alt Hacker News> Parent suggests a coding model needs exercise info in case you want to code an exercise model?
No, the point is having broader knowledge than just "can code" is important for building software for humans to use.
> We don’t even need to explain this completely reasonable and totally normal engineering preference that small is beautiful.
It is, of course it is, as long as that small thing is useful. My argument is not "let's put literally everything in this thing just in case" it's "broader world knowledge is important for building many things".
Also, we don't look at CVs or histories of people and say "hmm, this person could be good at coding for us but I really wish they didn't have such a broad and expansive history".
> Great, so we look that shit up
But what do you have it look up? What is exercise? What is a muscle and what is a human? How is it going to understand those references? Does it have the broad enough understanding to see where the gaps are?
At some level unless all you want is "loop over the array and sum the results into a variable called sales_total" converted into code, you have to have some broader knowledge about things.
And once you start considering that maybe it needs more than simply code, we're not disagreeing we're just discussing where the line should be. Which I've also not placed, because there's no simple statement to make on that.
> Also, we don't look at CVs or histories of people and say "hmm, this person could be good at coding for us but I really wish they didn't have such a broad and expansive history".
Damn right we don't say that. And I don't look at a carpenter and wonder if his head is hard enough to drive nails like a hammer either. People aren't tools, and tools aren't people. You've conflated them because they are both capable of doing work. And that's exactly the type of confusion and category error that the perspective I'm arguing against will lead to.
Wanting a multipurpose tool or system is occasionally reasonable. Much more often it is very, very to close misunderstanding the nature of a problem, what a tool is, or what a system should be. The particulars of purpose and mechanism of action matter, which is why a blowtorch is sometimes a wrench but only if you're kind of desperate. It is always a very scandalous thing to speak ill of someone's best new electric banana-phone / dishwasher-piano that they want to sell you. But that just sounds messy to me, I'm not sure it will improve the sound quality or taste of anything involved.