The amplifying mirror analogy works best here. LLMs are ultimately a reflection of your own interactions with its weights, the tone you use, the structure with which you construct your prompt, aspects of an issue you tend to focus on, your breadth of vocabulary and world knowledge and whatnot.

People who (carefully) use it as an extension of their own mind and senses will very likely thrive, and those who use it as a replacement for their minds and their senses will struggle.

One of the Claude skills I made Claude itself generate was the 'learning a concept across tiers' skill -- from ELI5 level to a PhD level, and it triggers whenever I ask it a very general question on a complex topic that isn't my bread-and-butter. The fact that I'm able to choose explanation level from a super smart LLM (that's available 24x7) that can explain any topic under the sun would've been mind-bogglingly sci-fi-ish just 4 years ago in 2022.

When I get out of my domain, I always ask it to describe things to me "like I'm a senior CS student who doesn't know any industry terms". I find it really easy to skim past the definitions I know and very useful to get the explicit clarification on unfamiliar terminology. Telling it to talk down to you a little also seems to calm down it's tendency to talk like it's trying really hard to convince you it's smart like a 8th grader trying to use every single vocab word they learned last week.

> People who (carefully) use it as an extension of their own mind and senses will very likely thrive, and those who use it as a replacement for their minds and their senses will struggle.

Claude code is entirely vibed. Someone posted some of the prompts they used: barely comprehensible typo-addled half phrases.

This seems to be the opposite of your experience.

This was true some time ago but nowadays I don't get this impression. Seems like whatever style I type in, the LLM is already pre-prompted to respond in "its" "own" "style".

As an unapologetic generalist[1] this has also been my experience. Many tools that would have been "eh maybe if I get bored over Thanksgiving holiday" have become "hold on, gimme fifteen minutes".

Tiny, isolated, but awesomely useful CLI scriptlets, for me, seem to be the sweet spot. Little shining rays spreading out from the veins of my own familiarity.

The downside, the Achilles Heel of LLMs, so far as I can tell, is using the system to assist in maintaining large, sprawling, and largely pointless legacy codebases. Somewhere you have to keep many many many stupid things alive. I swear I can almost sense Claude's frustration with some of this shit. Then you get frustrated, and then Claude wants to agree with you so it acts even more frustrated, and the gyre thus widens. You're just cussing at everything with a machine. Which can be fun - Claude is often surprisingly funny - but not productive.

[1] I know absolutely nothing about positively everything, but have the attention span of a squirrel.

ELI5 is the way to go. I have Claude break down high level physics "as if I'm a farmer standing in a field" - works beautifully.

The amplifying mirror is not just a characteristic, but the fundamental driving force of LLMs. With every token it consumes, its primary goal is to understand who you are and what you intend. If you type Hola thats sufficient to tell it so much more than if you type hi.

That sounds useful. Can you share that skill?

I am really curious about that skill now, would you mind sharing it?

>learning a concept across tiers can u share this pls? thx.

Mind sharing the skill?

Your LLM is not "smart" and it cannot "explain", it is a program that can output a statistically average text of an explanation. Don't mistake the capabilities of these models for intelligence.