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"ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

terriblesoftware.org

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Re: "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

#81

Post by lrvick »

lostmsu wrote: post #68
lrvick wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using an AI to think for me would be like going to a gym and paying a robot to lift weights for me. Like sure that is cool that is possible, but if I do not do the work myself I will not get stronger. Our brains are the same way. I also do not use a GPS because there are literally studies with MRI scans proving it makes an entire section of our brain go dark compared to London taxi drivers required by law to navigate…

> Our brains are the same way. How many IQ points do you gain per year of subjecting yourself to this?

No idea if it actually makes me smarter, but I have noticed I have an atypically high level of mental pain tolerance to pursue things many told me were impossible and quickly gave up on.

Re: "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

#82

Post by lrvick »

jasonlotito wrote: post #41
lrvick wrote: post #23

I do not use AI for engineering work and never will, because doing the work of thinking for myself is how I maintain the neural capacity for forming my own original thoughts and ideas no AI has seen before. If anyone gives me an opinion from an AI, they disrespect me and themselves to a point they are dead to me in an engineering capacity. Once someone outsources their brain they are unlikely to keep learning or evol…

> I do not use AI for engineering work and never will So, working with CLAUDE doesn't count. Gotcha. > If this pisses you off, ask yourself why. It doesn't piss me off, but your comment is disingenuous at best.

I actually do not use any proprietary software of any kind in my work. Any tools I can not alter to my liking are not -my- tools and could be taken away from me or changed at any time.

Re: "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

#83

Post by sanswork »

lrvick wrote: post #80
sanswork wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will not use Jr developers for engineering work and never will, because doing the work of a Jr..... You don't have to outsource your thinking to find value in AI tools you just have to find the right tasks for them. The same as you would with any developer jr to you. I'm not going to use AI to engineer some new complex feature of my system but you can bet I'm going to use it to help with refactoring or test writing…

> The reality is that you will be unlikely to compete with people who use these tools effectively. If you looked me or my work up, I think you would likely feel embarrassed by this statement. I have a number of world firsts under my belt that AI would have been unable to meaningfully help with. It is also unlikely I would have every developed the skill to do any of that aside from doing everything the hard way.

I just looked and I'm not sure what I'm meant to be seeing that would cause me to feel embarrassed but congrats on whatever it is. How much more could you have developed or achieved if you didn't limit yourself?

Do you do all your coding in ed or are you already using technology to offload brain power and memory requirements in your coding?

Re: "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

#84

Post by lrvick »

sanswork wrote: post #83
lrvick wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reality is that you will be unlikely to compete with people who use these tools effectively. If you looked me or my work up, I think you would likely feel embarrassed by this statement. I have a number of world firsts under my belt that AI would have been unable to meaningfully help with. It is also unlikely I would have every developed the skill to do any of that aside from doing everything the hard way.

I just looked and I'm not sure what I'm meant to be seeing that would cause me to feel embarrassed but congrats on whatever it is. How much more could you have developed or achieved if you didn't limit yourself? Do you do all your coding in ed or are you already using technology to offload brain power and memory requirements in your coding?

AI would have been near useless when I was creating https://stagex.tools https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex, for instance.

Also I use VIM. Any FOSS tools with predictable deterministic behavior I can fully control are fine.

Re: "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

#85

Post by sanswork »

lrvick wrote: post #84
sanswork wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just looked and I'm not sure what I'm meant to be seeing that would cause me to feel embarrassed but congrats on whatever it is. How much more could you have developed or achieved if you didn't limit yourself? Do you do all your coding in ed or are you already using technology to offload brain power and memory requirements in your coding?

AI would have been near useless when I was creating https://stagex.tools https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex , for instance. Also I use VIM. Any FOSS tools with predictable deterministic behavior I can fully control are fine.

I don't know, just a quick glance at that repo and I feel like AI could have written your shell scripts which took up several tries from multiple people to get right about as well as the humans did.

So your ok with using tools to offload thinking and memory as long as they are FOSS?

Re: "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

#86

Post by skylurk »

brookst wrote: post #65
theamk wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it is, as long as those engineers apply and honest effort and learn from their mistakes. Even if they don't do things faster then you initially, at least they learned something. Unfortunately that logic does not apply to models.

Then I’m lost. I thought this was about the laziness of outsourcing thinking. Why would the outsourcee’s ability to learn impact whether it’s lazy or not?

LLM are plenty useful, don't get me wrong, but:

If your interaction with the junior dev is not much different than interacting with an LLM, something is off.

Training a junior dev will make you a better dev. Teaching is learning. And a junior dev will ask questions that challenge your assumptions.

It's the opposite of "outsourcing."

Re: "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

#87

Post by Terretta »

Counterpoint: asking GPT can provide useful calibration not to facts but to median mental models

Think of it as a dynamic opinion poll -- the probabilistic take on this thing is such and such.

As a bonus you can prime the respondent's persona.

// After posting, I see another comment at bottom opening with "Counterpoint:"... Different point though.

Re: "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

#88

Post by lrvick »

sanswork wrote: post #85
lrvick wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI would have been near useless when I was creating https://stagex.tools https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex , for instance. Also I use VIM. Any FOSS tools with predictable deterministic behavior I can fully control are fine.

I don't know, just a quick glance at that repo and I feel like AI could have written your shell scripts which took up several tries from multiple people to get right about as well as the humans did. So your ok with using tools to offload thinking and memory as long as they are FOSS?

Take this one for example https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex/src/branch/main/src/compa...

It took some iteration and hands on testing to get that right across multiple operating systems. Also to pass shellcheck, etc.

Even if an LLM -could- do that sort of thing as well as my team and I can, we would lose a lot of the arcane knowledge required to debug things, and spot sneaky bugs, and do code review, if we did not always do this stuff by hand.

It is kind of like how writing things down helps commit them to memory. Typing to a lesser extent does the same.

Regardless those scripts are like Absolutely 0 chance an LLM could have helped with bootstrapping a primitive c toolchain from 180 bytes of x86 machine code like this: https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex/src/branch/main/packages/...

That took a lot of reasoning from humans to get right, in spite of the actual code being just a bunch of shell commands.

There are just no significant shortcuts for that stuff, and again if there were, taking them is likely to rob me of building enough cache in my brain to solve the edge cases.

Also yes, I only use FOSS tools with deterministic behavior I can modify, improve, and rely on to be there year after year, and thus any time spent mastering them is never wasted.

Re: "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

#89

Post by simonw »

lrvick wrote: post #88
sanswork wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, just a quick glance at that repo and I feel like AI could have written your shell scripts which took up several tries from multiple people to get right about as well as the humans did. So your ok with using tools to offload thinking and memory as long as they are FOSS?

Take this one for example https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex/src/branch/main/src/compa... It took some iteration and hands on testing to get that right across multiple operating systems. Also to pass shellcheck, etc. Even if an LLM -could- do that sort of thing as well as my team and I can, we would lose a lot of the arcane knowledge required to debug things, and spot sneaky bugs, and do code review, if we did not al…

That x86 machine code link reminded me of an LLM project I did just last week - https://tools.simonwillison.net/sloccount

I decided to see if I could get an old Perl and C codebase running via WebAasembly in the browser having Claude brute-force figuring out how to compile the various components to WASM. Details here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/22/sloccount-in-webassemb...

Here are notes it wrote for me on the compilation process it figured out: https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/473e89edfebc27781b43443...

I'm not saying it could have created your exact example (I doubt that it could) but you may be under-estimating how promising it's getting for problems of that shape.

Re: "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

#90

Post by malfist »

lostmsu wrote: post #69
greazy wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's wonderfully succinct argument.

It hinges assuming that ChatGPT does not thinking, which is clearly false. Hell, Feynman said as much in 1985. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipRvjS7q1DI

I really don't think Feynman said ChatGPT was "thinking" in 1985.
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