3 ms·

It's the white page problem, that LLMs solve handily. Instead of facing the daunting task of building back up a complex mental model, I can ask the machine "yo,

It's the white page problem, that LLMs solve handily. Instead of facing the daunting task of building back up a complex mental model, I can ask the machine "yo, what were we doing? what's this thing? ok, how about you give it a spin and show me" and all of the sudden I'm back in it and can get cracking. That, and rubber ducking, and speeding up yak shaving to the nth degree really make this thing very useful to me. I also have various data sources hooked up (slack, notion, linear) so it's also a task management and project management tool for me.

storus 1y ago
Maybe there is a reason why is your brain hesitating (e.g. low energy) and pushing it with LLMs would blow it up at some point in the future if the cause was not fixed in the meantime? Covid showed me (in a very accentuated way) that many of the times I was procrastinating was instead brain throttling due to low energy, protecting itself.
- extr 1y ago
  I think for me the hesitation is in that to get started on task XYZ, the first step is often some extremely boring task ABC that is only tangentially related to the "real" task. For example, the other day I needed to find which hook to use in a 2300 loc file of hooks. AI found me the hook in 5 seconds and showed me how to use it. This is a pure win - now that I have the name of the hook I can go read it in 30 seconds and verify it's what I wanted. If it's not, I can ask again. There's zero risk here.
jorvi 1y ago
Re: the "white page problem", that is just known as motivation inertia. You can overcome it by training yourself to agree with yourself to "just do it" for 5 minutes, even if you really, really don't want to. If you're still demotivated after that, fine. But 9 out of 10 times, once you've started, it's surprisingly easy to keep the momentum up. This is also great for going to the gym or cleaning up your home, where an LLM can't come to the rescue :) Re: usage of LLMs, that is honestly the way I like to use LLMs. That and auto-complete. It's great for creating a bird's-eye view of a project because that is very fuzzy and no granular details are needed yet. And it's great at being fancy autocomplete, with its stochastic bones. But the middle part where all the complexity and edge cases are is where LLMs still fail a lot. I shudder for the teams that have to PR review devs that jubilantly declare they have "5x'ed" their output with LLMs, senior or not. What is even more worrisome is that the brain is a muscle. We have to exercise it with thinking, hence why puzzlers stay sharp at old age. The more you outsource your code (or creative writing) thinking, the worse you get at it, and the more your brain atrophies. You're already seeing it with Claude Code, where devs panic when they hit the limit because they just might have to code unassisted.

storus 1y ago

Maybe there is a reason why is your brain hesitating (e.g. low energy) and pushing it with LLMs would blow it up at some point in the future if the cause was not fixed in the meantime? Covid showed me (in a very accentuated way) that many of the times I was procrastinating was instead brain throttling due to low energy, protecting itself.

extr 1y ago
I think for me the hesitation is in that to get started on task XYZ, the first step is often some extremely boring task ABC that is only tangentially related to the "real" task. For example, the other day I needed to find which hook to use in a 2300 loc file of hooks. AI found me the hook in 5 seconds and showed me how to use it. This is a pure win - now that I have the name of the hook I can go read it in 30 seconds and verify it's what I wanted. If it's not, I can ask again. There's zero risk here.

jorvi 1y ago

Re: the "white page problem", that is just known as motivation inertia. You can overcome it by training yourself to agree with yourself to "just do it" for 5 minutes, even if you really, really don't want to. If you're still demotivated after that, fine. But 9 out of 10 times, once you've started, it's surprisingly easy to keep the momentum up. This is also great for going to the gym or cleaning up your home, where an LLM can't come to the rescue :) Re: usage of LLMs, that is honestly the way I like to use LLMs. That and auto-complete. It's great for creating a bird's-eye view of a project because that is very fuzzy and no granular details are needed yet. And it's great at being fancy autocomplete, with its stochastic bones. But the middle part where all the complexity and edge cases are is where LLMs still fail a lot. I shudder for the teams that have to PR review devs that jubilantly declare they have "5x'ed" their output with LLMs, senior or not. What is even more worrisome is that the brain is a muscle. We have to exercise it with thinking, hence why puzzlers stay sharp at old age. The more you outsource your code (or creative writing) thinking, the worse you get at it, and the more your brain atrophies. You're already seeing it with Claude Code, where devs panic when they hit the limit because they just might have to code unassisted.