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AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
431–440 of 656 posts
Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
#432Use AI like you would use any other tool: to work for you. There are all sorts of things you can probably do manually that just go a bit faster or more efficient with AI. It's not that different to using an electrical drill vs. a manually operated one. You end up with holes in both cases. But one achieves that a bit faster and neater. Nobody is going to pay you for your artisanally crafted CSS code or whatever you we…
good luck with ignoring what's under the hood. One day you will experience how it does translate to the things people pay for.
Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
#433agree on the code side. for decisions i'd push it a bit further though. the trap isn't really that the model does your thinking for you, it's that it agrees with the thinking you already brought to it. you can't verify a decision the way you verify code, there's no test that fails when "this answer is wrong because you wanted to hear it." so even if you don't outsource the thinking, you can walk away with a plausible-sounding agreement that feels like understanding. that's the failure mode that worries me more. replacement is honestly the easier one to spot.
Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you check if what it produced is even the right thing? Models love to go chasing the wrong goal based on a reasonable spec.
When the end result has problems and needs to be reworked. You can't figure this out instantly except when you'd review everything the LLM produces, which I am not. So the round trip time is pretty long, but I can trace it back to the intent now because I commit every architecture decision in an ADRs, which I pour most of my energy into. These are part of the repo. Using these ADRs helped a lot because most of the as…
Got it. I imagine concurrency bugs will hit hard with this approach because they show up rarely and are hard to debug.
Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
#435Earlier 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.
I "purge" - or better yet choose not to retain - the data.
BUT, BUT! I keep the index.
My favourite quote from Donald Rumsfeld (a very bad human being, but this is still good)
> Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.
What I optimise for is to have as many "known unknowns" as possible. I know a concept, process or a tool exists, but don't understand it or know how to do it. But because I know it exists, I won't start inventing it again from scratch when I need it.
Like if one needs to do some esoteric task, they might start figuring it out from scratch. But because the index in my brain contains a link ("known unknown") to a tool/process that makes that specific thing a LOT easier, I can start looking into it more.
Or I might need to do something common like plumbing or some electrical work at home. Do I know how to do that? No. But I Know A Guy I can call, again externalising the knowledge. Either they come over and help me do it or talk me through the process of adjusting the thermostat in my shower faucet (you need to use WAY more force than I was comfortable with without an expert on the phone btw... there are no hidden screws, you just rip the bits off :D)
Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
#436People are lazy. AI will replace thinking for many people. Augmentation always leads to atrophy.
> Augmentation always leads to atrophy. That's a very bold claim. As a small example let's look at calculators - I remember a lot of claims that having access to calculators would make people's brains atrophy and they'll never be able to do actual math, but what I'm seeing in myself and most people around me is that we're using calculators (and more mathematical software) to tackle significantly more complex problems…
a lot of people indeed cannot do even simple calculations by themselves. Your example just adds to the point.
Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
#437[dead]
Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Socrates wrote about what was being lost… Dr. Steven Skultety & Dr. Gad Saad discussed this in a recent video / podcast. This link is time stamped to the topic https://youtu.be/7mcQf9E3YRo?t=1058
It's the opening page of the book Technopoly.
And here I thought I was being unique. I guess Socrates must be popular.
Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
#439I 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 thes…
What counts as AI help and therefore should be disclosed? For example I often use Grammarly to edit some of my more important writing (but not this post obviously) because it does find grammar mistakes and it does give good readability suggestions (I have a tendency to be wordy) and the process is quicker saving time. I don't always take its advice, as many of its suggestions are not my voice, but it is a useful tool. So do I disclose?
Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
#440Earlier 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.
I never buy these examples. Being a good engineer is more than purely resource optimization. I can think of many times over my career where resource optimization mattered but it’s not always a valuable undertaking.