stream

Beagle SCM

AI: surgeon's assistant or commodity on a meter?

V. Grishchenko

There has been many metaphors proposed for AI assisted coding.<br>For example, Geoffrey Litt suggested "code like a surgeon"<br>metaphor: your are the surgeon, LLM is your assistant. Delegate<br>the grunt work to AI, do what matters.

When I sit down for a work session, I want to feel like<br>a surgeon walking into a prepped operating room. Everything<br>is ready for me to do what I’m good at.

I had a surgery once, so I get it. I remember how rudely a<br>surgeon reprimanded his assistant for a minor mishap that could<br>have potentially caused a medical error. Nice to hear when it<br>is your flesh on the table. The assistant, I believe, have<br>internalized that and likely does surgeries by now. Meanwhile,<br>I reprimand Claude virtually every day and I am not sure if it<br>helps at all. What Claude does well is reproducing a stream of<br>"internet conciousness", its effective training set.

The other thing I noticed in the operating room is the formal<br>process . Paid by countless lives, a process that allows to<br>minimize the preventable negative outcomes. The process of<br>organizational and cultural learning . The surgeon re-read my<br>papers before entering the room. A day before there was a<br>medical concillium where my case was seen by several doctors.<br>A surgeon sees many patients. Cases are somewhat similar cause<br>modern surgeons are highly specialized. Still, he remembered<br>that the surgery is on the right, while a chair was set on the<br>left. An assistant got that well-deserved kick in the butt, so<br>to say. Can we trust Claude to put the chair on the right side?<br>Currently, not. Not at all.

Another metaphor was suggested by Sam Altman of Open AI.

We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like<br>electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.

This is a bit demeaning to the concept of intelligence per se,<br>and that was probably intended. Are you sure you want to call<br>that commodity you sell "intelligence"?

So let me improve that metaphor a little bit. What we get from<br>LLMs is not intelligence per se, but a stream of "internet<br>conciousness" that, if left alone, just flows from a high place<br>to a low place. That is indeed a commodity. Following that<br>water metaphor, we are now like the people of Sumer. We learn<br>to divert that stream to water our fields and pump our bellows.

How do we do it? By building processes. By learning.