Ask HN: How are you actively keeping your thinking sharp while using LLMs daily?

I turned off autocomplete in my IDE back in August. Absolutely hate it. I can defer work to an LLM and review it later. I really can't stand autocomplete built into OSX and iOS. Recently, I tried Grammarly as I'm building my own text editor for non-coding use cases, and that is driving me crazy, too. Everything I type is wrong. Some suggestions are generally good - these would be obvious typos or misspellings I simply missed. But a lot of the suggested solutions are subjective.

I like AI use cases where I can offload large tasks and follow up on them to review the output critically. I think there is a ton of opportunity to leverage yourself with AI, as all of the hype posts say you can. But most tools are simply invasive and, to me, the equivalent of social media 'junk food for the mind' where you just turn your brain off and start clicking approve, approve, copy, paste, etc.. as opposed to doom scrolling.

Or worse you delegate an easy task to an LLM agent and start doom scrolling while you wait on it. No bueno.

I've found that daily LLM use have sharpened my mind considerably, it actually forces a shift from 'production' to 'judgment'. Because AI commoditizes average output, the value moves to evaluation and learning to me-speak-words-good. To stay sharp, I started building tools to audit and refine the agent's reasoning cycles (an observability framework). When you treat the LLM as a junior dev, you are able to think much harder about systemic constraints, edge cases, and the taste of the final product.

I also feel a shift in what I spend my time on. Sometimes I just don’t feel like thinking about complex things. But is that really a problem? If you’re too lazy to do something, maybe it doesn’t need to be done at all?

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