Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> I beginning to think most "advanced" programmers are just poor communicators.

This is a interesting take take considering that programmers are experts in communicating what someone has asked for (however vaguely) into code.

I think you're referring to is the transition from 'write code that does X' which is very concrete to 'trick an AI into writing the code I would have written, only faster', which feels like work that's somewhere between an art form and asking a magic box to fix things over and over again until it stops being broken (in obvious ways, at least).

Understandably people that prefer engineered solutions do not like the idea of working this way very much.





When you oversee a team technically as a tech lead or an architect, you need communication skills.

1. Basing on how the engineer just responded to my comment, what is the understanding gap?

2. How do I describe what I want in a concise and intuitive way?

3. How do I tell an engineer what is important in this system and what are the constraints?

4. What assumptions will an engineer likely make that are will cause me to have to make a lot of corrections?

Etc.. this is all human to human.

These skills are all transferrable to working with an LLM.

So I guess if you are not used to technical leadership, you may not have used those skills as much.


The issue here is that LLM’s are not human and so having a human mental model of how to communicate doesn’t really work. If I communicate to my engineer to do X I know all kinds of things about them, like their coding style, strengths and weaknesses, and that they have some familiarity with the code they are working with and won’t bring the entirety of stack overflow answers to the context we are working in. LLM’s are nothing like this even when working with large amounts of context, they fail in extremely unpredictable ways from one prompt to the next. If you disagree I’d be interested in what stack or prompting you are using that avoids this.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: