there have been studies that show recall diminishes if your phone is even in the same room. But you still need to know what to look for, and know what to do with what you find.
I think this'll still be true in the future, and I think TFA kind of agrees, but seems to be doing the "all may be lost" vibe by insisting that you still need foundational skills. You don't need to know the foundational skills if you want to know what the answer to 24923 * 923 is, you can quickly find out the answer and use that answer however you need.
I just think the work shifts - you'll still need to know how to craft your inputs carefully (vibe coding works better if you develop a more detailed specification), and you'll still need to process the output, but you'll become less connected to the foundation and for 99% of the time, that's absolutely fine in the same way it has been with calculators, and so on.
> This idea summarizes why I disagree with those who equate the LLM revolution to the rise of search engines, like Google in the 90s. Search enginers offer a good choice between Exploration (crawl through the list and pages of results) and Exploitation (click on the top result). > LLMs, however, do not give this choice, and tend to encourage immediate exploitation instead. Users may explore if the first solution does not work, but the first choice is always to exploit.
Well said, and an interesting idea, but most of my LLM usage (besides copilot autocomplete) is actually very search-engine-esque. I ask it to explain existing design decisions, or to search for a library that fits my needs, or come up with related queries so I can learn more.
Once I've chosen a library or an approach for the task, I'll have the LLM write out some code. For anything significantly more substantive code than copilot completions, I almost always do some exploring before I exploit.
I’m finding the same usage of LLMs in terms of what actually I use them for day to day. When I need to look up arcane information, an LLM generally does better than a Google search.
How do you verify the accuracy of "arcane information" produced by an LLM?
"Arcane Information" is absolutely the worst possible use case I can imagine for LLMs right now. You might as well ask an intern to just make something up
Phrasing LLMs as encouraging exploitation is important, because they can still be powerful tools for exploration. The difference comes in the interface for LLMs, which is heavily focused on exploitation whereas search engine interfaces encourage exploration.
Newer models often end responses with questions and thoughts that encourage exploration, as do features like ChatGPT's follow up suggestions. However, a lot of work needs to be done with LLM interfaces to balance exploitation and exploration while avoiding limiting AI's capabilities.
> LLMs, however, do not give this choice, and tend to encourage immediate exploitation instead. Users may explore if the first solution does not work, but the first choice is always to exploit.
You can ask the llm to generate a number of solutions though - the exploration is possible and relatively easy then.
And I say that as someone who dislikes llms with a passion.
This article makes no sense. It criticizes current LLMs and then without stopping for a second pretends future LLMs will have these problems. Even though hallucination levels have been going down with every generation. Even though every test and benchmark we can come up with, LLMs do better with every generation.
> Even though hallucination levels have been going down with every generation.
Gonna need a BIG citation on that one, chief.
> Even though every test and benchmark we can come up with, LLMs do better with every generation.
Has it occurred to you the people making the tests and benchmarks are, more often than not, the same people making the LLM? Like yeah if I'm given carte blanche to make my own test cases and I'm accountable to no one and nothing else, my output quality would be steadily going up too.
The other day I tried asking Copilot for a good framework for accomplishing a task, and it made one up. I tried the query again, more specifically, and it referred me to a framework in another language. And yes, I specified.
> Gonna need a BIG citation on that one, chief.
OP has consumed so much LLM they’ve started to hallucinate themselves
Perhaps the real hallucinations were the friends we made along the way
> Future bicycles will fly. Just two more rounds of venture capital investment, trust the plan.
To be fair, we went from the invention of the bicycle to a (wheeled) flying apparatus within a shockingly short amount of time.
Yeah, but not by dumping a billion bucks into bicycle venture capital funds.
I frequent Hacker News and have not noticed that much buzz around AI and LLMs. The vast bulk of that buzz is insubstantial and therefore off topic here. Sites like LinkedIn on the other hand are overrun with the swill.
On the other hand: with thinking models, agents, and future models to come we are offloading the exploration phase to the models themselves. It really depends on constraints and pressures.
For new developers wanting to learn to code, AI is great today to help them. For experienced developers AI is also great because it can write tons of code for us that we already know how to evaluate and test, because of years of experience doing it in the "pre-AI" world.
However the future is uncertain, when we reach a point where most developers have used generated code most of their lives, and never developed the coding skills that are required to fully understand the code.
I guess we'll adapt to it. We always do. I mean for example, I can no longer do long division on paper like I did in elementary school, so I rely totally on computers for all calculating.
The number one skill in the future is the ability to predict the future
Always has been
Good read!
the Exploitation and exploration got me thinking, what if LLM generate, say, 5 results at a time and let user choose the best
I have that experience plenty with gpt and gemini
People will need AI just to communicate in a polite manner! What is todays politically correct language? Who is current approved celebrity? What if you quoted something, that is somehow offensive today?!
No, skill for future is using AI to carve out safe space for yourself, so you can focus without distractions!