Can we explore the digging holes analogy a bit more?

Digging by hand with a shovel involves

1. Assessing the terrain and checking any documented or obvious obstacles (subsurface water, gas, electricity etc)

2. Planning the approach to digging the hole, most efficient angle, and ensuring that collapse doesn't occur

3. Organising disposal

4. Digging the hole

5. Dealing with any unforeseen issues (old tree roots, old foundations etc)

This is exactly the same whether digging by hand or using an excavator. The excavator isn't automating stages 1, 2, 3, or 5. It's just speeding up the 4th stage and only if there aren't stage 5 issues present.

LLMs when employed in a manner on the extreme end of the vibe coding spectrum are automating every stage of the process. If the excavator was hooked up to an LLM and left to run all stages of digging (extreme vibe digging?), I'd argue that yes, the operator is becoming lazy, and is running a very dangerous operation.

Over in the "AI is not a tool" post there's this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50063732

Which says that it's a tool for querying and summarization, but not a tool for reading or writing, because it helps you to do something different from those.

(Yes I know, don't cross the streams. I just thought it was a shame for this nice distinction to languish over there when you need it over here.)

The problem is that while it is entirely possible in principle to use AI as a tool, not a surrogate, the actual interfaces to widely available AI models constantly push their users towards delegating their thinking to AI, rather than assisting their thinking. I constantly have to stop Claude from just doing the thing for me instead of presenting me with options or evidence and letting me choose how to proceed.

I guess my counterpoint is bluntly - no-one will not be using the tool at their day-job.

It requires so much extra discipline to think for yourself and not use it, you will be forced to use it in your job or be seen as a Luddite and your ability to think for yourself in the domain will diminish over time - your domain thinking muscle will gradually atrophy from lack of use.

Why would any of us bother thinking hard, when there is no financial incentive to doing so ?

Your analogy fails with shovels and excavators .. because General synthetic intelligence is not a single purpose narrow 'tool'. near-future AI is equivalent to an alien intelligent species competing for resources, or equivalent to a cheaper smarter non-human 'outsource worker'.

In the context of education, your analogy doesn't work. We still have physical education in schools because, even though people can now use automated tools for physical work rather than doing it by hand, it is still useful for people to be physically fit.

A wheelchair is also a tool! A very efficient one too! People claim they've 2x'd their energy efficiency by not ever walking or standing, and they are much more happy now that they don't need to suffer the pain of walking! I'm thinking of amputating my feet just to make footoids seethe more!

I don’t think that’s “the whole shtick” anymore than it is for something like cars. There are valid ways to use it as a tool to provide net new value, and inevitably a whole bunch of people will end up using it as a lazy machine anyway, especially if their country/society benefits from people using it that way (Americans in both cases).

This was literally George Jetson's job on The Jetsons: pushing a button on the computer RUDI while it did all the work. The joke being that he works 4 hours a day, 2 days a week pushing a button and complains about being tired when he gets home, because that's how the future will be: full of unimaginable leisure.

As alienating and stultifying as this work seemed, however, The Jetsons is still an optimistic future compared to the one we're getting: when George is fired, RUDI intervenes on his behalf and gets him rehired. I don't see Claude doing that for me; its raison d'être is ensuring I'm put out of work.

I use it as a hybrid of that I guess: I prompt some simple tool into existence, iterate a bit, then I look at the code, am very dismayed and spend more time than it might have taken me to build from scratch to refactor it.

It solves a huge motivation problem for me though, because having a working prototype of something I want is a lot. Especially when it's something I never did, where I cannot imagine the end result fully, or estimate my own ability to get there. But if I can see the thing in action, while I may look at the code (and my own skills) and realise it would take me months to make it something I could share with others, I at least know there is a destination.

Not to mention how it surfaces all sorts of issues I didn't think of, so I'm basically prototyping v2 before I ever fully built v1, and so on, until it kinda settles.

I guess I'm lucky I don't do it professionally :P