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Comment by lolive | Hacker News Reader

I read, ages ago, this apocryphal quote by William Gibson: “The most important skill of the 21st century is to figure out which proper keywords to type in the Google search bar, to display the proper answers.”

To me, that has never been more true.

Most junior dev ask GeminiPiTi to write the JavaScript code for them, whereas I ask it for explanation on the underlying model of async/await and the execution model of a JavaScript engine.

There is a similar issue when you learn piano. Your immediate wish is to play Chopin, whereas the true path is to identify,name and study all the tricks there are in his pieces of art.

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The true path in Piano isn’t learning tricks. You start with the most basic pieces and work step by step up to harder ones. That’s how everyone I know has done in it my 26 years of playing. Tricks cheapens the actual music.

Chopin has beginners pieces too, many in our piano studio were first year pianists doing rain drop prelude, e minor prelude, or other beginner works like Bach.

I was unhappy with [the briefness of] my piano metaphor. Thanks for elaborating.

But my important point in it was the « identify and name » the elements of your problem [piece of music, or whatever]

Learning process has usually been, as you mention, to follow the path first, then eventually you can name things afterwards. Which is a highly uncomfortable process.

Another path that AI might force us to follow is to quick-identifyAndName the proper concepts, ahead of practical experience.

Feels like the real "AI literacy" isn't prompt engineering in the meme sense, but building the conceptual scaffolding so that the prompts (and the outputs) actually connect to something meaningful

That’s my definition of prompt engineering.

Nailed it. Being productive with LLMs is very similar to the skill of being able to write good Google searches. And many many people still don't really know how to conduct a proper Google search...

I agree, you need to know the "language" and the keywords of the topics that you want to work with. If you are a complete newcomer to a field then AI wont help you much. You have to tell the AI "assume I have A, B and C and now I want to do D" then it understands and tries to find a solution. It has a load of information stored but cannot make use of that information in a creative way.

Well, there is a big difference between wanting to just play Chopin and wanting to learn piano well enough to play anything on the current level including Chopin. There are people, who can play whole piano pieces mechanically, because they just learned where to position hands and what keys to press at a given time.

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