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tomwheeler a day ago

Or, in the words of Morris Day, "It takes more than a hat to call yourself a chef."

More people have the capability now, but not necessarily the experience or understanding.

tptacek a day ago | parent | next [-]

The hat : chef analogy is even less apposite than the table saw! At least the table saw serves an important function in that trade.

cuttysnark a day ago | parent [-]

Culinary hats serve the important purpose of helping catch stray hairs, not unlike a hairnet.

tptacek a day ago | parent [-]

Walk into a fine dining restaurant kitchen and count the number of chefs hats you see.

b112 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Capability? I have to push back on that (AI sounding joke, yes).

Point is, if I give a person a calculator, it doesn't even make them the tiniest bit of a mathematician. Nor if I give them a pencil, either. The tool never, ever makes the tradesperson.

Whatever's happening with LLMs, it's not making people programmers. It's how you use the tool, which validates that.

tptacek a day ago | parent | next [-]

Wait: a calculator doesn't make you a mathematician because you have to know math to get the calculator to do anything. A pencil does even less for you. You can't say any of that about AI.

josephg a day ago | parent | next [-]

> You can't say any of that about AI.

It’s weird though, LLMs still don’t seem very good at magically enabling most non developers able to make software. I’ve tried with a couple people - mostly for curiosity’s sake. Even when they have pressing needs that software could solve, they’re really resistant to talking to the machine about them. Then they don’t know what to actually ask the ai to do. Regular people don’t seem to know what use cases are. Or what a design mockup is. They don’t know what a website is, or what the limitations are. The llm could help guide them through all of this, but the people I’ve sat down in front of the machine didn’t ask the machine to guide them through the process at all.

Of course, if you only know how to vibe code, that doesn’t make you an engineer. But I’m no longer convinced that LLMs make developers pointless. If anything, so far they seem to make our skills much more valuable. With LLMs, I can get a lot of low quality work done quickly if that’s what the project calls for.

b112 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Entering 2x2 in the calculator, gives you 4, just as looking up the answer on a chart. Yet no one would give you the title of "mathematician" for doing so.

AI doesn't make you an expert. Or even a professional in any field. First, AI is terrible at cogent work, without someone driving it. And even if you do get it to do all the work, then that's not you doing it.

"Hi, I asked a coder friend to write an app, I'm a developer", nope!

localfauna a day ago | parent | prev [-]

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