The problem is that LLMs stop working after a certain point of complexity or specificity, which is very obvious once you try to use it in a field you have deep understanding of. At this point, your own skills should be able to carry you forward, but if you've been using an LLM to do things for you since the start, you won't have the necessary skills.

Once they have to solve a novel problem that was not already solved for all intentes and purposes, Alice will be able to apply her skillset to that, whereas Bob will just run into a wall when the LLM starts producing garbage.

It seems to me that "high-skill human" > "LLM" > "low-skill human", the trap is that people with low levels of skills will see a fast improvement of their output, at the hidden cost of that slow build-up of skills that has a way higher ceiling.

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stavros 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Then test Bob on what you actually want him to produce, ie novel problems, instead of trivial things that won't tell you how good he is.

Why is it a problem of the LLM if your test is unrelated to the performance you want?

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skydhash 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What people forget about programming is it is a notation for formal logic, one that can be executed by a machine. That formal logic is for solving a problem in the real world.

While we have a lot of abstractions that solve some subproblems, there still need to connect those solutions to solve the main problem. And there’s a point where this combination becomes its own technical challenge. And the skill that is needed is the same one as solving simpler problems with common algorithms.

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troupo 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How can Bob produce novel things when he lacks the skills to do even trivial things?

I didn't get to be a senior engineer by immediately being able to solve novel problems. I can now solve novel problems because I spent untold hours solving trivial ones.

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stavros 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Because trivial things aren't a prerequisite for novel things, as any theoretical mathematician who can't do long division will tell you.

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sgarland 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I would love to see someone attempt to do multiplication who never learned addition, or exponentiation without having learned multiplication.

There is a vast difference between “never learned the skill,” and “forgot the skill from lack of use.” I learned how to do long division in school, decades ago. I sat down and tried it last year, and found myself struggling, because I hadn’t needed to do it in such a long time.

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thepasch 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> There is a vast difference between “never learned the skill,” and “forgot the skill from lack of use.”

This sentence contains the entire point, and the easiest way to get there, as with many, many things, is to ask “why?”

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ipaddr 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Most people learn multiplication by memorizing a series of cards 2x2,2x3.. 9x9. Later this gets broken down to addition in higher grades.

	▲	Jensson 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Most people learn multiplication by counting, it has been in basic mathbooks since forever. "1 box has 4 cookies. Jenny ha 4 boxes of cookies. How many cookies do Jenny have?" and so on, the kids solve that by counting 4 cookies in every of the 4 boxes and reaching 16. Only later do you learn those tables.
	▲	sgarland 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That’s definitely not how I learned it, nor how my kids have learned it. I vividly remember writing out “2 x 3 = 2 + 2 + 2 = 3 + 3.” I later memorized the multiplication table up to 12, yes, but that was not a replacement of understanding what multiplication was

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Folcon 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's a difference between needing no trivial skills to do novel things and not needing specific prerequisite trivial skills to do a novel thing

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troupo 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Ah yes. The famous theoretical mathematicians who immediately started on novel problems in theoretical mathematics without first learning and understanding a huge number of trivial things like how division works to begin with, what fractions are, what equations are and how they are solved etc.

Edit: let's look at a paper like Some Linear Transformations on Symmetric Functions Arising From a Formula of Thiel and Williams https://ecajournal.haifa.ac.il/Volume2023/ECA2023_S2A24.pdf and try and guess how many of trivial things were completely unneeded to write a paper like this.

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stavros 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Seems that teaching Bob trivial things would be a simple solution to this predicament.

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sumeno 4 hours ago | parent [-]

That's what the program he just took was supposed to be for, learning not output. You've just reinvented the article from first principles, congrats

	▲	HauntingPin 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Sometimes I wonder how deeply some people actually read these articles. What's the point of the comments if all we're doing is re-explaining what's already explained in such a precise and succint manner? It's a fantastic article. It's so well-written and clear. And yet we're stuck going in a circle repeating what's in the article to people who either didn't read it, or didn't read it with the care it deserves.
	▲	thepasch 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> That’s what the program he just took was supposed to be for, learning not output. If you send a kid to an elementary school, and they come back not having learned anything, do you blame the concept of elementary schools, or do you blame that particular school - perhaps a particular teacher _within_ that school?

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brookst 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This whole argument can be made for why every programmer needs to deeply understand assembly language and computer hardware.

At a certain point, higher level languages stop working. Performance, low level control of clocks and interrupts, etc.

I’m old enough dropping into assembly to be clever with the 8259 interrupt controller really was required. Programmers today? The vast majority don’t really understand how any of that works.

And honestly I still believe that hardware-up understanding is valuable. But is it necessary? Is it the most important thing for most programmers today?

When I step back this just reads like the same old “kids these days have it so easy, I had to walk to school uphill through the snow” thing.

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imtringued 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Teaching how computer hardware works is pretty smart. There is no need to do it in depth though.

Writing assembly is probably completely irrelevant. You should still know how programming language concepts map to basic operations though. Simple things like strict field offsets, calling conventions, function calls, dynamic linking, etc.

	▲	sgarland 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Writing assembly is probably completely irrelevant. ffmpeg disagrees. More broadly, though, it’s a logical step if you want to go from “here’s how PN junctions work” to “let’s run code on a microprocessor.” There was a game up here yesterday about building a GPU, in the same vein of nand2tetris, Turing Complete, etc. I find those quite fun, and if you wanted to do something like Ben Eater’s 8-bit computer, it would probably make sense to continue with assembly before going into C, and then a higher-level language.