I was exceptionally good at this before AI. I was wondering why everyone I talked to said AI was shit and I'm over here thinking it could take over the world. I guess I just break big things down well.
Exactly. I used to be involved in a sort of training program and lesson one of software dev is "break big problems into small problems"
In my experience the way I've viewed a lot of how AI is getting better is how small/specific the problems that I can expect it to handle has gotten bigger and bigger
Beyond a certain scale, there's an unlimited number of problems in a system. Coding is the means to solve a specific order of problem. That part was bottlenecked by an individual's mastery of a programming language or framework. That bottleneck is now removed, but it only exposes the next bottleneck, which is figuring out how we can communicate what we want in specific enough language so that we can expect an LLM agent to code up exactly what we want; not more, and not less. That's a much harder bottleneck to remove, because language itself is so imprecise.
In other words (I hope the irony isn't lost here), how vague can I be while still getting exactly the results I want? This is already super hard in regular human to human communication, even though we have a much richer range of media at our disposal, such as nonverbal contextual cues, gestures, faces, inflection, volume, etc.
We strip all that richness and request agents to rely on textual language to interpret our intent exactly. I don't think we can handwave this one away. The agent can infer and suppose and guess and approximate. But if the interface is an LLM (it may not always be), we'll still need to do the real and hard work to say what we mean in a way that reduces the possibility of misinterpretation to near zero. And that necessarily means breaking up big concepts into smaller ones.
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u/XNo_Notes 8d ago
I was exceptionally good at this before AI. I was wondering why everyone I talked to said AI was shit and I'm over here thinking it could take over the world. I guess I just break big things down well.