Tagged: llm

Niklas Gruhn, on relaying AI output verbatim:

By all means, prompt AI. But don’t just relay the output. Read it, understand it, validate it, and then write a response in your own words (a decent certificate that you’ve done the prior steps). Making that effort is value you can add.

This reminds me of Simon Willison’s rule, I will not publish anything that takes someone else longer to read than it took me to write.

Among friends I’ll sometimes skip the rewrite and share a link with the prompt in it instead. As Dave Rupert mentioned, he wants the prompt because it shows the context you gave the machine and your understanding of the problem: I’d rather have the original prompt so I can just ask the machine myself. It’s the least bad way to relay, not an alternative to doing the work.

At work, if your job is to move a bunch of heavy things from one side of the room to another, you should use whatever assistive tech you have on hand: a wagon, a forklift… even an AI-powered robot. But at the gym, it makes no sense for that robot to lift weights for you. The point of weightlifting isn’t to move heavy things across the room; it’s to actually lift those heavy things.

The same analysis holds for any task an AI can do for you. If it’s work—if the task has to be done and no one cares how—then it’s fine to use AI assistance. But if the task is more like the gym, and howthe task is done is at least as important, then it probably doesn’t make sense to use AI.

Just watched the latest Whiskey Web and Whatnot episode with Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert. No one would’ve guessed that I was watching a web dev podcast from how much I was laughing.

At one point in the episode Adam mentions, “holy crap, my job is now leftover tokens in a burn window”. If Adam can feel like AI is making his work redundant then what hope do I have? 🙈

When you offload your thinking, you might be on-loading someone else’s you’d never agree to — personally or collectively.

• Good software depends on judgment, communication, and clear abstraction. AI has amplified this.
• AI coding is automation of implementation, so design and stewardship become more important.

Jim Nielsen on the personal connections formed on the internet.

You could search the world and find someone who saw what you see, felt what you feel, went through what you’re going through.

And how these connections are increasingly being lost when we prompt an impersonal LLM instead.