If you replace a junior with #LLM and make the senior review output, the reviewer is now scanning for rare but catastrophic errors scattered across a much larger output surface due to LLM "productivity."
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@pseudonym That and LLM code often looks very nice on the surface so it takes a lot of vigilance and thinking to find the subtle errors. Code from juniors tends to have more immediate signs of errors or wrong mental models.
@moink @pseudonym one of the benefits of people *having* a mental model
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@pseudonym It's certainly like that.
FWIW though LLMs don't have any shame or feeling they need to manage their reputation.
If you tell the same LLM that produced the report that it is now the QA manager and it must review the report from the standpoints of checking for missing or inaccurate citations, dubious claims or non-concise text, it will rat itself out and can be told to fix what it found.
This is the same LLM entirely...
@hopeless @pseudonym you are suggesting that you can just layer more shit onto the shit and after enough layers of shit it becomes not shit.
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If you replace a junior with #LLM and make the senior review output, the reviewer is now scanning for rare but catastrophic errors scattered across a much larger output surface due to LLM "productivity."
That's a cognitively brutal task.
Humans are terrible at sustained vigilance for rare events in high-volume streams. Aviation, nuclear, radiology all have extensive literature on exactly this failure mode.
I propose any productivity gains will be consumed by false negative review failures.
@pseudonym also, when the senior retires, who replaces them?
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If you replace a junior with #LLM and make the senior review output, the reviewer is now scanning for rare but catastrophic errors scattered across a much larger output surface due to LLM "productivity."
That's a cognitively brutal task.
Humans are terrible at sustained vigilance for rare events in high-volume streams. Aviation, nuclear, radiology all have extensive literature on exactly this failure mode.
I propose any productivity gains will be consumed by false negative review failures.
@pseudonym This, %100. The Glass Cage by Nicholas Carr dives into this in depth with examples from aviation, and how full-automation of flight, makes it harder to recover from a disaster situation for pilots.
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If you replace a junior with #LLM and make the senior review output, the reviewer is now scanning for rare but catastrophic errors scattered across a much larger output surface due to LLM "productivity."
That's a cognitively brutal task.
Humans are terrible at sustained vigilance for rare events in high-volume streams. Aviation, nuclear, radiology all have extensive literature on exactly this failure mode.
I propose any productivity gains will be consumed by false negative review failures.
@pseudonym @mayintoronto … and: there will be no juniors to grow into seniors.
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If you replace a junior with #LLM and make the senior review output, the reviewer is now scanning for rare but catastrophic errors scattered across a much larger output surface due to LLM "productivity."
That's a cognitively brutal task.
Humans are terrible at sustained vigilance for rare events in high-volume streams. Aviation, nuclear, radiology all have extensive literature on exactly this failure mode.
I propose any productivity gains will be consumed by false negative review failures.
@pseudonym We are using AI inexactly the worst ways possible.
Caveat: I am a never AI-er, due to the ethical issues surrounding how training data is gathered, the severe ecological and economic impacts, and the fact that deepfakes are objectively making the world a shittier place.
But pretend for a second, none of those are a problem anymore. We are still using AI wrong. You don't have it produce a mountain of code and have a human review it. You still use humans to produce the code, and have AI help other humans to review it. AI isn't terribly good at writing code, but it has been shown to be effective at finding a few classes of bugs humans are typically very bad at finding.
But that won't allow you to fire people and replace them with monkeys on typewriters, so it'll never happen.
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