from your link :
A recent study ( https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646 ) uses the term “cognitive surrender” to describe the way humans tend to offload key critical thinking skills onto LLMs, even when the output is wrong.
Hey ! this is too much for my old tired brain.
This weekend I wanted to set up my raspberry pi with a LLM multiplexer so that my wife, my kids, and I could share a single subscription but still have our own customizable memories and instructions. Needs a web chat interface using codex as the inference provider. Some day when I have the cash to set up a local LLM server, I’ll switch the back end over.
I don’t have time in my life to create it, so either LLM can do it or not. No downside to letting it try. I gave it barely any instructions beyond that. I wanted a Java microservice. A handful of hours and a couple of usage resets later it’s done and tested.
Allegedly there is a Java repository somewhere on my pi, but I haven’t seen a line of code, and that service is running. Now, I haven’t tested it, and I won’t use it until I’ve reviewed the code, but shit I see how seductive this is for folks who don’t know how to code themselves. And how dangerous because I’ll bet when I look at the code I’m going to have alarm bells ringing.
It’s not that my brain is tired or even that I trust LLMs, I just don’t have time and either an LLM can create the thing I want or I do without. If the project fails, nothing of value is lost. But the difference is I’m looking deeper than if the thing does what I want — I need to make sure it’s done in a safe, extendable way.
It’s not that my brain is tired or even that I trust LLMs, I just don’t have time and either an LLM can create the thing I want or I do without. If the project fails, nothing of value is lost.
At home, that’s the summary of so many of my hobby projects lately. At work, however, there’s one phenomenon that I don’t know if we have a name for yet: loss of job satisfaction because a large part of the joy of creative problem solving comes from the process of wrestling with a hard problem, making a breakthrough, and genuinely learning something. LLMs make it too easy. I don’t feel like I’m learning anything of value. I’m just regurgitating some version of the LLM’s solution back to my coworkers during stand-ups. And so, if anyone really pressed me on the details, I would have a hard time coming up with anything. For this latest release on a project that I’ve worked on for most of a year and given demos for in the past, we unleashed AI. I’m genuinely nervous to give an upcoming customer demo for this release because I don’t really feel like I understand the changes were shipping.
At first, I thought it was just a problem I was experiencing alone. But then I started hearing others express very similar sentiments. At least one person mentioned that they chose to work on hobby projects without LLMs, precisely because they wanted to recapture that joy they lost from their career. Even though I’ve finally started knocking out quite a few ideas from the backlog that had accumulated over the years, it’s hard to really reach that same level of satisfaction.
Is there a balance point where I can stay on top of the backlog while feeling like my brain hasn’t fallen out of my head?
