undefined | Better HN

0 pointsamarant20h ago0 comments

So what I do when I'm not sure about something, is I say "I want to achieve X, I was thinking I could solve it by doing Y, what are the pros and cons of this approach, and what is a alternative solution you would suggest?"

And from there it's a interactive discussion drilling down on details until I understand the problem and the solutions better.

It definitely challenges my bias when I do this. The one thing it doesn't challenge is the X. Formulate the problem poorly, and you'll get a bad solution. Or rather, you'll end up with a good solution to the wrong problem. Which is even worse than a bad solution to the right problem.

Which is largely why I'm not at all worried about losing my job to AI. It takes some experience to formulate the problem correctly. I don't feel like I'm made redundant by AI, I'm just way faster than I used to be, my thinking is more abstract.

A good prompt I'll often use is "is there a industry standard solution that is applicable to this problem?" You very rarely want novel solutions. Don't reinvent the wheel just because AI lets you do it 10x as fast. Use a wheel. They're round for a reason.

Sometimes I find it useful to discuss things with a different model. I like Gemini for discussion and Claude for implementation. With Gemini I go about it as a learning session, discussing options and details. I honestly think this is mostly because it compartmentalizes the phases in a natural way for me. One interface for brainstorming and learning, and another for planning and implementing.

Sorry this comment turned into a rather disorganised collection of ramblings, I hope you can extract some kernel of usefulness from it all.

0 comments

Paracompact18h ago

Indeed I don't mean to downplay the usefulness that AI can have in the self-evaluation process. It's a wonderful engine for discovering information either general or specific to one's project.

> interactive discussion drilling down on details until I understand the problem and the solutions better.

I think it is fair to call this use of AI something akin to a fusion of a super-competent search engine and a leveled-up rubber duck (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging). And this is not to downplay the utility of either of those things.

However, one cannot rely on an AI to decide when the details are sufficiently expounded, or when one understands them clearly enough. If one starts hinting that one gets it when one really doesn't, or that one is getting close to having all the pieces together, the AI will not be opinionated enough to contradict that sentiment.

> It definitely challenges my bias when I do this. The one thing it doesn't challenge is the X. Formulate the problem poorly, and you'll get a bad solution.

The best advice an expert can give a beginner is generally in the form of solutions to XY problems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem). It is a shame that AI are rarely opinionated enough to suggest you're not hunting the right thing. And if you do explicitly prompt it to consider if you're an XY problem, usually it takes that as a cue to indulge that suspicion regardless of its merit.

I don't think this is an inherent issue to LLMs and I see signs of it improving bit-by-bit. I can recall the shit-on-a-stick test about a year ago (https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1k920cg/new_chatgp...), and when I most recently asked Claude "Are oyster mushrooms or wine cap mushrooms more capable of high levels of sunlight?" it answered my question while also adding, "Caveat on the comparison: the relevant variable isn't sun per se but moisture retention. A wine cap bed that's kept moist will take far more sun than an exposed oyster log, but a sun-baked, drying bed will fail for either" which I think is a mature amount of pushback to include.

In the end I still disagree with the notion that subservience is, by default, the right attitude for an LLM to have. An agent spawned specifically for code generation according to a spec? Sure. But in any cases where you're trying to refine rather than execute your ideas, you want something to call you out on your bad ideas.

devin18h ago

Thanks for writing what I was thinking in response to the above. Namely that the mere suggestion to the LLM that you need a “pro/con list” kicks the bias off, and that’s the problem.

Edit: Well, not the whole problem, but rather insufficient to overcome the root of the problem.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse