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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

#461

Post by lateral_cloud »

koshyjohn wrote: post #454
gjuggler wrote: post #406

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 thes…

Great question! I had A.I. critique what I wrote and wherever it gave me suggestions like “this sentence runs too long”, “this can be more punchy”, etc., I considered what it would tell me and chose to change direction if I thought it was warranted. But, notably, I typed out what I thought in my head to counter specific criticisms if I thought them valid instead of taking the LLM’s direct suggestion. I’d then ask it…

Sorry but it's very obvious you used an LLM for more than just suggestions. Ironic given the point of the article.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#463

Post by pkphilip »

anygivnthursday wrote: post #363
pkphilip wrote: post #355

Just as the advent of palm-sized organizers reduced our ability to recall dozens and sometimes even 100s of phone numbers of friends etc, AI will reduce our ability to perform a range of functions. I think the evidence for this is quite clear. Humans are NOT going to expend any energy - even mental energy, to think about something if they don't have to.

Or Google Maps our ability to navigate when GPS signal is lost

Google Maps has made me a total idiot. I can't remember routes to places where I have gone quite a few times!

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#464

Post by sesm »

freetime2 wrote: post #426
sesm wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM didn't solve an Erdos problem, it generated a text that a human looked at, cleaned up, corrected and used as base for a solution. WRT logic, there a multiple occasions of LLMs answering incorrectly to trivial logic puzzles. Of course, with each occasion becoming public they are added to training data and overfitted on, but if you embed them in a more subtle way LLMs will fail again.

From the article about the Erdos problem: > “This one is a bit different because people did look at it, and the humans that looked at it just collectively made a slight wrong turn at move one,” says Terence Tao, a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has become a prominent scorekeeper for AI’s push into his field. “What’s beginning to emerge is that the problem was maybe easier than expecte…

Sure, LLMs are good at generating text that humans can interpret as educated guesses. But a list of educated guesses is not 'enumerating options', because informed decision requires a complete list of options in order to not miss anything. Imagine using a Monte-Carlo method with sample size of 3 for finding a function extremum - that's the equivalent of using LLM-generated list of options for making a decision.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#465

Post by erdaniels »

journal wrote: post #15

A.I. is creating engineers who can't WORK without it

I think if anyone is looking for a concise way to talk about the problems with LLM and agentic coding, it's this. People say AI assisted coding but for much of what I've seen (and tried), it's the tool, gateway, and interface to some people's work now.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#466

Post by [deleted] »

gombosg wrote: post #420
gjuggler wrote: post #406

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 thes…

Right at the top: "That distinction matters more than people think." That's basically telltale AI :) Also the entire framing around "judgment" and "taste" is what LLMs love to parrot about the topic. There are fair arguments in the post but I totally agree that "writing is thinking" and also holding myself to "if you didn't bother to write it, why would I bother to read it"?

[deleted]

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#467

Post by Archelaos »

thrownthatway wrote: post #413
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…

> 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

Socrates never wrote anything. At least, not as far as we know.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#468

Post by jazz9k »

nunez wrote: post #309
spacechild1 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see. Computer Science is not an engineering degree and it is not about programming. That's what Software Engineering degrees are for.

Most CS programs have software dev in their curricula; I don't think it's wild to expect a CS student to code FizzBuzz.

I graduated in 2006 in CS, and I had at least 5 or 6 software development classes. We also had electives, which included DB design and algorithms. Many of the higher-level classes allowed us to use any language of our choice as well.

I was self-taught since I was 15, so most of these classes were just review for me. I met lots of people that didn't know how to code as seniors (and never ended up getting a job in their field).

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#469

Post by mpalmer »

koshyjohn wrote: post #454
gjuggler wrote: post #406

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 thes…

Great question! I had A.I. critique what I wrote and wherever it gave me suggestions like “this sentence runs too long”, “this can be more punchy”, etc., I considered what it would tell me and chose to change direction if I thought it was warranted. But, notably, I typed out what I thought in my head to counter specific criticisms if I thought them valid instead of taking the LLM’s direct suggestion. I’d then ask it…

Taking you at your word, your A.I. revision process nonetheless seems to have yielded content which may as well have been generated at the start for how difficult it is to get through it.

    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 reduces a vague debate into crisp tradeoffs. The one who identifies the missing abstraction. The one who can debug reality, not just read code. The one who can create clarity where everyone else sees noise.
This is a list of six things, disguised as an actual paragraph. Of sentence fragments disguised as actual sentences. Etc. Either you wrote this yourself and the AI didn't tell you "this is repetitive and list-y", or...

    "The software engineers who will be most valuable in the future are not the ones who do everything themselves. They are the ones who refuse to spend time on work that A.I. can do for them, while still understanding everything that is done on their behalf."

    "The danger is not that A.I. will make people lazy in some vague moral sense. It is that it makes it easy to simulate competence without building competence."

    "In that world, the engineer is not replaced by A.I. The engineer becomes more leveraged because they are operating above the level of raw output."

    "The ability to explain why something works, not just that it appears to work."

    "That process is not optional. It is how engineers acquire and elevate their competency."

    "The support system may make you look functional, but it does not make you capable."

    "The challenge is not merely adopting A.I. tools. It is protecting the conditions under which real thinking, learning, and craftsmanship continue to thrive."

    "They will need interview loops that test reasoning, not just polished answers."

    "The organizations that handle this well will not be the ones that simply push A.I. adoption hardest. They will be the ones that learn to separate leverage from dependency, acceleration from imitation, and genuine capability from convincing output."
^ Which of these are your thoughts? They all look like slop to me.
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