One thing to keep in mind is that anytime you punt to the LLM (or anybody) for anything, that skill is going to atrophy.
I've seen this happen to myself where suddenly I had trouble planning out the architecture for a very small project. It should have been obvious to me, and I knew that. So it was disconcerting to not be able to suddenly have the answer appear in front of me like it normally would. I thought maybe I would go to Claude and help get some ideas.
But then I stopped myself. I knew I should be able to do this! So I got out a piece of paper and I scribbled ideas until the dam burst and suddenly the entire design was obvious, like it should have been in the first place. It took about 5 minutes.
But those were an alarming 5 minutes. It was like I'd gone blind to the solution.
And I realized that when I asked Claude for a bunch of ideas and then I selected the best one based on my experience, I was exercising that exact skill. I wasn't exercising the skill of coming up with the solution from scratch.
Lots of times we're happy letting particular skills atrophy. Maybe we don't like exercising them and we just don't want to do that anymore. And I think that's valid.
5 minutes... what about 5 hours, or 5 days? Imagine spending 5 hours with a pen and paper sketching solutions. Unthinkable to spend that amount of time "unproductively" today. I feel like there's just so much pressure to make visible progress, and with these tools available it's getting harder to convince yourself to take the time to think.
Absolutely not unthinkable! We're paid for exactly that in research, for example.
It's terrifying to hear that 5 hours of focused thinking is considered crazy. I can understand a budget battle if it's 5 months, but 5 hours?! Everyone, in every profession (or none), would be better off mentally if they "wasted" 5 hours thinking about something every now and then!
If you were in need of legal services in a high-stakes case, or if you needed brain surgery, would you want "fast visible progress" or "I need to think this through"?
I'd say both relevant professions are highly regarded.
Just like my AI. They also think before and during a code refactoring. There is a gap between my prompt and them taking actions, you could call that "stopping and thinking".
A very good friend, who is not a brain surgeon, but designs and plans brain surgeries for clinical trials with the very brain surgeons doing the surgeries. So yes they do think it through and even do entire dry runs through every step.
Sometimes you gotta do things that others don’t value highly. A long career needs you to act with good judgment. Even - sometimes - when the optics are bad.
If 5 hours of thinking time to solve a problem is unthinkable to some people does that mean they have some form of Attention Deficit Disorder, be it a natural thing or introduced by an over-dependence on LLMs? Like stopping for an hour to think through a problem is unfathomable and instead they would rather hit small dopamine spikes every few minutes from talking to a chatbot?
beej71 · · focus · HN ↗
I've seen this happen to myself where suddenly I had trouble planning out the architecture for a very small project. It should have been obvious to me, and I knew that. So it was disconcerting to not be able to suddenly have the answer appear in front of me like it normally would. I thought maybe I would go to Claude and help get some ideas.
But then I stopped myself. I knew I should be able to do this! So I got out a piece of paper and I scribbled ideas until the dam burst and suddenly the entire design was obvious, like it should have been in the first place. It took about 5 minutes.
But those were an alarming 5 minutes. It was like I'd gone blind to the solution.
And I realized that when I asked Claude for a bunch of ideas and then I selected the best one based on my experience, I was exercising that exact skill. I wasn't exercising the skill of coming up with the solution from scratch.
Lots of times we're happy letting particular skills atrophy. Maybe we don't like exercising them and we just don't want to do that anymore. And I think that's valid.
Just be careful how you use it.
pton_xd · · focus · HN ↗
gspr · · focus · HN ↗
It's terrifying to hear that 5 hours of focused thinking is considered crazy. I can understand a budget battle if it's 5 months, but 5 hours?! Everyone, in every profession (or none), would be better off mentally if they "wasted" 5 hours thinking about something every now and then!
kaffekaka · · focus · HN ↗
Fast, visible progress and delivery is the melody.
gspr · · focus · HN ↗
I'd say both relevant professions are highly regarded.
auggierose · · focus · HN ↗
gspr · · focus · HN ↗
auggierose · · focus · HN ↗
eiginn · · focus · HN ↗
auggierose · · focus · HN ↗
josephg · · focus · HN ↗
daemin · · focus · HN ↗
gspr · · focus · HN ↗
xnx · · focus · HN ↗