Comment on MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
hisao@ani.social 3 weeks agoI’m happy for your successes and your enthusiasm! I’m in a different position, I’m kinda very lazy and have little enthusiasm regarding coding/devops stuff specifically, but I enjoy backsitting the Copilot. I also think that you’re definitely learning more by doing everything yourself, but it’s not really true that you learn nothing by only backsitting LLM, because it doesn’t just produce working solution from a single prompt, you have to reprompt and refine things again and again until you get what you want and it’s working as expected. I feel myself a bit overpowered this way because it lets me get things done extraordinarily fast. For example, at 00:00 I was only choosing a VPS to buy and by 04:00 I already had wireguard server with port forwarding up and running and all my clientside stuff configured and updated accordingly. And I had some exotic issues during setup which I also troubleshoot using LLM, like for example, my clientside wg.conf file getting wrong SELinux context and wg-quick daemon refusing to work because of that:
unconfined_u:object_r:user_home_t:s0
I never knew such this thing even exist, and LLM just casually explained that and provided a fix:
sudo semanage fcontext -a -t etc_t "/etc/wireguard(/.*)?" sudo restorecon -Rv /etc/wireguard
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
LLMs are good as a guide to point you in the right direction. They’re about the same kind of tool as a search engine. They can help point you in the right direction and are more flexible in answering questions.
Much like search engines, you need to be aware of the risks and limitations of the tools. Google with give you links that are crawling with browser exploiting malware and LLMs will give you answers that are wrong or directions that are destructive to follow (like incorrect terminal commands).
We’re a bit off from the ability to have models which can tackle large projects like coding complete applications, but they’re good at some tasks.
I think the issue is when people try to use them to replace having to learn instead of as a tool to help you learn.
hisao@ani.social 3 weeks ago
I believe they’re (Copilot and similar) good for coding large projects if you use them in small steps and micromanage everything. I think in this mode of use they save a huge amount of time, and more importantly, they prevent you wasting your energy doing grindy/stupid/repetitive parts and allow you to save it for actually interesting/challenging parts.