> AI models are extremely bad at original thinking, so any thinking that is offloaded to a LLM is as a result usually not very original, even if they’re very good at treating your inputs to the discussion as amazing genius level insights.

This is repeated all the time now, but it's not true. It's not particularly difficult to pose a question to an LLM and to get it to genuinely evaluate the pros and cons of your ideas. I've used an LLM to convince myself that an idea I had was not very good.

> The way human beings tend to have original ideas is to immerse in a problem for a long period of time, which is something that flat out doesn’t happen when LLMs do the thinking. You get shallow, surface-level ideas instead.

Thinking about a problem for a long period of time doesn't bring you any closer to understanding the solution. Expertise is highly overrated. The Wright Brothers didn't have physics degrees. They did not even graduate from high school, let alone attend college. Their process for developing the first airplanes was much closer to vibe coding from a shallow surface-level understanding than from deeply contemplating the problem.

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notahacker 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Have to admit I'm really struggling with the idea that the Wright brothers didn't do much thinking because they were self taught, never mind the idea that figuring out aeronautics from reading every publication they could get their hands on, intuiting wing warping and experimenting by hand-building mechanical devices looks much like asking Claude to make a CRUD app...

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nickysielicki 5 hours ago | parent [-]

That's not what I'm saying. My point is that expertise, as in, credentials, institutional knowledge, accepted wisdom, was actively harmful to solving flight. The Wrights succeeded because they built a tool that made iteration cheap (the wind tunnel), tested 200 wing shapes without deference to what the existing literature said should work (Lilienthal's tables were wrong and everyone with "expertise" accepted them uncritically), and they closed the loop with reality by actually flying.

That's the same approach as vibe coding. Not "asking Claude to make a CRUD app.", but using it to cheaply explore solution spaces that an expert's priors would tell you aren't worth trying. The wind tunnel didn't do the thinking for the Wrights, it just made thinking and iterating cheap. That's what LLMs do for code.

The blog post's argument is that deep immersion is what produces original ideas. But what history shows is that deeply immersed experts are often totally wrong and the outsiders who iterate cheaply and empirically take the prize. The irony here is that LLM haters feel it falls victim to the Einstellung effect [1]. But the exact opposite is true: LLMs make it so cheap to iterate on what we thought in the past were suboptimal/broken solutions, which makes it possible to cheaply discover the more efficient and simpler methods, which means humans uniquely fall victim to the Einstellung effect whereas LLMs don't.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstellung_effect

	▲	notahacker 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The Wright brothers were deeply immersed experts in flight like only a handful of other people other people at the time, and were obsessed with Lilenthal's tables to the point they figured out how aerodynamic errors killed Lilenthal. The blog's actual point isn't some deference to credentials straw man you've invented, it's that stuff lazily hashed together that's got to "good enough" without effort is seldom as interesting as people's passion projects. And the Wright brothers' application of their hardware assembly skills and the scientific method to theory they'd gone to great lengths to get sent to Dayton Ohio is pretty much the antithesis of getting to "good enough" without effort. Probably nobody around the turn of the century devoted more thinking and doing time to powered flight Using AI isn't necessary or sufficient for getting to "good enough" without much effort (and it's of course possible to expend lots of effort with AI), but it does act as a multiplier for creating passable stuff with little thought (to an even greater extent than templates and frameworks and stock photos). And sure, a founding tenet of online marketing (and YC) from long before Claude is that many small experiments to see if $market has any takers might be worth doing before investing thinking time in understanding and iterating, and some people have made millions from it, but that doesn't mean experiments stitched together in a weekend mostly from other people's parts aren't boring to look at or that their hit rate won't be low....