alt Hacker NewsI think this is probably true for most skilled professions. AI is best used in the hands of folks already knowledgeable in the skills/professions they are using it for.
I liken it to me googling things as a sysadmin vs. Jane from accounting doing it. The non-tech end user is far more likely to make the problem worse, or install something sketchy from the ad riddled results than I am, or one of my help desk employees are.
I wouldn't trust myself to draft an important legal document using AI without the advice of a lawyer, much like I wouldn't really want to rely on my lawyer to use AI to write code for me.
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> sysadmin
Another domain where LLMs are very effective at confidently leading people down a messy path. I have a roommate using LLMs to guide him through setting up some ollama stuff in my WSL (I happen to have the half-decent GPU here) and after multiple rounds of the bot trying to get him to do things that were redundant if not in the wrong direction entirely (and vaguely insulting as a matter of course), I had to write "ground truths" along these lines, and probably more as I find them:
We are using systemd. ~/.bashrc or similar dotfiles should not be used to start services/processes automatically. Do not "sudo" anything in ~/.bashrc.
A systemd service should be created for any processes/services that need to run automatically and persistently. The current output of `systemctl list-unit-files | grep enabled` is available at [ . . . ]
sshd is already enabled + running and listening on 0.0.0.0:22 and [::]:22. ~/.ssh perms are already 700 and ~/.ssh/authorized_keys perms are already 600. Public key authentication is already enabled in sshd and ~/.ssh/authorized_keys already contains pubkeys ENDING as follows: . . .
tailscaled is already enabled + running; the tailscale address for [host] is [addr]
It is not necessary to fix connectivity to any 192.168.0.0/16 ; tailscale interface should be used for any traffic to [host] or other hosts involved in the project; hosts/nodes lacking tailscale interface should be assigned one
Maybe it's just me, but I'm not inclined to trust the judgment of something that can't keep this kind of thing straight, which I know is to some degree a matter of having all the needed info in the context window. But maybe it would be able to do that if it didn't waste tokens telling me to cd into the same directory that I'm already in every 2 minutes, or chmod .ssh/ again, or (when it really needs to burn some tokens) blow away the .venv and pull a bunch of modules again just to "start clean".
> I wouldn't really want to rely on my lawyer to use AI to write code for me.
Yet that is exactly what a lot of C-Suiters (many of whom are lawyers), are doing.
im not so sure
i think devs overestimate their own role and underestimate others
i am seeing lawyers and doctors roll out their own software with AI
but we dont have their training and experience
It's like that in engineering, for sure. My background is in aerospace and there are lots of things that a reasonably technically-inclined random can probably do passably. It takes an engineer to know which tasks those are, though.
I would imagine it's similar in law, in that it takes a lawyer or judge to know where the foot guns lie.
I find those that are best and make the greatest use are the ones who remain skeptical but also use the tool. The same people who were already nuanced and picky before AI. The same people who already doubted and questioned their own work, and used that suspicion to help prevent them from having over confidence in their own work. If you weren't willing to just "lgtm" with your own code, it's difficult to do that with AI.
(To be clear, I'm not saying perfectionists. Some might call them that because the picky people have higher standards, but a good expert has to also understand that perfection doesn't exist. That's often a driving force in the suspicion! This also tends to cause them to continually improve)