Readit Newselliotbnvl commented on The end of the rip-off economy: consumers use LLMs against information asymmetry economist.com/finance-and... · Posted by u/scythe
If we have been living in the Information Age, I propose that we have just entered the Intelligence Age.
elliotbnvl commented on MCP Specification – version 2025-06-18 changes modelcontextprotocol.io/s... · Posted by u/owebmaster
Fascinated to see that the core spec is written in TypeScript and not, say, an OpenAPI spec or something. I suppose it makes sense, but it’s still surprising to see.
elliotbnvl commented on LLMs are mirrors of operator skill ghuntley.com/mirrors/... · Posted by u/ghuntley
Who is Garry Kasparov ? wikipedia hits a chess player
Chess saw no innovation since hundreds of years or something
I get your point: with IA in charge, the world will stagnate
What I do not share is your belief that this is a good outcome
One-time world chess grandmaster, who lost to Deep Blue (a chess AI) in 1997 after beating it in 1996. This marked the first time an AI beat a human on the world stage in a game of pure reasoning.
I don't believe AI will cause the world to stagnate at all. I think it will unleash humanity's creativity in a way orders of magnitude greater than history has ever seen.
elliotbnvl commented on LLMs are mirrors of operator skill ghuntley.com/mirrors/... · Posted by u/ghuntley
The only purpose of tests is the help you define good behavior and bad behavior, and keep it that way
So, when you write tests, your main job is to think (define what is good and what is bad)
As such, using IA to write tests is writing useless tests
I got a job interview this monday; I asked the guy : "do you use IA ?" He mumbled something like "yes" Then, I baited him: "It's quite handy to write tests!" He responded: yes, but no (for the above reason)
He got the job
All programming is thinking. If AI can write good code, it can write good tests. Your job – for now – is to make sure the tests are good, if only because for the time being we're still slightly better at reasoning than the AI is. Just ask Garry Kasparov if that'll ever change.
elliotbnvl commented on LLMs are mirrors of operator skill ghuntley.com/mirrors/... · Posted by u/ghuntley
Hard disagree. It’s not super important to be AI-pilled. You just need to be a good communicator. The tooling is a moving target, but so long as you can explain what you need well and can identify confusion or hallucination, you’ll be effective with them.
Nope. Being a good communicator and being good at AI are two completely different skillsets. Plenty of overlap, to be sure, but being good at one does not imply being good at the other any more than speaking first-language quality English means you are good at fundraising in America.
I know plenty of good communicators who aren't using AI effectively. At the very least, if you don't know what an LLM is capable of, you'll never ask it for the things it's capable of and you'll continue to believe it's incapable when the reality is that you just lack knowledge. You don't know what you don't know.
elliotbnvl commented on LLMs are mirrors of operator skill ghuntley.com/mirrors/... · Posted by u/ghuntley
Yeah, any of these AI accelerationist threads make me feel like I'm working in some parallel universe.
Writing code has never been a bottleneck for me. Planning out a change across multiple components, adhering to both my own individual vision and the project direction and style, fixing things along the way (but only when it makes sense), comparing approaches and understanding tradeoffs, knowing how to interpret loose specs... that's where my time goes. I could use LLM assistance, but given all of the above, it's faster for me to write it myself than to try to distill all of this into a prompt.
If you have a good codebase, a good team, and strong product direction behind you a lot of the more abstract work you're describing goes away because most of those decisions were made weeks, months, or years ago by the time you're ready to put pen to paper on the actual code. Maybe that's part of why your experience is so different?
elliotbnvl commented on LLMs are mirrors of operator skill ghuntley.com/mirrors/... · Posted by u/ghuntley
I don't think people has refused to learn C (which is not particularly hard to learn for someone who knows about assembly and various other languages at the time). A lot of compilers were buggy and people have lots of assembly snippets for particular routines. And that's not counting mature projects that was already in assembly and you have to maintain. A lot of programmers are actually fine trying new stuff out, but some are professionals and don't bring everything under the sun in their work projects.
You're missing the point. People refused to learn it not because it was technically challenging but because it was a transformation. It happens with every increase in abstraction; folks fall by the wayside because they don't want change.
The same thing is happening with LLMs. If anything, the gap is far smaller than between assembly and C, which only serves to prove my point. People who don't understand it or like it could easily experience massive productivity gains with a minimum of effort. But they probably never will, because their mindset is the limiting factor, not technical ability.
It really comes down to neural plasticity and willingness to adapt. Some people have it, some people don't. It's pretty polarizing, because for the people that don't want change it becomes an emotional conversation rather than a logical one.
What's the opportunity cost of properly exploring LLMs and learning what everybody else is talking about? Near zero. But there are plenty of people who haven't yet.
elliotbnvl commented on LLMs are mirrors of operator skill ghuntley.com/mirrors/... · Posted by u/ghuntley
So what has changed about the realm of programming that make all the skill obsolete, including the skill to learn new programming thingies?
The DOM API is old, All the mainstream backend languages are old, unix administrations has barely changed (only the way to use those tools have). Even Elasticsearch is 15 years old. Amazon S3 is past drinking age in many countries around the world. And that's just pertaining to web projects.
You just need to open a university textbook to realize how old many of the fundamentals are. Most shiny new things is old stuff repackaged.
A lot of people are rejecting AI because of how transformational it is. Those people will fall behind the people who adopt it aggressively.
It's akin to people who refused to learn C because they knew assembly.