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Comment by tlamponi | Hacker News Reader

  > people are doing real paid work using LLMs that they could not otherwise do

FWIW, this is not exactly new; those same people were just using other sources like Stack Overflow, blog posts, etc. before, cobbling together random code snippets, libraries, and so on without actually understanding any of that at a relevant detail level.

Sure, with LLMs, one can naturally tailor this much closer to the current need (or at least the need one thinks they have) and iterate ("spew") faster, but it's not a new phenomenon in general.

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I think this is fine as long as the success criteria are strict enough that they are forced to learn something in the end.

Any significant testing will inevitably create that situation. The LLM won't have enough context to handle the more precise business requirements. The dev will have to read the code carefully and make their changes by hand. Additional rounds of testing may cause thrashing between regressed states until something clicks for the developer. That lightbulb going off is called "learning" and they are human after all!

> I think this is fine as long as the success criteria are strict enough that they are forced to learn something in the end.

They are fired, get promoted to management, or learn the technical aspects.

Promotion into management isn't so different. They still experience similar thrashing and have to learn or be fired.

My point was not only that so much human learning happens out-of-band, but that it has to be fundamentally different from how an LLM builds context. I've never seen an LLM overcome the thrashing on its own. There's never any "lightbulb moment".

Yeh but I also mean outside of software engineering. Within the gamut of 'being a programmer' it seems fair to bleed into adjacent areas without too much cheek. We've all done it; it's part of the learning curve. But I was talking more about people in other knowledge work who have to come up with a lot of prose-like material about {insert thing}. Marketing, consultants, PMs, or even domain-specific analysts, .. ya know, the types of office jobs where people basically write emails, attend meetings, discuss reports, and produce mostly text-or-data artefacts all day long.

That sounds like fraud. You claimed you have knowledge of the job you got hired for, but you don't actually have.

If the company want's hire someone who doesn't have a clue and only uses SO, that's of course fine, but I doubt, that this is the case.

People gotta eat.

All people do, only few resort to fraud. If you start with that argument, you can rationalize any crime.

“Fake it ‘till you make it” is not a venerable mafia saying, if you catch my meaning.

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