Thank you for sharing some thoughts. Somes comments:
[Question] Do you ever find yourself slipping into a state (possible gradually) of over-reliance on the LLM? This could instantiate itself as a momentary mental-rupture of the routine, where you find yourself pausing and realizing that now it feels more difficult to do something yourself that was, at a time in the recent past, moderately ordinary?
[Question] As Claude and other LLM become (expectedly) more capable, do you have any preliminary thoughts for how this workflow style may be updated?
[Remark] I find myself most entertained and invigorated by having Claude generate lists of posts on a particular subject that could be written, along with short descriptions of what these posts might contain. I’ve used the LW API to get LessWrong posts before asking of Claude something akin to “What is missing from this selection?”.
Do you ever find yourself slipping into a state (possible gradually) of over-reliance on the LLM?
I don’t really buy the premise of over-reliance. I can only rely on a technology too much with respect to some goal. Like for example if I need to be able to survive in the wilderness, then using a microwave causes my skill at starting fires to dwindle if I’m no longer practiced at starting fires.
I instead think in terms of what I’m trying to accomplish. If all I want is a picture, not to learn how to draw, and the alternative was no picture, then I’m pretty happy to get a diffusion model to draw me a picture. Similarly, when writing, if the choice is fail to finish a blog post because I’m stuck or get unstuck with Claude’s help, I choose Claude, even if that means I get marginally worse at solving writer’s block on my own. As long as I have Claude around, this isn’t an issue, and if I lose it, I can go back to doing things the hard way.
For another example, I’ve been doing ML research lately, in that I’m trying to train new models from scratch. I don’t have much background in ML, but I am a professional programmer and have some adjacent experience with data analytics. So I’m using Claude Code to vibe code a lot of this stuff for me, but I’m always setting the direction. As a result, I’m not really learning PyTorch, but then if I had to learn PyTorch I probably wouldn’t even bother to invest the time to train new models because it would be more than I had time to take on. So instead I vibe code to see if I can get results, and then learn as I go, filling in my knowledge by looking at the code, fixing problems, and trying to understand how it all works after it’s already working.
As Claude and other LLM become (expectedly) more capable, do you have any preliminary thoughts for how this workflow style may be updated?
The big change would be if Claude got better at writing in my style. The most painful and time consuming part is still editing. Claude can only kind of approximate good writing, much less good writing of the type I would personally produce. It would cause a big speed up if I could just dump thoughts and have Claude sort them out and turn them into easily readable text. Even if I could just write in the maximally Gordon way that’s not fit for other people to read (which is a little bit of what you’re getting in this comment; it’s stream-of-thought and not polished for concision or readability) and have that be turned into nice text would be a big deal.
Thank you for sharing some thoughts. Somes comments:
[Question] Do you ever find yourself slipping into a state (possible gradually) of over-reliance on the LLM? This could instantiate itself as a momentary mental-rupture of the routine, where you find yourself pausing and realizing that now it feels more difficult to do something yourself that was, at a time in the recent past, moderately ordinary?
[Question] As Claude and other LLM become (expectedly) more capable, do you have any preliminary thoughts for how this workflow style may be updated?
[Remark] I find myself most entertained and invigorated by having Claude generate lists of posts on a particular subject that could be written, along with short descriptions of what these posts might contain. I’ve used the LW API to get LessWrong posts before asking of Claude something akin to “What is missing from this selection?”.
I don’t really buy the premise of over-reliance. I can only rely on a technology too much with respect to some goal. Like for example if I need to be able to survive in the wilderness, then using a microwave causes my skill at starting fires to dwindle if I’m no longer practiced at starting fires.
I instead think in terms of what I’m trying to accomplish. If all I want is a picture, not to learn how to draw, and the alternative was no picture, then I’m pretty happy to get a diffusion model to draw me a picture. Similarly, when writing, if the choice is fail to finish a blog post because I’m stuck or get unstuck with Claude’s help, I choose Claude, even if that means I get marginally worse at solving writer’s block on my own. As long as I have Claude around, this isn’t an issue, and if I lose it, I can go back to doing things the hard way.
For another example, I’ve been doing ML research lately, in that I’m trying to train new models from scratch. I don’t have much background in ML, but I am a professional programmer and have some adjacent experience with data analytics. So I’m using Claude Code to vibe code a lot of this stuff for me, but I’m always setting the direction. As a result, I’m not really learning PyTorch, but then if I had to learn PyTorch I probably wouldn’t even bother to invest the time to train new models because it would be more than I had time to take on. So instead I vibe code to see if I can get results, and then learn as I go, filling in my knowledge by looking at the code, fixing problems, and trying to understand how it all works after it’s already working.
The big change would be if Claude got better at writing in my style. The most painful and time consuming part is still editing. Claude can only kind of approximate good writing, much less good writing of the type I would personally produce. It would cause a big speed up if I could just dump thoughts and have Claude sort them out and turn them into easily readable text. Even if I could just write in the maximally Gordon way that’s not fit for other people to read (which is a little bit of what you’re getting in this comment; it’s stream-of-thought and not polished for concision or readability) and have that be turned into nice text would be a big deal.