jp_totsum

When I started working in the 80s in my first job, the head of department had banned the PC for administrative tasks. He thought that the old manual process was more reliable and allowed him to better control what was going on. He retired one year later and the PC were introduced successfully shortly after. Was he wrong to push back ? At that time, that was what I thought. But now, 40 years later, I don’t think so anymore. I think that that delay gave the proponents of the PC the time to prepare themselves a lot better and is a reason for the success.

I can’t help drawing a parallel with what is going on now. Even though I’m pro AI, I understand why QGIS is stepping back. There are a lot of places where the processes and tools are not ready yet to fully embrace it and you need time to prepare.

Most people think that using an LLM requires no skill: it is just talking to a machine. I think it is a soft skill that only hours of practice can make you good at. Unfortunately, most of the people I know use LLMs as a search engine: their requests are just short sentences. They get basic results and either they stop there, not impressed or they keep using it as a smart replacement for Google. So they judge what AI can do from their first weak experience. Going further than that would requires more effort: going deep on a subject they know, thinking carefully about the prompt they write, more importantly judging the answer they get and pushing back.