If they’re big enough, every fad turns into a bubble. Actually every fad does, but the little ones are hard to see.

Currently the Fad is “Use LLMs for Everything”

It starts with a discovery or invention, and zooms to a peak that it can’t possibly deliver on.

Then it fails to do something it had promised to people. Boom, straight into Slough of Despond.

Over time, some people find things it can do well, and rehabilitate it to be productive.

What Do I Do?

Ignore the Spike of Hype, that’s inflated expectations.

Expect the Slough of Despond, The sky is falling! (No it’s not.)

Instead, look around for what it’s really good for, and go straight to the slope of enlightenment

1. Jump straight to the “maturity” stage
2. Don’t believe the blather you hear. Know what it will screw up.
3. Avoid doing something stupid: Watch it like a hawk. “Believe nothing, trust no-one.”
4. In other words, use the new stuff that works, not what’s hyped.

I’ve found a couple of possibilities thus far

• A Socratic gadfly
• A tool that you run in a domain where the true stuff hugely outnumbers the false.

There are others, being discovered as we speak.

Links

This is part of a multi-part look at the Gartner hype-cycle of LLMs, and where I found my part of the “Plateau of Productivity”.

• Hedgewitch Part 0 is Torches and Pitchforks. That’s the back-story.
• The main story starts with Hedgewitch Part 1: LLMs, about why I’m not a wizard.
• Next is Hedgewitch Part 2: My Favorite Errors, and what I do about them.
• Then Hedgewitch Part 3: LLMs Should Challenge, Not Obey, about the magic that makes it work.
• Then  Hedgewitch Part 4: How do I know that LLMs are buggy? By experiment.
• Then  Hedgewitch Part 5: Upsy-Daisy Teaching the three-year-old.
• Then Hedgewitch Part 6: What would Dave like me to Say? About biased prompts.
• This is Hedgewitch Part 7. Oh, and it’s in a Bubble
• Last will be Hedgewitch Part 8: Coda