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Comment by soperj | Hacker News Reader

> allows me to do things not only faster, but better, and across domains I do not hold expertise on.

How would you know it's better when you have no expertise?

He didn't say that. He said [with my re-puncuation of it]:

"...allows me to do things not only faster, but better. And [allows me to do things] across domains I do not hold expertise on."

I have also done things in domains I don't hold expertise on. I'm a web dev, but I built a terminal TUI client yesterday. In a language I don't write.

He didn't say THAT was better, he said he's doing things faster and better. Presumably he's able to measure many of those things against how he did them before.

In the case of new domains, I know I can produce better output than my previous self, because the output compiles and does what I want. Previously I could not produce compiling output that did what I want. It's definitely better now.

Because it produces the desired output. The purpose of a program.

There are many domains where an intelligent human can act as a discriminator for output without knowing exactly in precise detail how the process itself works.

That is certainly true, but there are also many cases where someone without core expertise who believes themselves to be a capable discriminator actually is not.

Welcome to Earth. I see people parading as experts in all kinds of things all the time, without LLMs to back them up. Political opinions, economic theory, foreign policy, professional sports strategy, who is or isn't intelligent. People blast their very uninformed opinions about these constantly, without realizing they're uninformed.

This is a human thing, not an LLM thing.

I even have a pet joke about it. Like yesterday I built something in Rust with the LLM -- I'm a total novice in rust. I said "I'm so happy I became an expert in rust today." I built a shed, "so glad I'm an expert carpenter." Some -- maybe most -- people really attach that pin to their lapel with the same amount of experience.

Producing the desired output is the purpose of the program, but it's not the only consideration: there's performance, maintainability, security, and so on.

We had contractors come in to do a project for us once, they had a team of programmers in India as well as a team on the ground. The team in India would produce a bunch of code for them during the night, and they'd review it, and carry on. Things were being done very quickly. Management was happy. Finally after months of this they let us review their code. Turns out that the contractors were just reviewing the output, and they were nailing it. The code itself was absolutely unmaintainable. There was clearly one programmer that had never heard of a jsp, and wrote all of his java to produce html within the java code itself, and another who wrote all of their business logic in scriplets in the jsps themselves. Years later we finally got the okay from management to refactor the whole project. That refactoring project reduced the deployable artifact from over 700mb, to just under 40mb. It reduced a ton of security vulnerabilities and made the code vastly more maintainable, and significantly more performant.

The purpose of a program shouldn't be the only consideration unless it's 1 off scripts.

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