Have you read the "Whispering earring" essay? I love it for the LLM era.[1]

You can treat AI as a whispering earring - "What should we do now? How do we fix this? What do you think?" Or you can treat it like an exoskelton - "Implement kd-tree with metric space xyz for this problem, mapping this to that blah blah".

That's pre-thought execution automation that makes review much simpler - you already know the shape of the desired output. The whispering earring is atrophy.

1. https://croissanthology.com/earring

The thing with calculator argument that always gets me. I do math unconsciously all the time. Even something as simple as adjusting a recipe when cooking. I don't need to grab a device to do that, I just do the quick math in my head. And the only way I can do that is because I learned how to do math. And even with a calculator, I still needed to know what to calculate. The argument "we don't need math, we have a calculator" assumes you always get a textbook question that lays it out for you.

Same goes for LLMs. I can use them for programming, and they're very convenient. But I still need to know what to ask it and make sure it stays within the confines of what I want. And without my knowledge I would have no clue if what it's trying do is correct, or safe.

Naturally, this assumes a workflow where you do actually look and modify the output yourself. But I'd argue that any non tech person is inevitably going to hit a wall where they can't debug themselves out of without getting a human involved.

> calculators didn't make us dumber

I think that most of people misunderstand what calculator changed. Calculator didn't replace people doing math, calculator replaced mathematical tables, slide rulers and other already existing devices.

And regarding making people dumber ... Math teachers who saw this change said that there was a clear shift – students started to think less critically. With slide rulers and tables you had to think about answers – significant figures etc – with calculators you don't.

"Many LLM maximalists say they use the tech to learn new things, but to what effect? Are you going to apply that knowledge of physics or computer science yourself, or will you just prompt the LLM again?"

Many of the LLM maximalists I know don't have the skills or knowledge to excel in technology and need to use LLMs to do their job. It's seen as a cheat code to get work done.

As an example, A person I went to high school with that could barely figure out how to setup a Drupal site a few years ago, is now a frontier engineer at an AI startup. His Linkedin posts are filled with AI buzz words on a daily basis.

"It's inherently worth more because it's hard-earned and anchored to experiences we share. "

At some point, it will be impossible to tell the difference. Many people already can't tell if something was generated by AI.

> In my mind, it's pretty simple: I'm a human, LLMs are not. If a human writes a novel, it's inherently worth more.

While I appreciate you laying it out so plainly, I disagree. A novel is a bunch of words and I don't care if they were written by one person, five, an AI, or infinite monkeys on typewriters. What's valuable in a novel (or a poem) is in the words.

> If a human writes a novel, it's inherently worth more because it's hard-earned and anchored to experiences we share. I want to support that

I'd extend on this as well: the process of creating changes you. In a technical sense, where you approach a problem and the way you solve that problem informs you. Both your problem solving skills, creative skills, but also even understanding how a compromise works.

This is why I have minimal compunction about an experienced engineer using AI-assisted coding ("hey claude, define this data class") versus finding AI-art to be repugnant.

The act of creating an artistic work is both an expression, but also the act of ideating and then executing on that changes you. Experience, emotion, and other more intangible concepts.

> is it the prompt you once wrote?

Yes, but also the prompts you give after, and the iterations you continue to do. Art is rarely something you build once and forget about. A lot of that going on in AI no doubt, but the builders who polish their work and strive for perfection are still the builders they were before AI.

You mention the novel writer and yes that person who's great at writing novels will create great art. But the ones that are 80% of the way their, but maybe can't nail the ending, or segue into different plot-lines, can now create great art and have AI get them there. Subconsciously, they will get better at those things by using AI and seeing the result.

I'm always reminded of that I, Robot scene where the scientist says "you must ask the right questions." And that is true now more than ever.

> But to latch onto the calculator argument: if you outsource adding numbers to a calculator, you're still you.

Except calculators have been a problem for decades, it's why they're not allowed in school when you're still learning. Without doing the math yourself and internalizing how it works, you won't develop the number sense to tell if the result makes sense (broken calculator, typo, wrong equation, etc).

I still remember my physics teacher using one of the student's test answers as an example of how he should have known it was wrong and gone back over it (I think it was a pendulum on an elevator, his result had negative gravity (so gravity going upwards)).

> calculators didn't make us dumber

For most people, GPS did not improve sense of direction, spellchecking did not help to write without making mistake, deepl did not help to be better in foreign languages. But replacing a bicycle by a motorcycle forces to acquire new skills without losing any, and we can find many example of symbiosis between "The man and the machine" (Lindbergh wrote a book named "WE"). AI could be something like that, after all it is human knowledge reachable in a conversational and contextual manner.

So AI can be used to learn: "tell me what's wrong in my code, or if it can be improved". I also tend to think that the more we code, the more we give AI valuable piece of knowledge to learn from, the best code it can produce, the less the produced code seems alien. It can be a win/win, all depend on the mindset. I like to code and even if I am skeptical about many aspects of AI I can share the workload with a robot, as an exercise or if the time or budget is constrained.

> We have people here who use LLMs to raise their children, to manage relationships, to design products.

My first thoughts were around trying to understand why these people would do that. What I see a lot around me, is people being afraid to fail, as it's some inherently dumb and bad thing, not realizing that sometimes failing is what makes you learn enough so you don't fail later, or builds resilience in other ways that later will be useful, for others or for yourself. Avoiding the path of harsh failure will put you down the path of mediocrity.

it's the gut bacteria that is left. lol, that hunger, that emotion, that sense of intuition. Without emotions we are just a naturally evolved LLM.

"What's your unique contribution to the world" is a good question, and I've been thinking about it a lot. One framing I very much like is thinking about the priceable versus unpriceable contributions of a person. As an example, your software engineering ability is priceable (it's your labor). Your value to your parents isn't priceable. The problem is, right now the default assumed value of the latter is 0. Our society only tries to put a value on priceable facets of a person. There's reasons for that, wisdom of the crowds and whatnot, but of course it also means that if an AI can do that thing, economics drives society to adopt AI over employing people.

It's possible to set that latter value to be nonzero. You can't use free markets to set it because they necessarily cannot see what price to set, so you kinda have to guess, but IMO, it isn't zero, and I'd hazard to say it's positive.

I don't relate with this at all, are you saying that founders who execute through employees are not creating anything by "themselves", they have no "unique contribution"? Most of us just want to create great products and hopefully get paid for them. And at the end, if I create a great product through this method, I feel equally happy, who wants to grind for a decade over some manual software creation process ?

The calculator argument is interesting because I am for sure slower at arithmetic by hand than when I was in gradeschool able to rattle off times tables and long division and what not, due to calculator use. I know plenty of other people who can’t easily do basic math, like multiplying something by 1.5x as a recent example in my life. Their gradeschool self probably would also run laps around them.

Most people only do the simplest of math on a day to day basis. I’d bet that if you asked most adults to do something even remotely non-trivial (addition, subtraction, multiplication) a lot would have trouble without a calculator and/or make a large number of mistakes. That’s probably fine because it’s unlikely most adults are all of a sudden going to have to do non-trivial math without a calculator. That probably isn’t the case for people who are having agents do effectively everything for them in their lives

> So what's your unique contribution to this world - is it the prompt you once wrote

Why not? You're implying writing good prompts doesn't require effort or thought, which is false to me.

> Are you going to apply that knowledge of physics or computer science yourself, or will you just prompt the LLM again?

To write better prompt is a good reason to learn new things. It's so obvious that more knowledge and experience you have, the better results you get from LLMs.

>We have people here who use LLMs to raise their children, to manage relationships, to design products

It's not either/or. I think about designing a product in conjunction with AI "thinking" about it. Two heads are better than one.

The same was probably said when machines started making furniture, cloth, harvesting wheat, etc. A desk made custom by a human to your specs is cool, beautiful, and life giving for both involved. And will cost $10-$50k. Maybe with the AIs and robots doing the grunt work, humans could get back to building things for each other. That would be great but I'm not sure what percentage of people are interested in that though.

> I'm not good at lifting weights or running, so my thinking is the only thing I have

I'm not saying this to be snarky, but maybe it's time to work on lifting weights and running. The worth of a novel is, of course, subjective, but most people would judge it based on the entertainment value it provides and not how much human effort went into it. Hobbies like fitness (which don't have an output that's meant to be consumed) seem like a safer harbor in this new era.

Just live your life and don't support the AI machine. Nobody is forcing you, your life quality might get much better and you live your life as an intelligent person.

On the other side, people pushing the intelligence is for losers narrative are already too stupid to create anything that benefits humanity or the planet, so might as well ignore them.

LLMs are bicycles for the mind, they do not think instead of you

Focusing just on AI wrt our work (let’s say software engineering for now) and letting go the other items. I see a like when this comes up the story is if the AI is doing the arch/impl then what are you even doing anymore? That is honestly not where my value add is, many people can do those two things plenty well, it’s basically commoditized at this point (at a certain experience level). What I bring is all the soft skills and intuition to glue it together and ship and maintain it.

Let the impl go.

> Many LLM maximalists say they use the tech to learn new things, but to what effect? Are you going to apply that knowledge of physics or computer science yourself, or will you just prompt the LLM again?

We had some contractors at the house doing some work. The contractors had been doing this work for a long time. I could tell they were good at what they did because I had some experience with that type of work when I was younger and they were way better than me.

We ran into an unusual situation (old house, old building techniques, overlapping old renovations) that they had never seen before. The contractors pulled up ChatGPT and started chatting with it. Eventually they came up with a solution with some good materials and techniques to make it work without turning it into a bigger tear out and complete rebuild project, and they got quick links to confirm it matched code.

This worked because they had the experience to judge the accuracy of the answers. They still checked the claims against the description of the materials we needed to order. After they did the work they had the experience to do it again, and it didn’t take them any guessing, trial and error, or searching through forums or Facebook groups (which are very popular with contractors) to get advice.

This is the right way to benefit from LLMs in learning something: Get the information then put it into practice so you learn it.

I worry when I see someone claim to learn something from an LLM but then the next turn is having the LLM do the work. It’s like skimming a math textbook but then skipping the exercises and never doing any quizzes. Every student in school learns that you have to practice to really understand something because reading the words is not enough. You have to work through it to internalize it.

LLMs can be very powerful tools in this way. They can also trick people into thinking they’re learning when they’re not. I think everyone has to go through that learning process about how to learn all over again like we all did with calculators in elementary school. There will be a lot of people who get trapped into being LLM promoters, whose output ceiling is limited by what LLMs can do as limited by their ability to recognize what’s right and wrong.

By now, almost everyone can think of someone they know who is happy to turn their brain off and press enter in Claude until it says the task is complete. I worry how this is going to intersect with the Reddit generation who grew up consuming doomer content about how jobs are just “bullshit jobs” and how your goal should be to do as little as possible at work, because there will come a time where those who spent their careers offloading their thinking to LLMs without doing the hard work of learning will not have much compelling reason to be hired over any other intern who can prompt Claude.

On the long term view I can see a lot of the LLM prompters getting replaced by LLMs doing the prompting. On social media like Reddit you can already see a lot of people gloating about how they just copy from Jira into Claude, push a PR, and then have Claude handle code review from their peers while they do nothing. Not hard to see that someone like that isn’t doing much that couldn’t be done by going one level deeper with Claude and letting it automate that person away. You have to put in some work to stay valuable.

> In my mind, it's pretty simple: I'm a human, LLMs are not. If a human writes a novel, it's inherently worth more because it's hard-earned and anchored to experiences we share.

.... What?

You open up with the calculator argument. Great. Then state "on the flip side". Ok.

And then declare it very simple in your mind when there is _only_ the flip side.

The whole issue is the not-simple gray area and where each of us believes the line between empowered human and brainless idiot is drawn.

> Many LLM maximalists say they use the tech to learn new things, but to what effect?

"Many book maximalists say they read books to learn new things, but to what effect?"

First we had verbal transmission, then books, then the Internet, now LLMs. And they all kind of do the same thing.

For me, the value of an LLM is it can take my imprecise query, scour its memory AND the Internet, and then return an answer (with citations if you ask) quicker than I can look for it "manually".

And I'm far from an LLM maximalist...