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.

Just be careful how you use it.

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pton_xd 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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vconnor 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It is unfathomable to me that spending 5 hours of hard mental work is deemed ‘unthinkable’ and ‘unproductive time’

I might be of the old “hammock driven development” school, but I wonder if people have any idea of what productivity and creativity consists of, how it works and how to promote a state of flow and deep work. Hint: it’s not about context switching between 15 different agents per minute.

I keep wondering if I am defending my experience in this field against the deep hubris of 19 year olds that are still figuring it all out (programming but also system design and how to tackle hard problems efficiently)

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gspr an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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!

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daemin 10 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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?

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kaffekaka an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I completely agree with you, but being "better off mentally" is really not valued very highly today.

Fast, visible progress and delivery is the melody.

	▲	josephg an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	gspr an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.

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seanmcdirmid 25 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s not just that, punting something to an LLM is its own skill that will push out the other skills you were using to do everything on your own. It’s like going from an IC to a tech lead manager, you go from doing things on your own to figuring out how to get a team (of agents) to do it instead.

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dylanhouli 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is why I like to come up with my own solution(s) for a problem first, and then ask AI what it recommends to see if we match up. Makes it a fun exercise, and usually ends up helping creating one ideal, combined idea.