Joe 'Oz' Fredette

RE: https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/116573524318221025

I've only skimmed, but I will say the top line of this jives well with recent experience. I believe there is definitely skill reallocation happening, I'm not convinced it's net loss though. An alternative to the 'LLMs make you worse' explanation is 'LLMs require you to be better at things the studies aren't measuring'; and there is enough heat and bias floating around that distinguishing between the two will take some serious time.

IME w/ agents and llms; if you're careful, if you constrain them well, and if you direct them deliberately, they can be good for, if not a real speedup, certainly a major reduction in the amount of typing I need to do.

TBH, I think the majority thing I've learned is all the metainformation that coding by hand gives me is often unnecessary for a class of tools I want but have no time to build; and similarly for classes of problems I want solved but have no direct interest in the theory for.

A frequent prompt for me is "I need a tool or script that leverages <this infrastructure> to produce <this report>, place it in <this part of the repo> and wire the tool to a CI job."

I do not care about anything but the result of that script, if it is terrible, so be it, the cost to implement it was that sentence. When it breaks, I will throw it away. Agents extrude plastic code, treat it as such and most of the downsides go away IME.