https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/111208692505811257
Many of his mastodon posts this month have been about his learning progress.
Certainly an interesting case study of how LLMs can accelerate the work of even of the most extremely successful people
Interestingly, LLMs may end up contributing to more inequality if only the highly skilled can leverage them effectively.
I (having 30 years experience as a professional Software Developer^TM) am begging him to teach me his techniques.
Now that you mention it, I met him and we became friends in large part due to his communications abilities.
Phind is often recommended to me by programmers who find it produces "better" results than a naive GPT-4 session, but I don't know that anyone has done any real world testing.
I understand your skepticism (because the internet is fully broken right now/and forum posts are more or less paid for content at this point)
but...its a bit funny you'd like someone who just explained they're a beginning programmer who got into programming because an LLM helped remove insane amounts of friction from the learning process to "explain a mechanism" to them.
However, over time, the overwhelming benefits of using LLMs will be well understood, and these ladder climbers will absolutely master LLMs, no matter their intelligence. People can become experts at taking exams despite how boring and soul sucking that can be, let alone using something way funner and useful like LLMs.
For any relatively simple task I can say "Write a Python script to do X" and it will almost always spit out working code, even if it has subtle mistakes. Fixing mistakes is fine and part of the process. I don't have to read StackOverflow posts saying "Do you really want to do X?", or sift through documentation that follows the author's approach of how they want to introduce the material but doesn't directly address my question.
GPT would be good as a search engine, but who would want a search engine that stopped indexing a few years back? Also, it is not good at ultra niche topics, which would be the whole point of a search engine.
To me, the first one is the most basic and frankly, most silly definition of a 10x programmer - produces more code? really? Code sucks. Nobody needs more code, people need solutions. Solving a problem with no more code, or understanding it so a _tiny_ change solves all problems? Way better than adding code, actually much harder to synthesize and produce new results. Way more efficient.
Now can you remove things and solve the problem? Realize you can build an even more simple and generic system that solves your problem? Even more amazing.
More code per unit of time, not necessarily more code in an absolute sense.
The latter would be a bad thing.
Like if the answer is not a leetcode/CRUD code sample you can easily find on the internet either way, it can’t do anything useful. Like, my problems mostly constitute things like reasoning about the correctness of a given change in the context of the whole codebase, its threading model, etc. It will at best regurgitate some bullshit like “race conditions can be this and that” here, not helping at all.