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I think it's basically equivalent to giving that prompt to a low paid contractor coder and hoping their solution works out. At least the turnaround time is faster?

But normally you would want a more hands on back and forth to ensure the requirements actually capture everything, validation and etc that the results are good, layers of reviews right



It seems to be a mix between hiring an offshore/low level contractor and playing a slot machine. And by that I mean at least with the contractor you can pretty quickly understand their limitations and see a pattern in the mistakes they make. While an LLM is obviously faster, the mistakes are seemingly random so you have to examine the result much more than you would with a contractor (if you are working on something that needs to be exact).


the slot machine is apt. insert tokens, pull lever, ALMOST get a reward. Think: I can start over, manually, or pull the lever again. Maybe I'll get a prize if I pull it again...

and of course, you pay whether the slot machine gives a prize or not. Between the slot machine psychological effect and sunk cost fallacy I have a very hard time believing the anecdotes -- and my own experiences -- with paid LLMs.

Often I say, I'd be way more willing to use and trust and pay for these things if I got my money back for output that is false.


If the contractor is producing unusable code, they won't be my contractor anymore.




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