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Almost no skill required to cook a steak

263 points · 304 comments · yusyd

  1. MostlyStable · · focus · HN ↗
    I take the point, but I think the author picked a poor analogy. Cooking even an excellent steak is actually not that hard. In fact, I'd argue that it's among the easiest things to master/make at a top level quality at home. Does it require some modicum of attention and understanding? Sure. But starting with a high quality cut, owning a meat-thermometer, and knowing about reverse searing is about all it takes to reliably and easily get a near perfect steak every time.

    There are far, far better cooking examples out there.

    1. Animats · · focus · HN ↗
      > I take the point, but I think the author picked a poor analogy.

      He may have missed the point.

      AI-generated code does not seem to have parsimony, for one. Generating code is cheap, so there's no drive to condense it. LLMs are not yet good at formulating abstractions to make code smaller, leading to code bloat. It's the same phenomenon that appears when humans modify code they only partially understand by adding special cases to general code.

      There are complaints about "elegance", but it's more useful to talk about parsimony. Code bloat is measurable. Elegance is hard to assess.

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