Alcides Fonseca.AI & Programming Languages researcher
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Making intelligent software
more reliable.

I work on the intersection of AI, Software Engineering and Programming Languages. Currently, I am applying Formal Methods to Agents, towards AI Safety.

Program synthesisLiquid typesReliable AIGuardrailsEvals

Transformative and Compositional Work

To assess the productivity gained by LLMs, Iris Meredith distinguishes between transformative and compositional work:

While work is obviously a very, very complicated thing, a useful lens for the purpose of this essay is to draw a distinction between work which reshapes a raw material into a finished object and work that puts together multiple objects in a way that creates a certain effect in the world. For the sake of having a shorthand, I’ve chosen to call them transformative and compositional work, respectively.

While Iris does not have a particular clear idea of LLMs, Jeremy Keith does:

My own take on this is that transformative work is often the drudge work—take this data dump and convert it to some other format; take this mock-up and make a disposable prototype. I want my tools to help me with that.
But compositional work that relies on judgement, taste, and choice? Not only would I not use a large language model for that, it’s exactly the kind of work that I don’t want to automate away.
Transformative work is done with broad brushstrokes. Compositional work is done with a scalpel.

Personally, I think it depends much more on where you are in the economic value proposition. Are you selling quick-and-dirty cheap stuff? LLMs are great for you. Are you delivering high-assurance, high-quality work? Then you might/should be skeptical of LLMs.

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