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AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

koshyjohn.com

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Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#401

Post by fehu22 »

nunez wrote: post #303

> If the job were mainly about producing syntactically valid code, then of course A.I. would be on a direct path to replacing large parts of the profession. But that was never the highest-value part of the work. The value was always in judgment. > The valuable engineer is the one who sees the hidden constraint before it causes an outage. The one who notices that the team is solving the wrong problem. The one who redu…

AI has not yet aligned with human thinking absolutely but some people create euphoria that it's surpassing human thinking so only after alignment and surpassing AI can think of an outside inview now it is still inside out

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#402

Post by markus_zhang »

Rebuff5007 wrote: post #356
ookblah wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you learn by struggling and slogging through, even as a senior if your shit breaks it's on you to understand why. no LLM will shortcut that process for you (even asking LLMs why something is wrong requires you to actually understand it eventually, aka LEARNING). how that happens is up to the person. i don't understand all this fear projected as if people won't have agency of learning just because LLMs make it easier…

I'd argue that the engineers of 20 years ago were better than the engineers of today because they were significantly more resource constrained and for example, would never use a 300mb javascript library for a profile page.

John Carmack did praise restraint of resources when he recalled his early days working as a lone contractor and as an employee of Softdisk, when he and the team had to push out games on a very tight schedule.

I think this extends to other parts of life, too. I still remember that I fondly played a game over and over again back in high school, when I did not have the Internet and had to borrow CDs from my friends — but when I went into the university and had access to pretty much every game freely on the Intranet, I rarely do that anymore. That’s why I always think an abundance of X may not be the best option for me. That’s why probably includes money, too.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#403

Post by sesm »

freetime2 wrote: post #400

The scary thing is I have seen high level directors and executives say “I asked ChatGPT and it agreed with me” as a way to try to settle a debate. People seem all too willing to delegate even matters of judgement to AI. On the other hand I have been in debates where someone asks ChatGPT to draft a list of possible approaches and pros and cons - and after reading through the list we were all in alignment on the best a…

To make an exhaustive list of possible options you need to find key questions that divide solution space. This requires logic, which LLMs lack.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#404

Post by orangecoffee »

lordnacho wrote: post #336
dwaltrip wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel this as well. I think it’s something to do with having to be more “on” as you slowly work with the LLM to define the problem and find a reasonable solution. There’s not much of a flow-state. You have to process mountains of output and identify the critical points, over and over, endlessly. And it will always be an off in this unsettling little way, even when it’s mostly quite good. It’s jarring. The strange so…

Could it be that what we called flow state was actually a sort of high level thinking time afforded by doing low level routine work? For instance I'm the old world, if you wanted to change an interface, you might have to edit 5 or 6 files to add your new function in the implementations. This is pretty routine and you won't need to concentrate that much if you're used to it, so you can spend that low-effort time think…

you may be right on this hunch. but I think the old world is no longer there now :( more thinking is expected per unit time

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#405

Post by white_dragon88 »

chii wrote: post #308
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #17

No, AI is not creating that group of people. They already existed. They were the people who would google for StackOverflow snippets and copy+paste them without even reading the entire snippet, much less understand them. Same people, new tool.

> Same people, new tool. the tool works better than stackoverflow, and i expect it eventually will improve enough that such people become as "productive" as the intelligent and conscientious engineer today.

[dead]

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#406

Post by gjuggler »

I was surprised not to see any discussion on whether the author used AI to help write this post. As many people say, writing is thinking.

I started getting that "I'm reading another AI-written blog post" feeling around 1/3 of the way through, but I don't consider myself super calibrated on this.

Pangram seems pretty confident it's AI (https://www.pangram.com/history/e9f6eb77-86f9-46d0-a6c1-e57c...). But I know these tools aren't perfect. I'd love to hear from the author what their process was in writing this piece!

Related question (I'm trying to work this out for myself):

If you believe using AI to write an email or blog post for you isn't okay, but using AI to write code for you is... what's the difference?

Right now my instinct is something like:

- Code can be verifiably correct (especially w/ good tests) so it's less of a purely-creative act than writing.

- But always, always double-check the tests!

- I still wouldn't submit a PR where I can't vouch for every line of code.

- AI-written documentation and specs are mostly still bad and should be looked down upon. But mostly because the quality, at least today, is poor. (Lots of duplication, lack of a clear understanding of the reader's intent and needs, no thoughtful curation, etc.)

- Be psychologically ready to update these priors as models change.

I'd love to hear from anyone who's thought more about this.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#410

Post by hectdev »

rimliu wrote: post #335
netcan wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Myopic is inevitable, to some extent. It's very hard to project this stuff. Socrates wrote about what was being lost as philosophy was becoming written rather than oral...and he was right. We can't even understand what was lost. Many methods of learning and thinking became entirely lost. You could say they were redundant, and they were. But... writing largely replaced oral traditions. It didn't just augment them. He…

I'd say that by purging stuff from the brain we are losing thinking itself. Thinking is manipulating ideas and concepts in your head, assembling and linking. The fewer things there is, the more primitive the result. You cannot juggle without object to juggle, connecting the dots result in trivial patterns when you have just a couple of dots.

It just becomes more abstracted but the thinking is still there. And who is to say we aren’t going to keep reading books, delving into hobbies, or watching movies. All those concepts will then be mixed into the our brains and who knows what new things we will think of to extract out and desire to build with AI.
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