The fact that Claude knows I wrote the Virgil compiler makes it be on its best behavior when working on it. I force it to not write too much code, and to write more tests. I push back on slop and just adding another special case. It has a surprisingly deep understanding of floating point.

Also, one can improve domain expertise with the help of the LLM, to becomme a better part of the LLM harness.

i find this post re-assuring (as who doesn't like to feel like they are an expert at something and llm definitely strips that away)... but it still feels like you are rewarded just as much for being a 6/10 expert as you are for being a 9/10 expert. It definitely is an equalizer it is just a question of to what degree.

Yes. If you use the right technical terms together it’s lights up more specific feature spaces to your task.

Specificity matters to LLMs a lot.

This is absolutely a case where you can't get any output that better than the input, and the input is you.

Terminology is a crazy lever with AI

They reward expertise but not for long. Let's not kid ourselves into coping for a little longer.

Skilled use may or may not matter, depending on the task. Do you need to do what Terence Tao is doing?

I think if we have a large population of generalists, then none of them are generalists after all