One of my favourite rules: perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. This is invaluable to writing. So much text from an LLM feels superfluous, like I could've said the same wall of text with just a few sentences. Writing is tightly coupled with thinking: refining thoughts, arguments, ideas, discarding them, mulling over them. LLM text always raises this nagging question in my mind: am I reading what you think, or what your agent parroted back and you accepted?

▲

memjay 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There is no way that solely talking to an agent induces the same depth or amount of thinking than when you are actually writing for yourself. It just takes too much discipline to not offload your thinking.

And the discipline gets attacked even more when all you read is LLM text. For example in code reviews there is no noticeable value in answering LLM generated review comments. I remember taking great care answering human-written reviews comments with much thought to either further build on their suggestions or to forward knowledge about the system when I had to defend a particular change.

Now, some bot will read my carefully written response and forgets about it. There is no value anymore.

No wonder that our pull request comments feel like the dead internet theory right now.

I am absolutely pro AI assisted coding. But communication between humans HAS to stay human. I am currently experiencing the opposite and it’s bad.

▲

ImaCake an hour ago | parent [-]

>It just takes too much discipline

While I think your argument has merit, I would be careful to discount any human skill based on people being too lazy to do it.

	▲	memjay 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Of course you can’t generalize this behavior to everyone. There will most certainly be people who can be disciplined and I try to be one of them. But I don’t know where to draw the line yet. It’s difficult to decide what parts you are offloading and what parts you keep for your own brain. Because theoretically you can offload nearly everything when you get a well-defined ticket and just give it to an agent. Maybe it’s also just me who is having a hard time staring at LLM generated texts all day and missing the past brainstorming, pair programming or “just talking about the project” sessions with colleagues and managers. I fear that we are moving in the direction of silos again with lots of gate keeping as everyone has their own little rubber duck to talk to now. Systems from today (if not worked on with discipline) will be no more than an agglomeration of features glued together. But as you said, guess our fight to fight will be to be that disciplined person.

▲

AlienRobot 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."

s/time/effort

▲

rnjesus 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]