I'm a scientist, (biophysicist). Over time I have become a bioinformatician and a python dev. I wrote articles and applications, and it always was a struggle. But now I can speed up, make it all go much faster. But I often feel like my mental models can't keep up. Recently the AI has generated a comprehensive data model (in Django) and I find myself retracing its steps with long discussions and explanations (with/fro…
Recently my wife said that my daughter (ill at the time) may have heatstroke, my response was: It looks like it but she also has a hefty fever (hot after being more than 24 hours out of the sun), I can't really imagine the immune system being involved in heat stroke, although it's possible... My mind went out to heat damaged proteins presenting neo-antigens triggering an immune reaction. I also labelled that as unlikely and more dangerous than what we were observing. I like that I can do that (of course I went on to verify these thoughts!). That reasoning, it's not exactly 100's tokens a sec, but I like the process and it has value.
I also recently observed some weirdness in a dataset, I spend 3 days hunting it down. Long story short: I though I understood how genes make transcripts but I was wrong and ended up adding a new transcript to the human reference genome annotation together with the Gencode people. Now I understand my data better and can separate two different transcripts better in my data (a difference important to our research).
Things like that. The LLM doesn't speed that up, not really. I read a part of a book on gene expression and the function of transcription factors and their interaction with promoters, but I also used LLMs, In the end it was the book with the pictures and clear language that communicated the concepts most clearly. It was made for that of course, and I knew I could trust it (it's tiring to assign Maybe I, we all (humanity), will really be faster in the future. Maybe when you grow up with these things you can build world models better and faster. Maybe I'm just too stuck in my ways, as my neuro-plasticity degrades over time. Or maybe it doesn't degrade, maybe I just need more evidence before changing my world models, they have been building on a heavy foundation for a while now.