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I feel like we're doomed to respond to these lazy analogies ad infinitum.

Knowledge abstractions have historically been built by people with a detailed understanding of a problem domain and with a period of vetting the abstraction by many people. That is simply not true with LLM-generated code. We do not really understand what techniques LLMs are using to understand directions, value aesthetic/legibility characteristics, assess tradeoffs, retrieve contextual information, generate output, etc. Embedded in everything LLMs do are small decisions.

If you reach for formulas that you don't understand the applicability of, you will similarly get bad outcomes! But a calculator has almost no resemblance to what happens when you give general instructions to an LLM and get a generated code back, because in between that prompt and the result are many layers of decisions you the developer did not make and likely will not understand without carefully assessing the output!

If you have no discomfort with being culpable for something and doing none of the work to understand it, by all means, don't do anything to understand the output! Don't read the code, don't re-type the result, etc. I have concerns that you'll have a job in a year, but that's your decision to make!

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A computer used to be a term for an occupation. [0]

> I have concerns that you'll have a job in a year

Me too because I might be the best TypeScript coder on Earth and there is no demand for those skills. I'm doing a pivot.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)

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I don't have any delusions about that, LLMs are impressively good. But they bring with them a host of epistemological problems that I think we ignore at our own peril. A society that blindly trusts the output of LLMs to be good and to make decisions that adhere to our own preferences and acceptance criteria is extremely dangerous! There's a growing call to sort of let LLMs cook and get out of the way, and I think there will be catastrophic problems if we give in to that.

As good as they are, they are still fallible. They still write bugs, they still misunderstand instructions. They even get defensive about bad choices! And even in a world where that appears to no longer be true, we will be making society extremely fragile if we give an alien intelligence total autonomy to do what they think is right.

If you're not going to be writing code, you better be a vigilant babysitter. Otherwise I firmly believe that more than your job is at stake.

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