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Comment by joenot443 | Hacker News Reader

That's a good point - I've heard people make the same one whenever LLMs are brought up. I hope someday you're able to get more value from them.

Anyway, my pool's looking great and I gained some new skills. I probably could have gotten there with books and YouTube alone, but having another tool at my disposal made me a bit more confident.

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That's the entire problem. The main thing LLMs gave you was confidence, and the thing to understand is that the confidence an LLM gives you is often utterly false and baseless.

Why were you not confident with literal how to videos and documentation, but became confident when a chatbot generated probable text?

I remember this was brought up about a month or so on HN, in the context of describing how one person's experience using LLMs can be so vastly different than another person's:

"LLMs seem good at things you are not good at."

So, if you've never touched PVC before, LLM sounds plausibly competent--it may actually be or it may not be, but you'll walk away from it thinking you learned something. If you are a professional plumber and ask an LLM the same thing, the output will more look flawed and possibly dangerous.

Same for software writing: If you're not a good software developer, you probably think an LLM is great and writes much better code faster than a human developer can. But if you are a good software developer, LLM output is slop and requires huge rework to be passable.

> So, if you've never touched PVC before, LLM sounds plausibly competent

well to be fair, it's sounds about as competent as your average homedepot employee. He's wasn't doing something super complicated, cutting and gluing PVC for an above ground pool is very common and doesn't require a plumber. I used some youtube videos to fix my dishwasher, i didn't need a professional service agent from the manufacturer I just needed some pointers.

as for software writing, for standard everyday enterprise app work which is typically just CRUD and moving data around it works fine. That kind of software does not need to be a highly tuned work of art to meet the requirements.

LLMs seem good at things you are not good at... primarily because you lack the skill to actually judge the goodness of their work, and they present their work confidently with an air of authority.

This sounds accurate.

I am not a mechanic by trade, but I know nearly everything there is to know about working on an ICE car. I did paint cars professionally for a bit.

LLMs are absolutely full of garbage advice, when I try to use it for troubleshooting. However, people who don't know anything about cars are telling me it helped them fix issues. I am assuming their issues were maybe surface level and something I would just know without even looking at any manuals, because when I use it for complex problems it just doesn't work for me.

if it helped them fix issues then it helped them fix issues. Good for them. Maybe their problems didn't rise to your bar but at least they were able to get it solved. That's very useful and empowering to people without the direct knowledge and experience themselves.

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