This article tells me the author is not that creative. With LLMs, the number of projects I create increases by 1000%.
I think that is the real bottleneck now. Creative people used to be hindered by execution, now you can aim higher.
LLMs are making me lose my savviness
41–50 of 86 posts
Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
With all due respect, what you're describing doesn't quite spell learning in my opinion. Sure, its better to read the code of an application you envisioned to learn a programming language rather than an unrelated convulated program; but you're still offloading your thought process to the LLM. You're not quite seeing why it chose A instead of B, and why it uses that struct instead of the other. And honestly, the LLM d…
I see this response a lot. What part of the thinking are you thinking is actually offloaded? Writing things down and then arguing with an agent that constantly gets things wrong is just a new kind of Rubber Duck. Are Rubber Ducks offloading thinking? These are more like search plus memory tools. Memory loss is real but that has been happening for me way before agents.
This came out a bit longer than I expected.
Depends on your usage. A rubber duck won't upheave the entire history of written human knowledge to reach for your answer. It doesn't have inherent bias, and its purpose could also be handled by a wall, or the air infront of you if you can stretch your mind a little. What I'm going for here is that as you said, its just a hack to make your brain look for answers in a more efficient manner, by clearly underlining your thought process out loud, tricking yourself into conversation mode, yada yada. Its still you doing all the work, you're just being smarter about it.
A LLM is more akin to a senior pair programmer. It may seem like a rubber duck on the surface, in the sense that you're having a conversation, but the senior programmer may come up with ideas you wouldn't think of. They may have more innate experience in the domain which might pull you away to very different implementations from what you had in mind initially. This is all good, but a common pitfall with LLMs is that they're much more conformative than a senior engineer, much faster, much more responsive. This is where it gets dangerous: they don't tell you you're wrong 80% of the time, like a rubebr duck. They also have innate experience of a domain, like a senior engineer. The result is that your brain never gets a 'hang' signal, and it doesn't feel the need to reevaluate.
Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness
#43[deleted]
Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness
#44This article tells me the author is not that creative. With LLMs, the number of projects I create increases by 1000%.
Being creative and creating things are not the same?
Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Have mathematicians become "less savvy" since the invention of the abacus or calculator? The invention of logarithms or analysis? This is not a fair analogy. Those things are like compilers, languages, and type-checkers. They are deterministic, carefully proven, hand-crafted tools, that allow people to go safely to a higher level of abstraction and still make things in a deterministic way. The jump into the fuzzy w…
Not sure how much frontier math you follow, but probabilistic arguments are extremely popular (particularly in, weirdly enough, number theory), especially for fiddling with the bounds on things, or getting closer to full coverage of various theorems. So this idea that doing math is some kind of fully deterministic & mechanistic process is a bit misleading.
Right, programmers also use randomly generated info from property based testing for example? But I was referencing the analogy to the abacus, calculator, logarithms, analysis, and higher level languages.
Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Have mathematicians become "less savvy" since the invention of the abacus or calculator? The invention of logarithms or analysis? This is not a fair analogy. Those things are like compilers, languages, and type-checkers. They are deterministic, carefully proven, hand-crafted tools, that allow people to go safely to a higher level of abstraction and still make things in a deterministic way. The jump into the fuzzy w…
Not sure how much frontier math you follow, but probabilistic arguments are extremely popular (particularly in, weirdly enough, number theory), especially for fiddling with the bounds on things, or getting closer to full coverage of various theorems. So this idea that doing math is some kind of fully deterministic & mechanistic process is a bit misleading.
Is that kind of argument something like where you count the number of cranks claiming P=NP and the number of cranks claiming P!=NP and then if you get 95% papers claiming P!=NP that one wins?
Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
With all due respect, what you're describing doesn't quite spell learning in my opinion. Sure, its better to read the code of an application you envisioned to learn a programming language rather than an unrelated convulated program; but you're still offloading your thought process to the LLM. You're not quite seeing why it chose A instead of B, and why it uses that struct instead of the other. And honestly, the LLM d…
I see this response a lot. What part of the thinking are you thinking is actually offloaded? Writing things down and then arguing with an agent that constantly gets things wrong is just a new kind of Rubber Duck. Are Rubber Ducks offloading thinking? These are more like search plus memory tools. Memory loss is real but that has been happening for me way before agents.
> Are Rubber Ducks offloading thinking?
Just that an actual rubber duck doesn’t do anything. You solve the problem you have by talking, and in doing so, thinking, to come up with a solution, an idea, or gain better understanding.
After that you either implement something yourself or have learned something.
With an LLM you offload all of that, the only thing you still do is tell it what the problem is. The agentic duck does the rest and you look at the output.
Even if you have to argue, you argue without having gone through the steps to gain anything yourself.
Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness
#48> I’ve experienced that great feeling of “this is a great idea” coming out of nowhere while doing unrelated activities, and having to rush back at my desk to write it down and implement it. That was great - it was rewarding, it was really meaningful.
This is it for me. It’s a pretty incredible tool but it killed the vibe and challenge of building things.
Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness
#49Using AI can open up topics you couldn't work on before. I think you're blaming tools for what are other problems. No carpenter ever said "I used to plane wood by hand and carve magnificent pieces, now that I have an orbital sander and power tools, the love just isn't there". I don't buy this argument at all.
Actually, you'll find in this comment thread a lot of carpenters that prefer doing it "by hand": https://www.reddit.com/r/woodworking/comments/xvgynk/i_dont_...
Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness
#50I remember feeling a little bad the first time seeing AI create a UI as good as the one I did using a niche library and only a picture reference, when I focused on the feeling I realized it was an ego issue, nothing is stopping me from doing it by hand if I enjoyed it for itself, it's just that what I did was no longer scarce or difficult.
Not sure it's an ego issue for everyone. If your job was fun and now it's not anymore, you're having 8h a day less fun.