We all use LLMs to make code, but there are at least two distinct modes of working with them. Both are powerful, but conflating them is dangerous. It leads to burnout, loss of agency, security breaches, and disastrous outages. Instead, we want to enable better ideas, executed faster, at higher quality.
This week, whilst troubleshooting video encoding discrepancies for a film, I was reminded of the immense wizard power of debugging: the art of systematically bisecting your way to the root cause of a problem, then devising the cleanest fix. This is an art that cannot be taught and which few professions lead you to learn. Even among those that do, such as computer programming, only the most diligent practitioners come to master it, because it is at once unnatural and primordial. We can be sure that many humans will never in their lives enact this discipline, but also that it is fundamental to our success as a species. ...