So far I think I have learned far more from LLMs than I've lost to them. I forget some syntax, definitely. But I now reach for a much wider range of tools that I have become familiar with because of LLMs.

So, partly agree, partly disagree.

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lanstin 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, I have to say some of this deskilling argument sounds like Socrates complaining about the invention of writing ruining people's ability to truly own the text. I really don't mourn my lost assembly skills or my lost C skills. And I'm not missing the details of whatever web framework du jour my Claude is vibing for me on my extremely useful dataviz internal tools; and I have learned how to rein the agents in to not ruin my high-performance Go code and yet debug concurrency issues. Maybe coding qua coding is what some people find their summum bonum, but for me programming is instrumentive - to build real things in the world that do things to make something better. When I want pure virtuosity of intellectual construction, I read maths papers in arxiv.

(Not to say that the current state of the art with LLMs merits borrowing money for a multi-trillion spend on hardware that will be obsolete in 5 years, but for me that is a different issue).

The master decrying the invention that resulted in more wisdom for more people than anything prior:

"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise." (quoting from https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3439)

	▲	larsfaye 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I posted this elsewhere, but that story has a lot more nuance. Plato (who actually wrote these quotes, because Socrates only spoke) wasn't against just "writing" in a general sense, or that he felt it was going to hold humanity back. He was against treatises and felt that someone could "memorize facts" without having to actually think about them on a deep level. Which I think, ironically, is not all that off the mark especially in the age of the internet and now LLMs, right? He also felt that memory could decay if we relied on written facts instead of having dialogues, which again, not all that off the mark, either. He underestimated the compounding capability of technology and our ability to record data and information, but people remember a lot less these days than they used to because we'd largely given up that ability in exchange for the instant information machines. Of course, he's just one man (or two, if you consider he was conveying Socrates' thoughts, as well) who lived in ancient times and couldn't possibly foresee how technology would evolve...but when I went back and read his concerns, it was ironic to admit that much of what he warned about still applies to this day. People are far less informed despite having access to more information than we've ever had because we've exchanged the ability to remember for the ability to just look things up. And, we also have less meaningful dialog than ever before; people just sit on social media, copying and pasting "facts" to each other, instead of having actual productive discourse. When I look around, the world doesn't seem brimming with mindful critical thinkers and there's reasons for that (many reasons, of course). AI tooling can be a boon to learning, but it requires us to stop using them for code generation as a primary purpose (at least for juniors) and instead advocate for Socratic workflows that still require manual coding practices. When someone decides to code something, it's not just learning syntax; it engages a variety of mental disciplines from critical thinking to planning to creative problem solving to logic and math, even.
	▲	juvvel 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		There is an argument to be made though that writing stuff down yourself results in better retention than simply reading the same material. People still write by hand and take notes. And they still process ideas and thoughts verbally. Doing so is often more effective than going in circles with a chatbot.
	▲	causal 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yeah. Thought in Socrates' defense I think the jury is still out on writing, in the scale of human existence it's still very new. Give it a hundred thousand years or so.

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larsfaye 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

May I ask how many years experience you have?

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causal 5 hours ago | parent [-]

20ish. What's your hypothesis?

	▲	larsfaye 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's basically laid out in the article: the reason that you are able to gain so much from LLMs is because of your decades of experience that predated their existence. Ability begets ability, but if that ability doesn't take root, these more advanced toolsets don't yield the same outcome (and are likely to do harm). To be clear, I feel the same way as you. I have been doing this for about twenty-five years, and I have developed a keen sense of taste and judgment to know how to properly scrutinize and utilize these systems. I definitely feel like I am able to learn things faster, but that is directly correlated to having experienced a lot of friction over the years that cultivated said taste and judgment in the first place. I imagine it's sort of similar to someone who's just getting started in mathematics, but is introduced to WolframAlpha, versus someone with decades of experience in the field and what they learn with it.