On beginners and LLMs

i remember watching a youtube video on Grammarly, on how it markets itself to people who aren’t good at english, yet it often gives bad advice. the conclusion is that, ironically, Grammarly is only good in the hands of someone good at english - who can differentiate between the good and bad advice.

i see a similar thing with LLMs. they are extremely frustrating to beginners for several reasons: beginners have a harder time differentiating low quality responses, and LLMs’ inability to offer opinionated guidance - being slop machines that’s designed to be as unopinionated as possible. meanwhile, skilled programmers know how to utilize it well as a Large Language Model, and can easily overcome any problem anyways if LLMs can’t solve them.

though, what that Grammarly video and a lot of people miss is that, to a lot of beginners, these tools are better than none at all. cause asking for help is hard! you need to first know someone knowledgeable, then formulate a question properly, and you have to be considerate to the other person. on the other hand, the barrier of entry to ask an LLM is literally the same as using a search engine. it’s a machine where you can say whatever you want without consequence, in exchange for having inconsistent quality of results. LLMs might only be intern-level, but they are intern-level at pretty much everything out there.

so here’s the boring conclusion that you already agree with: technology is cool but we should be honest. don’t overhype them. don’t replace the old ways with the shiny new tech just to make everything cheaper at all costs. something something capitalism sux.