This is an excellent strategy for smaller startups, where every individual contributor needs to have an understanding of the customer's needs, in order to develop an understanding of what kind of product must be built. I have much more success in projects where I deeply understand the product requirements (because I am involved in defining them), than those where the product requirements are "handed" to me and I just have to implement something that satisfies them.
Readit Newssemitones commented on I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform old.reddit.com/r/Entrepre... · Posted by u/bilsbie
semitones commented on Show HN: Project management system for Claude Code github.com/automazeio/ccp... · Posted by u/aroussi
The elephant in the room though is that the vast majority of programming fits into the template style that LLM’s are good at. That’s why so many people are afraid of it.
Yes - and I think those people need to expand their skillsets to include the things that the LLMs _cannot_ (yet) do, and/or expand their productivity by wielding the LLMs to do their work for them in a very efficient manner.
semitones commented on Show HN: Project management system for Claude Code github.com/automazeio/ccp... · Posted by u/aroussi
This. I‘m always amazed on how LLMs are praised for being able to churn out the large amount of code we apparently all need.
I keep wondering why. All projects I ever saw need lines of code, nuts and bolts removed instead of added. My best libraries consist of a couple of thousand lines.
LLMs are a godsend when it comes to developing things that fit into one of the tens of thousands (or however many) of templates they have memorized. For instance, a lot of modern B2B software development involves updating CRUD interfaces and APIs to data. If you already have 50 or so CRUD functions in an existing layered architecture implemented, asking an LLM to implement the 51st, given a spec, is a _huge_ time-saver. Of course, you still need to use your human brain to verify before hand that there aren't special edge cases that need to be considered. Sometimes, you can explain the edge cases to the LLM and it will do a perfect job of figuring them out (assuming you do a good job of explaining it, and it's not too complicated). And if there aren't any real edge cases to worry about, then the LLM can one-shot a perfect PR (assuming you did the work to give it the context).
Of course, there are many many other kinds of development - when developing novel low-level systems for complicated requirements, you're going to get much poorer results from an LLM, because the project won't as neatly fit in to one of the "templates" that it has memorized, and the LLM's reasoning capabilities are not yet sophisticated enough to handle arbitrary novelty.
semitones commented on Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels scrollguard.app/... · Posted by u/adrianhacar
I already deleted the apps, and I mostly use Instagram and youtube in the browser. Any support for blocking reels in browser?
semitones commented on Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels scrollguard.app/... · Posted by u/adrianhacar
> I wanted to find a way to use Instagram without ending up scrolling for two hours every time I open the app to see a friend's story.
Why not just Chrome/Firefox/Safari to open the link instead of the Instagram app?
I deleted the YouTube and Instagram apps and I still end up scrolling / watching shorts - it doesn't matter, browser still lets you scroll
semitones commented on Deep-Sea Desalination Pulls Fresh Water from the Depths scientificamerican.com/ar... · Posted by u/noleary
Cause it's not an ecosystem, right? It's just a resource for us to drain.
I think there's enough water in the ocean for us to try
> Other personality changes are subtler but still unsettling, like when models start sucking up to users or making up facts.
My understanding is that the former (sucking up) is a personality trait, substantially influenced by the desire to facilitate engagement. The latter (making up facts), I do not think is correct to ascribe to a personality trait (like compulsive liar); instead, it is because the fitness function of LLMs drive them to produce some answer and they do not know what they're talking about, but produce strings of text based on statistics.
Furthermore, it is very rare to have the following kind of text present in the training data: "What is the answer to X?" - "I don't know, I am not sure."
In this situation very often there won't be _any_ answer, plenty of difficult questions go unanswered on the internet. Yet the model probably does not interpret this scenario as such
semitones commented on Advertising without signal: The rise of the grifter equilibrium gojiberries.io/advertisin... · Posted by u/neehao
> "Star ratings on major platforms increasingly cluster between 4.3 and 4.9, leaving buyers little room to distinguish products."
The good ol' 7 out of 10 problem. Where the entire lower half of the rating system is unused.
The way I solve it is to have 0 be the middle, If the transaction exceeded expectations you can give it a +1 if it failed to meet them give it a -1 (thumbs up/down if you prefer) you can even throw in a +-2 if you want to allow for more subtlety of expression
and now all of your reviews will cluster around 0.7-0.9. And what will you have accomplished?
semitones commented on Section 174 is reversed, mostly newsletter.pragmaticengin... · Posted by u/jawns