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Hell, I have NO IDEA what those really mean, but it’s 3 seconds away via prompt.
This is where I stopped reading, and it's so emblematic of the argumentation I routinely see.
"I have no first hand knowledge of your domain, but let me tell you why you're wrong about it" is just a derivative of "everything I don't understand is simple", and I will have no part in that.
So someone who isn't an expert in implementing financial services isn't allowed entry into a discussion about LLMs in software develoment? Weird gate to keep, but sure.
I could see "well this doesn't apply to the financial space" as an argument, though I wouldn't really buy that in this case. But "fuck off you don't have the specific domain knowledge of this other dude" is a weird bar to set.
That's not gatekeeping, but okay. Gatekeeping is about withholding knowledge & information from a group of people for a personal benefit. It's not gatekeeping to stop every clueless idiot from blurting out their opinion and expecting everyone to respect it, because otherwise you're a gatekeeper (I don't want to imply the author of the article is a clueless idiot, this is a generalized statement).
to restrict access to (something of value, such as information, knowledge, or resources) in order to exert power or control over a person or group
The person I was responding to was restricting the author's access to the conversation by publicly refusing to engage with them over a trivial, irrelevant matter. So if that's not gatekeeping, then clearly they're calling the author a clueless idiot, which is just plain rude.
But it's specific domain knowledge all the way down.
We have a special term for the few remaining generalist web developers without a domain specialization: "WordPress Admin".
This is literally the premise of the article.
The person I responded to stopped reading because the author doesn't have specific domain knowledge of financial services.
Why does this read like it was written by Claude?
Because it obviously was.
The dashes, the short sentences, the bullet points, the overly familiar tone that seems LinkedIn-ish. All of it sounds like AI.
The author may be, in theory, right, but it counts for nothing if the people in charge don't recognize where that actual value is. Which MANY of them do not.
There is one other thing not mentioned that LLMs are bad at: being accountable. When your customers come complaining at 2:30 in the morning that the payments are failing, your manager isn't going to the LLM to ask what the fuck broke and why the fuck he's awake after 3 hours of sleep. He's going to you to do that. And when you're able to tell him that your downstream service is having an outage because AWS shit the bed again, he's going to trust your word. Will he choose to replace you with a LLM? Maybe, but he'll never be able to put out those fires without you.
he’ll never be able to put out those fires without you.
Why do you say that? I would guess that we are very few years away before we have AI systems monitoring for downtimes and such that can quickly diagnose and fix issues that occur completely automatically - in fact I would not be surprised if this already exists today.
Never? Never is a long time.
That said, by the time you can actually run a significant software company without any programmers it seems likely that you could also run most white collar firms with vastly fewer employees and then we're going to have bigger problems.
Never? Never is a long time.
Yep, it is.
You can't solve people problems without people. It doesn't matter how fancy your calculator is, whether it can only do addition or it's capable of simulating the universe. Someone has to take the blame (and accept the credit).
Why? You could have an entire company run by a single person if that is required for legal purposes. Or even multiple companies.
It would pretty much require strong AI / AGI, but are you really suggesting that we will never have AGI?
No one can tell whether AGI in the form of something akin to biological brains will happen. How will we build something we can't comprehend the architecture of?
Also, I think their point was not that AGI will never happen, it's more that it doesn't matter whether it happens or not, because AI/AGI will not solve our problems (well, it will solve some, but create so many more that in the end we've really achieved nothing).
I think we are further from AGI than people think. I doubt I will live to see it.
Also, I think their point was not that AGI will never happen, it's more that it doesn't matter whether it happens or not, because AI/AGI will not solve our problems
This exactly. AGI can never solve people problems because those problems are inherent to people. Social problems, for example, don't magically disappear because you have a magic box that does everything.
I think we are further from AGI than people think. I doubt I will live to see it.
I would go far enough as to say that most people alive, if not all, definitely won't see AGI in their lifetime. That's of course besides the point, but still...
