Back when I was in school and something came up on a test that required knowledge or skills I didn’t have, I would often find the closest thing I did know how to do, and then do that thing even though it’s not what the question asked for, in the hopes of getting partial credit.
Looking back, I’m sure that the teachers grading my tests were fully aware of what I was doing, and yet the strategy did work out for me often enough to be worth doing.
Anyway, working with LLM coding agents gives me sympathy for my teachers back then. LLMs are capable of doing a significant number of astonishing things. If you ask them to do something that is not on that list but that does resemble something on that list, you may get an artifact so beautiful and impressive that at first you don’t notice it’s not the artifact you asked for, but is instead the artifact the LLM knows how to create.
Back when I was in school and something came up on a test that required knowledge or skills I didn’t have, I would often find the closest thing I did know how to do, and then do that thing even though it’s not what the question asked for, in the hopes of getting partial credit.
Looking back, I’m sure that the teachers grading my tests were fully aware of what I was doing, and yet the strategy did work out for me often enough to be worth doing.
Anyway, working with LLM coding agents gives me sympathy for my teachers back then. LLMs are capable of doing a significant number of astonishing things. If you ask them to do something that is not on that list but that does resemble something on that list, you may get an artifact so beautiful and impressive that at first you don’t notice it’s not the artifact you asked for, but is instead the artifact the LLM knows how to create.