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Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

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Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#81

Post by raffraffraff »

CurleighBraces wrote: post #72

I find talking to LLMs both amazing and frustrating, a computer that can understand my plain text ramblings is incredible, but it's inability to learn is frustrating. A good example, with junior developers I create thorough specs first and as I saw their skills and reasoning abilities progress my thoroughness drops as my trust in them grows. You just can't do that with LLMs

You can write an agent.md file and gradually add to it as you develop the project. The reason junior developers get better is that the context goes from low to high over the time you spend working with them. Yes, "learning".

I've found that maintaining a file that is designed to increase the LLM's awareness of how I want to approach problems, how I build / test / ship code etc, leads to the LLM making fewer annoying assumptions.

Almost all of the annoying assumptions that the LLM makes are "ok, but not how I want it done". I've gotten into the habit of keeping track of these in a file. Like the 10 commandments for LLMs. Now, whenever I'm starting a new context I drop in an agent.md and tell it to read that before starting. Fella like watching Trinity learn how to fly a helicopter before getting into it.

It's still not perfect, but I'm doing waaaay more work now to get annoyed by the LLM's inability to "automatically learn" without my help.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#82

Post by my_throwaway23 »

muchfriction wrote: post #73
my_throwaway23 wrote: post #51

Your writing disagree - "This is not . This is how ." "When or , is not . It is ." "That alignment is what produces the sense of recognition. I already had the shape of the idea. The model supplied a clean verbal form." It's all LLM's. Nobody writes like this.

I was having a similar odd sense of something being off, then got to > This is not new. Writing has always done this for me. What is different is the speed. I can probe half-formed thoughts, discard bad formulations, and try again without much friction. That encourages a kind of thinking I might have otherwise skipped. This is a mess. The triple enumeration, twice in a row, right in the middle of a message that warra…

Ding ding ding!

Reading, and to some extent editing, is not an active task. In order to become better, at anything, you need to actively do the thing. If you're prompting LLM's, and using whatever they produce, all you'll see any improvement in is... prompting.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#83

Post by keybored »

firefoxd wrote: post #42

Not to dismiss other people's experience, but thinking improves thinking. People tend to forget that you can ask yourself questions and try to answer them. There is such thing as recursive thinking where you end up with a new thought you didn't have before you started. Don't dismiss this superpower you have in your own head.

Unfortunately we do neglect more and more of our own innate talents. Imagine sitting there just thinking, without even a reMarkable to keep notes? Do people even trust their memory beyond their immediate working memory?

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#84

Post by tehjoker »

teiferer wrote: post #52
gradus_ad wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the best existing "product" analogy for LLM's is coffee. Coffee is a universally available, productivity enhancing commodity. There are some varieties certainly, but at the end of the day, a bean is a bean. It will get the job done. Many love it, many need it, but it doesn't really cost all that much. Where people get fancy is in all the fancy but unnecessary accoutrements for the brewing of coffee. Some choo…

> Coffee is a universally available, productivity enhancing commodity The analogy carries further than you intended. If you have never reached addiction stage, then there is no factual productivity enhancement. "But I'm so much less productive if I haven't had my morning coffee" Yeah, because you have an addiction. It sounds worse than it is, if you just don't drink coffee for a few days the headaches will subside. B…

I'm not so sure. The stimulation can also self-medicate for people with attention issues. I've tried quitting coffee before for weeks and I get so spacey it is difficult to work on major projects. I try coffee again and suddenly I feel quite capable. Perhaps I didn't quit long enough, but at this point after multiple attempts quitting with similar results, I've just accepted it.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#85

Post by bijant »

firefoxd wrote: post #42

Not to dismiss other people's experience, but thinking improves thinking. People tend to forget that you can ask yourself questions and try to answer them. There is such thing as recursive thinking where you end up with a new thought you didn't have before you started. Don't dismiss this superpower you have in your own head.

When I was a kid people told me I needed no Chess Computer - You can play chess in your head, you know ? I really tried, no luck. Got a mediocre device for Christmas, couldn't beat it for a while, couldn't lose against it soon after. Won some tournaments in my age group and beyond. Thought there must be more interesting problems to solve, got degrees in Math, Law and went into politics for a while. Friends from College call on your birthday, invite you to their weddings, they work on problems in medicine, economics, niches of math you've never heard of - you listen, a couple of days later, you wake up from a weird dream and wonder, ask Opus 4.5/Gemini 3.0 deepthink some questions, call them back: "did you try X ?" they tell you, that they always considered you a genius. You feel good about yourself for a moment before you remember that Von Neumann needed no LLMs and that José Raúl Capablanca died over half a decade before Turing wrote down the first algorithm for a Chess Computer. An Email from a client pops up, he isn't gonna pay your bill unless you make one more modification to that CRUD app. You want to eat and get back to work. Can't help but think about Eratosthenes who needed neither glasses nor telescopes to figure out the earths circumference. Would he have marvelled at the achievements of Newton and his successors at NASA or made fun of those nerds that needed polished pieces of glass not only to figure out the mysteries of the Universe but even for basic literacy.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#87

Post by simianwords »

kranner wrote: post #66
rand846633 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you also do not need paper to think, but surely much of modern physics would not have happened without paper or blackboards…

As cognitive-offloading devices go, paper is completely neutral. It doesn't flatter you into believing you are a genius when you're not; it doesn't offer to extend your reasoning or find references in the research literature and then hallucinate and lead you astray; it will never show you advertisements for things you don't need; it will never leak your ideas and innermost thoughts to corporations owned by billionair…

Really pessimistic and mostly incorrect understanding of LLMs. No they don’t flatter you, try using ChatGPT once.

No they don’t hallucinate that much.

Since paper this is one of the most important inventions. It has almost infinite knowledge and you can ask it anything mostly.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#89

Post by simianwords »

johnfn wrote: post #54
firefoxd wrote: post #42

Not to dismiss other people's experience, but thinking improves thinking. People tend to forget that you can ask yourself questions and try to answer them. There is such thing as recursive thinking where you end up with a new thought you didn't have before you started. Don't dismiss this superpower you have in your own head.

I'm mystified by this comment. Do people really forget that they can think in their own mind?

Don’t be mystified if you lack to curiosity to understand how to use new technology. It’s useful to have something to speak to and get feedback on.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#90

Post by simianwords »

sublinear wrote: post #68
firefoxd wrote: post #42

Not to dismiss other people's experience, but thinking improves thinking. People tend to forget that you can ask yourself questions and try to answer them. There is such thing as recursive thinking where you end up with a new thought you didn't have before you started. Don't dismiss this superpower you have in your own head.

I almost entirely agree with you, but the issue is that the information you currently have might not be enough to get the answers you want through pure deduction. So how do you get more information? I think chatbots are a very clumsy way to get information. Conversations tend to be unfocused until you, the human, take an interest in something more specific and pursue it. You're still doing all the work. It's also too…

No I don’t think humans have some magical metaphysical deduction capability that LLMs lack exclusively.

I have had conversations and while they don’t have the exact attentiveness of a human, they get pretty close. But what they do have an advantage in is being an expert in almost any field.

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