I was an LLM skeptic for a long time. I still have a hard time trusting it to the same extent that most HN'ers appear to. (I would never use an LLM as a substit

I was an LLM skeptic for a long time. I still have a hard time trusting it to the same extent that most HN'ers appear to. (I would never use an LLM as a substitute for my own "voice" when writing, or put any AI-generated code into production.) But I think I have reached a middle ground: I basically use it as a first approximation when I am exploring something entirely new to me. For example, if I'm learning a programming language, I might ask it for ways to unpack an array into separate variables. Or if I'm reading an ingredients list, I'll ask what psyllium husk is. Basically anything that's moderately easy to verify if I get any suspicion that the LLM is hallucinating again. These are things that I _used_ to simply ask a search engine, before Google results became 99% SEO-optimized blogspam and therefore useless for actual knowledge-seeking. I think an important part of overcoming AI skepticism is to understand (at a very high level) how it all works so that you understand its limitations and know when you can and cannot trust it.