197 karma · joined May 24, 2021
Your friend could start with telling the LLM that they are a non technical person who wants to make an app and it will explain all the successive steps.
I find it harder to imagine a future where AGI (even if it's not superintelligent) does not have a huge and fundamental impact.
- Contact with reality (feedback). Predict, try, did it work?
- Having a good reasoning framework. For some it's 1. Religious text, 2. what others they respect think, 3. reasoning for understanding. This is not the worst but not the best. Perhaps a better one would be 1. Science/rationality, 2. religious/philosophical/spiritual texts, 3. first principles thinking
- Humility, you don't know anything unless you have great reasoning and empirical evidence to back up what you're saying. Even then, when faced with complexity (i.e. unless you are dealing with the most atomic/simple concept), you're still almost certainly wrong.
In a nutshell, what we did was email users asking for a 30-45 minute remote interview in exchange for $50 gift card. We started the meetings letting the user know that there are no wrong answers, that it's quite informal and they can leave at any time. We then spent the first half of the interview finding out who the user is, what they do and how they use the product. The second half was spent uncovering pain-points and maybe even asking users to share their screen and show us.
We'd take notes during the interviews and then once we've done a few we'll collate the notes at which point the improvements to make to the product would become obvious.
My general sense is that paid ads is still valuable for niche markets as the ad will be cheaper and ad platforms allow quite specific targeting (they do gather huge amounts of data after all). It's probs too expensive for big competitive markets.
As an aside, it's quite risky to rely too much of paid ads as your business becomes subordinate to the whims of Google, Facebook etc.
Practice
- have a 3 hour weekly practice session (minimum) outside of work. Won't do much for you in the beginning but it'll add up a lot over the years
- focus on the fundamentals related to the type of work you're doing
Reflection
- Identify what went wrong
- Identify the root cause
- Come up with a solution
- Implement the solution
- Identify what went right
- Come up with how you can further improve it or at least keep doing the right things
Feedback
- You can ask for feedback and advice about the areas of improvement you identified in your reflections
Concentrate
- When you work, make sure you're concentrated. Don't check IMs/email/socials