For example, I didn't learn about lenses or earthquakes or fusion messing with the controls on these.[1] I didn't know what to look at.
However, there were interactive exhibits at the Children's Museum I spent a long time exploring and loved. That's because they were carefully designed to really teach the concept?
It turns out the more technology you throw at something does not equate to ease of learning.
Put in the hands of the educator, they will be able to add those illustrations, design for the light bulb moment, etc, and the tools at their disposal just got much better.
You'd not be amazed by seeing a 2 sentences prompt and thus you are not amazed by this work either.
I've been thinking of this line recently — really gets at the heart of the matter for me. There is no substitute, no shortcut, no alternative for effort.
Now imagine the same thing but each person is using Opus 5.5 - I’d wager there would be a lot of commonality among each of the outputs.
- Each phrasing the prompt(s) differently
- Each having different history accumulated in context
If you asked me to issue the same prompt as you to write some web artifact, chances are mine would be substantially stylistically different, simply because at some point in the past half-year, Clause started styling everything in LCARS form for some reason.
Whether the differences would be substantial or surface-only? Probably depends, but chances for substance increase with iteration. Real artists don't zero-shot their masterpieces either.
I’m saying if you provide the same prompt to Opus 5.5 across 12 different people, you’re going to get some similarities that immediately arise.
I’ve mentioned this across many HN threads - I call it the LLM corollary to “garbage in, garbage out”: "generic in, generic out". If you prompt with more specificity, you’re obviously going to get different and potentially better results. But at that point, the artist is doing more of the work.
A while back, I tried a similar test asking for LLMs to come up with engaging D&D puzzles that would fit organically into an underground labyrinth environment. This is a pretty general prompt. Let's just say that the results were about as inspired as a tepid bowl of tapioca.
If something that previously took weeks for a human to design, now takes 10 min, that means a whole week of salary went up in smoke.
When have we automated enough?
The problem also is, if a human took weeks to design this, it would be much better. This is quick but also bad.
To me, this is the depressing sentiment. The idea that, somehow, the goal isn't to produce useful things but to spread work out over a period of time in order to maximize payment.
At a high level,I conceptualize my job as "doing useful things." Whether that's design, writing code, debugging, sysadmin, CI/CD, writing doc, whatever. I just want to be useful. If there's some tool that makes that easier, I am happy about it. I don't think that tool will result in my getting paid less. But if it does, oh well.
the 30min-3h of actual coding time is brought down to 10min, with the reviews, testing, consensus building, tracking, decision making all still taking up most of a week.