Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 442 posts

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#411

Post by xigoi »

dyauspitr wrote: post #314
risyachka wrote: post #302

This is exactly why there is no point in using AI for coding unless in rare fee cases. Code without AI - sharp skills, your brain works and you come up with better solutions etc. Code with AI - skills decline after merely a week or two, you forget how to think and because of relying on AI for simpler and simpler tasks - your total output is less and worse that in you were to diy it.

My total output is definitely higher.

If you only care about the volume of code and not the quality or usefulness, I have an even better tool for you:

    yes 'print("hello world")' > program.py

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#412

Post by groestl »

pepa65 wrote: post #400
groestl wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; Tell me you don't have ADHD without telling me you don't have ADHD (or even knowing what ADHD is, yet) ;)

You think Socrates had ADHD??

No, actually the opposite :)

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#413

Post by dang »

relaxing wrote: post #399

Why did the posting two days ago omit the first part of the title?

(This was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44307801 but we moved it to the merged thread, which is the "posting two days ago" being referred to)

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#414

Post by Terr_ »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #381
Terr_ wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The abacus, the calculator and the book don't randomly get stuff wrong in 15% of cases though. Yeah, you'd think that a profession that talks about stuff like "NP-Hard" and "unit tests" would be more sensitive to the distinction between (A) the work of providing a result versus (B) the amount of work necessary to verify it.

Yeah, they realize (B) is almost always much, much lower than (A), which is why ChatGPT is stupidly useful even if it gets 15% of the stuff wrong.

I distrust that rationale, because even if generation>=verification, it depends on the error-rate and impact. Wiring up a condemned building with demolition charges might take longer than a casual independent review...

Truly perfect code verification can easily cost more than writing it, especially when it's not just the new lines themselves, but the change's effect on a big existing system.

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#415

Post by throwawayoldie »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #66

The next generation of programmers will be stupider then the current generation thanks to LLMs. That means age-ism will become less and less prevalent. "Look at that old timer! He can code without AI! That's insane!"

Speaking as an engineer coming up on 50 years old: nice.

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#416

Post by mold_aid »

mjburgess wrote: post #233
bonoboTP wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe that one of the most underappreciated skills in business is the ability to string a coherent narrative together. I attend many meetings with extremely-talented engineers who are incapable of presenting their arguments in a manner that others (both technical and non-technical) can follow them. Yes, but the arguments they need to present are not necessarily the ones they used to convince themselves, or thei…

To give a brief example of this -- a college asked why an exec had listened to my argument but not theirs recently, despite "saying the same thing". I explained that my argument contained actual impacts: actual delays, actual costs, an actual timeline when the impact would occur -- rather than nebulous "there will be problems". Everyone comes to execs with hypothetical problems that all sound like people dressing up…

In light of this it's interesting that a lot of arguments for LLMs discuss them largely in terms of what they "can" do and not what the actual use is.

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#417

Post by throwawayoldie »

Frummy wrote: post #151
OhNotAPaper wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can’t believe riding a horse and carriage wouldn’t make you better at riding a horse. Surely you mean "would"? Because riding a horse and carriage doesn't imply any ability at riding a horse, but the reverse relation would actually make sense, as you already have historical, experiential, intimate knowledge of a horse despite no contemporaneous, immediate physical contact. Similarly, already knowing what you want…

From the thread: yes, it's sarcasm. Here's some clarification as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44291314 Yes, I'm acknowledging a lack of skill transfer, but that there are new ways of working and so I sarcastically imply the article can't see the forest for the trees, missing the big picture. A horse and carriage is very useful for lots of things. A horse is more specialised. I'm getting at the analogy o…

> A horse and carriage is very useful for lots of things. A horse is more specialised.

You have that backwards. A horse and carriage is good for traveling on a road. If you have just the horse, however, you can travel on a road, travel offroad, pull a plow, ride into battle and trample evildoers, etc.

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#418

Post by atoav »

niemandhier wrote: post #154
bsenftner wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! Never ever ever have AI write for you. Ask it to critique what you wrote, ask it to pick your arguments apart. Then use your mind to fix what it pointed out. If you cannot figure out how, ask the AI to explain how. Then take a break, 20 minutes is fine, and then return and fix the issue yourself using your own mind to write without assistance. This is how one uses AI to learn.

The problem with this strategy is that unless you commit logical fallacies you cannot trust the AI critic. Why? It might cite non existing diverging opinions, misuse sources or introduce subtle changes in a citation.

I mean the thing is, AI is a stochastic parrot. But so is grabbing a random book from a library in a certain sense. You will always have to think about it yourself.

But that means considering LLMs as a thinking tool rather than a tool that does work for you is worth it.

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#419

Post by Kon5ole »

bootsmann wrote: post #396
Kon5ole wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Code without AI - sharp skills, your brain works and you come up with better solutions etc. That train of thought leads to writing assembly language in ed. ;-) I think developers as a group have a tendency to spend too much time "inside baseball" and forget what the tools we're good at are actually used for. Farmers don't defend the scythe, spend time doing leetscythe katas or go to scything seminars. They think abo…

> That train of thought leads to writing assembly language in ed Hard disagree, LLVM will always outperform me in writing assembly, it won't just give up and fail randomly when it meets a particularly non-trivial problem, causing me to write assembly by hand to fix it. If LLMs would be 100% reliable on the tasks I had to do, I don't think anyone here would seriously debate about the issue of mental attrition (i.e. yo…

>The problem is that in too many cases, the LLM will only get so far and you will still have to switch to doing actual programming to get the task finished

The LLM makes mistakes sure and isn't a slam dunk tool like a compiler, but it could still save lots of time and be useful.

Some things are fine to let rot. Nobody should spend too much time learning Vue, React or Laravel, or even nhibernate, entity framework or structuremap, for example.

Such frameworks come and go, the knowledge has little value. Save brain cells for more important, long-lasting things instead. LLM's can certainly help with that.

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#420

Post by Kon5ole »

risyachka wrote: post #401
Kon5ole wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Code without AI - sharp skills, your brain works and you come up with better solutions etc. That train of thought leads to writing assembly language in ed. ;-) I think developers as a group have a tendency to spend too much time "inside baseball" and forget what the tools we're good at are actually used for. Farmers don't defend the scythe, spend time doing leetscythe katas or go to scything seminars. They think abo…

> That train of thought leads to writing assembly language in ed you an pick any language you think is best atm. the point if you have to practice it. use it or lose it

Losing Vue, React, Laravel, Rails, and a myriad of ORM's and other flash-in-the-pan implementations of larger ideas is fine. Lots of empty knowledge calories in IT.
Post reply on HN