Interest has risen in tandem with the popularity of LLMs. I have worked on these sorts of things as part of internal tooling.
Sometimes these strategies are used to provide LLMs with a greater understanding of your codebase to improve code generation results.
Additionally, techniques which allow humans to visualize the shape of code are being explored as engineers become less familiar with the specific implementation.
“Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, 'The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.' But since the Freedom of Information Act, I'm afraid to say things like that.”
In a similar vein, in the pre-LLM era I gave a few interviews where the candidate was asked to screenshare while solving the problem. The candidates were allowed to use any resource they wanted from the broader internet.
I often found that I learned more about the candidate by the way they phrased their Google searches and how they selected and explored sites for information than from the actual solution they produced.
Friends and family who are largely non-technical have referred to ChatGPT as Chat for at least a year.
I admit I was struck when I first heard someone use that shorthand in conversation at a party. It was the moment I knew that for better or worse LLMs use had permeated deep into regular life.
I watched someone ask Claude to replace all occurrences of a string instead of using a deterministic operation like “Find and Replace” available in the very same VSCode window they prompted Claude from.
The US bugged the “toilet partitions” of the Russian embassy in D.C. during its construction[0] and the FBI built a tunnel under it for espionage purposes in the 80s[1].
I think it’s fair to say that diplomats appear to be appointed under a two-faced system.
On the one side you have some diplomats who really are quite capable career foreign policy wonks, appointed in a manner which appears to be meritocratic.
On the other side you have folks appointed, like you mention, as a kind of patronage.
Traditionally, it has been that the softer counterparties (Friendly countries, European allies, small island nations, etc) are staffed with patrons while the more difficult or geopolitically sensitive relationships are manned by professionals, but this is certainly not always true, and one can find many counterexamples.
This is interesting, do all major airports have the ability to set up this cable system if needed? Or is this unique to PDX, or perhaps only those airports which are near where fighters train.
Sometimes these strategies are used to provide LLMs with a greater understanding of your codebase to improve code generation results.
Additionally, techniques which allow humans to visualize the shape of code are being explored as engineers become less familiar with the specific implementation.