Hacker News Reader

My experience with LLMs has been that they’re good at lifting you from “incompetent” to “somewhere near the middle of the bellcurve.” So, this result is not surprising. When I have expertise in a topic, I have not found them useful. When I’m incompetent at a topic, they are a real timesaver. It’s a bit like Gell-Mann amnesia; when you’re talented in an area it’s easy to spot the poor quality of the LLM’s output.

View on HN

There is a fallacy here. If you know they don't perform well in places where you have the expertise to detect it, it is a mistake to assume they perform well in other areas. My conclusion has been that they are useful for kicking off a task, sometimes useful for ideation, but generally will fall down on anything reasonably complex. The dangerous bit is that it's hard to detect the line where they start to fail.

But like, the expert also knows that the middle-of-the-bell-curve engineer makes mistakes and knows not to blindly trust their code; meanwhile, the person who is "incompetent at a topic" could be seen literally hiring the middle-of the-bell-curve engineer either as a tutor or a consultant... so I don't think trusting them when you are in that position is fair to call a "fallacy".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com