Posted by signa11 4 days ago
LLMs are becoming remarkably competent at both of these skills. Not quite at expert levels yet but I expect it won't be long until this happens. I'm astounded at what they can do already, with the benefit of relentless, persistent effort on top of this.
How I've been using LLMs is twofold. Firstly, using chat mode to the effect of having technical documentation to converse with. Secondly, using agentic mode to develop tooling to help me with reverse engineering. This includes things like one-off scripts to analyse complex trees of structures, to modules that use the API of a framework I and others have developed, to prototype how we might want to extend it for specific features. I then write the final code myself in my own style, using the LLM prototype as a rough reference.
For now I think I've got a decent balance between using the LLM as a useful timesaving tool and continuing to understand the finer details for myself. I feel I have to draw a line at this point regardless of how competent the LLM becomes, otherwise I'll just be babysitting a black box, which almost anyone can do.
cool to see it come full circle and see another person thrown into the industry by the work of another forum member.
Isn't this whole post seeking...recognition? I am so confused at the metahypocrisy here. Why is it valid to want recognition for something when you do it, but not when someone who uses an LLM does it?
Training a year, and running a marathon feels more worthy of recognition than driving 42km in a car from the start to the finish.
While I don't empathize with the defeatist tone of the post. I do empathize with this part.
Said another way: is it impossible to use something which everybody has access to to make something artful?
Or I will try it a third way. Does the fact that people take bad pictures on their iPhones prevent other people from shooting whole professional movies on iPhones?
In answer to that message: taking bad pictures on an iphone is not something celebrate or recognize no.
ex: getting a big seed round from a VC for your start up still may show that your parents had connections.
but marathons have this grindability and somewhat stable feedback loop.
Instead of cache, software-managed fast and slow memory spaces.
Instead of branch prediction, memory with multiple read ports/buses and software-managed parallel prefetch queues.
Instead of hardware speculative execution, VLIW.
Instead of automatic DRAM refresh, a hard-real-time OS handling the refresh timing.
I don't care that this would to make things on average slower and more expensive. Modern computers have tremendously fast average-case performance, but the software is still mostly laggy garbage. We sacrificed ease of understanding and didn't even get responsive software in return. I believe that if modern computers really were fast PDP-11s, we would not be in the situation we are now, where most programmers see nothing wrong with software taking some unpredictable human perceptible time to respond to inputs, even when simply processing text. I care more about worst-case performance than average-case performance.
As the article says, "Like a fisherman might feel one with a fishing rod, I treat the machine as a continuation of myself." A fishing rod always responds in zero milliseconds. A computer should do the same. You can say AI is qualitatively different because by embracing it we abandon even the possibility of understanding, but in practice we mostly abandoned understanding already. There's no practical way to count cycles any more.
Of course, most computer users don't care about this, so there's no commercial market for the kind of hardware I'm imagining, but I'd love to see the "fast PDP-11" approach taken to its limit. Let's make computers it's possible to completely understand.