Writing is fundamentally the transfer of information from your brain to my brain. If you have 1000 bits of semantic information you want to transfer, you can't give 300 bits of semantic information to an LLM and have it fill in the remaining 700, because it doesn't know what those 700 bits are. If it's able to guess those 700 bits correctly, then they aren't true semantic information, and you really only have 300 bits you want to transfer. You might as well transfer those bits to me directly, rather than having the LLM add on an extra superfluous 700 bits that I then have to filter out.
While I generally agree, the difference is I can also hand an LLM my pile of code and documents which is... a lot more information dense than basically anything I could write. Sure, a one-off prompt in a chat window isn't very helpful.
Summarization—especially of private context—is definitely one of the main exceptions to LLM writing being useless. However, it's still preferable to turn your private context into shared context and then give pointers to that, rather than having an LLM attempt to summarize it.
hatthew · · focus · HN ↗
Writing is fundamentally the transfer of information from your brain to my brain. If you have 1000 bits of semantic information you want to transfer, you can't give 300 bits of semantic information to an LLM and have it fill in the remaining 700, because it doesn't know what those 700 bits are. If it's able to guess those 700 bits correctly, then they aren't true semantic information, and you really only have 300 bits you want to transfer. You might as well transfer those bits to me directly, rather than having the LLM add on an extra superfluous 700 bits that I then have to filter out.
packetlost · · focus · HN ↗
hatthew · · focus · HN ↗
packetlost · · focus · HN ↗