7 ms·

It’s like weightlifting: sure you can use a forklift to do it, but if the goal is to build up your own strength, using the forklift isn’t going to get you there

by orev 8mo ago

It’s like weightlifting: sure you can use a forklift to do it, but if the goal is to build up your own strength, using the forklift isn’t going to get you there. This is the ultimate problem with AI in academia. We all inherently know that “no pain no gain” is true for physical tasks, but the same is true for learning. Struggling through the new concepts is essentially the point of it, not just the end result. Of course this becomes a different thing outside of learning, where delivering results is more important in a workplace context. But even then you still need someone who does the high level thinking.

arghwhat 8mo ago
I do appreciate the visual of driving a forklift into the gym. The activity would train something, but it sure wouldn't be your ability to lift.
- Lerc 8mo ago
  A version of this does happen with regard to fitness. There are enthusiasts who will spend an absolute fortune to get a bike that is few grams lighter and then use it to ride up hills for the exercise. Presumably a much cheaper bike would mean you could use a smaller hill for the same effect.
  - arghwhat 8mo ago
    From an exercise standpoint, sure, but with sports there is more to it than just maximizing exercise. If you practice judo you're definitely exercising but the goal is defeating your opponent. When biking or running you're definitely exercising but the goal is going faster or further. From an an exercise optimization perspective you should be sitting on a spinner with a customized profile, or maybe do some entirely different motion. If sitting on a carbon fiber bike, shaving off half a second off your multi-hour time, is what brings you joy and motivation then I say screw it to further justification. You do you. Just be mindful of others, as the path you ride isn't your property.
frankc 8mo ago
I think this is a pretty solid analogy but I look at the metaphor this way - people used to get strong naturally because they had to do physical labor. Because we invented things like the forklift we had to invent things like weightlifting to get strong instead. You can still get strong, you just need to be more deliberate about it. It doesn't mean shouldn't also use a forklift, which is its own distinct skill you also need to learn. It's not a perfect analogy though because in this case it's more like automated driving - you should still learn to drive because the autodriver isn't perfect and you need to be ready to take the wheel, but that means deliberate, separate practice at learning to drive.
- thesz 8mo ago
  Weightlifting and weight training was invented long before forklifts. Even levers were not properly understood back then. My favorite historic example of typical modern hypertrophy-specific training is the training of Milo of Croton [1]. By legend, his father gifted him with the calf and asked daily "what is your calf, how does it do? bring it here to look at him" which Milo did. As calf's weight grew, so did Milo's strength. This is application of external resistance (calf) and progressive overload (growing calf) principles at work. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_of_Croton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_of_Croton Milo lived before Archimedes.
  - aaronbrethorst 8mo ago
    Dad needs to respect that we need rest days.
    - thesz 8mo ago
      Bulgarian Method does not have rest days: https://www.mashelite.com/the-bulgarian-method-is-worth-a-look/ https://www.mashelite.com/the-bulgarian-method-is-worth-a-lo... Alexander Zass (Iron Samson) also trained each day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Zass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Zass "He was taken as a prisoner of war four times, but managed to escape each time. As a prisoner, he pushed and pulled his cell bars as part of strength training, which was cited as an example of the effectiveness of isometrics. At least one of his escapes involved him 'breaking chains and bending bars'." Rest days are overrated. ;)
jrm4 8mo ago
I like this analogy along with the idea that "it's not an autonomous robot, it's a mech suit." Here's the thing -- I don't care about "getting stronger." I want to make things, and now I can make bigger things WAY faster because I have a mech suit. edit: and to stretch the analogy, I don't believe much is lost "intellectually" by my use of a mech suit, as long as I observe carefully. Me doing things by hand is probably overrated.
- quinnjh 8mo ago
  This analogy works pretty well. Too much time doing everything in it and your muscles will atrophy. Some edge cases will be better if you jump out and use your hands.
  - WorldMaker 8mo ago
    There's also plenty of mech tales where the mech pilots need to spend as much time out of the suits making sure their muscles (and/or mental health) are in good strength precisely because the mechs are a "force multiplier" and are only as strong as their pilot. That's a somewhat common thread in such worlds.
    - ekidd 8mo ago
      Yes. Also, it's a fairly common trope that if you want to pilot a mech suit, you need to be someone like Tony Stark. He's a tinkerer and an expert. What he does is not a commodity. And when he loses his suit and access to his money? His big plot arc is that he is Iron Man. He built it in a cave out of a box of scraps, etc. There are other fictional variants: the giant mech with the enormous support team, or Heinlein's "mobile infantry." And virtually every variantion on the Heinlein trope has a scene of drop commandos doing extensive pre-drop checks on their armor. The actual reality is it isn't too had for a competent engineer to pair with Claude Code, if they're willing to read the diffs. But if you try to increase the ratio of agents to humans, dealing with their current limitations quickly starts to feel like you need to be Tony Stark.
      - 8mo ago
hyperpape 8mo ago
How seriously do you mean the analogy? I think forklifts probably carry more weight over longer distances than people do (though I could be wrong, 8 billion humans carrying small weights might add up). Certainly forklifts have more weight * distance when you restrict to objects that are over 100 pounds, and that seems like a good decision.
- burkaman 8mo ago
  I think it's a good analogy. A forklift is a useful tool and objectively better than humans for some tasks, but if you've never developed your muscles because you use the forklift every time you go to the gym, then when you need to carry a couch up the stairs you'll find that you can't do it and the forklift can't either. So the idea is that you should learn to do things by hand first, and then use the powerful tools once you're knowledgeable enough to know when they make sense. If you start out with the powerful tools, then you'll never learn enough to take over when they fail.
  - bluGill 8mo ago
    A forklift can do things no human can. I've used a forklift for things that no group of humans could - you can't physically get enough humans around that size object to lift it. (of course levers would change this)
  - AlexandrB 8mo ago
    Yeah, it's a great analogy. Pushing it even further: a forklift is superhuman, but only in specific environments that are designed for it. As soon as you're off of pavement a forklift can't do much. As soon as an object doesn't have somewhere to stick the forks you need to get a bunch of other equipment to get the forklift to lift it.
- _flux 8mo ago
  You're making the analogy work: because the point of weightlifting as a sport or exercise is to not to actually move the weights, but condition your body such that it can move the weights. Indeed, usually after doing weightlifting, you return the weights to the place where you originally took them from, so I suppose that means you did no work at in the first place..
stackedinserter 8mo ago
Unlike weightlifting, the main goal of our jobs is not to lift heavy things, but develop a product that adds value to its users. Unfortunately, many sdevs don't understand it.
- burkaman 8mo ago
  Yes but the goal of school is to lift heavy things, basically. You're trying to do things that are difficult (for you) but don't produce anything useful for anyone else. That's how you gain the ability to do useful things.
  - stackedinserter 8mo ago
    I kinda get the point, but why is that? The goal of school is to teach something that's applicable in industry or academia. Forklift operators don't lift things in their training. Even CS students start with pretty high level of abstraction, very few start from x86 asm instructions. We need to make them implement ALU's on logical gates and wires if we want them to lift heavy things.
    - lostdog 8mo ago
      We begin teaching math by having students solve problems that are trivial for a calculator. Though I also wonder what advanced CS classes should look like. If they agent can code nearly anything, what project would challenge student+agent and teach the student how to accomplish CS fundamentals with modern tools.
      - burkaman 8mo ago
        In one of my college classes, after you submitted your project you'd have a short meeting with a TA and/or the professor to talk through your solution. For a smaller advanced class I think this kind of thing is feasible and can help prevent blind copy/pasting. If you wrote your code with an LLM but you're still able to have a knowledgeable conversation about it, then great, that's what you're going to do in the real world too. If you can't answer any questions about it and it seems like you don't understand your own code, then you don't get a good grade even if it works. As an added bonus, being able to discuss your code with another engineer that wasn't involved in writing it is an important skill that might not otherwise be trained in college.
treetalker 8mo ago
Misusing a forklift might injure the driver and a few others; but it is unlikely to bring down an entire electric grid, expose millions to fraud and theft, put innocent people in prison, or jeopardize the institutions of government. There is more than one kind of leverage at play here.
- pjc50 8mo ago
  > Misusing a forklift might injure the driver and a few others; but it is unlikely to bring down an entire electric grid That's the job of the backhoe. (this is a joke about how diggers have caused quite a lot of local internet outages by hitting cables, sometimes supposedly "redundant" cables that were routed in the same conduit. Hitting power infrastructure is rare but does happen)
  - _whiteCaps_ 8mo ago
    At my last job we had the power taken out by a backhoe. It was loaded onto a trailer and either the operator forgot to lower the bucket, or the driver drove away before he had time to lower it. Regardless of whose fault it was, the end result was the bucket snagged the power lines going into the datacentre and caused an outage.
- yetihehe 8mo ago
  > but it is unlikely to bring down an entire electric grid Unless you happen to drive a forklift in a power plant. > expose millions to fraud and theft You can if you drive forklift in a bank. > put innocent people in prison You can use forklift to put several innocent people in prison with one trip, they have pretty high capacity. > jeopardize the institutions of government. It's pretty easy with a forklift, just try driving through main gate. > There is more than one kind of leverage at play here. Forklifts typically have several axes of travel.
  - mystifyingpoi 8mo ago
    The level of pettiness in this comment is through the roof. I love it.
_heimdall 8mo ago
The real challenge will be that people almost always pick the easier path. We have a decent sized piece of land and raise some animals. People think we're crazy for not having a tractor, but at the end of the day I would rather do it the hard way and stay in shape while also keeping a bit of a cap on how much I can change or tear up around here.
wklm 8mo ago
I like the weightlifting parable!
boilerupnc 8mo ago
I feel like the aviation pilot angst captured by "automation dependency" and the fears around skills loss is another great analogy. [0] [0] https://eazypilot.com/blog/automation-dependency-blessing-or-blind-spot-for-new-pilots/ https://eazypilot.com/blog/automation-dependency-blessing-or...
ModernMech 8mo ago
I've been showing my students this video of a robot lifting weights to illustrate why they shouldn't use AI to do their homework. It's obvious to them the robot lifting weights won't make them stronger. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Be7WBGMo3Iw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Be7WBGMo3Iw
MyHonestOpinon 8mo ago
Thanks for the analogy. But I think students may think to themselves:"Why do I need to be stronger if I can use a forklift?"
- MarsIronPI 8mo ago
  Hey, I guess that means there's less competition for me. I don't mind.
- fragmede 8mo ago
  Same reason to still memorize basic math in the time of calculators. gotta learn the fundamentals and you're not always going to have one.
kwikiel 8mo ago
Wondering why the obvious solution isn’t applied here - instead of giving already well known problems that have been solved thousand times give students open research opportunities- stuff which is on the edge of being possible, no way to cheat with Ai. And if Ai is able to solve those - give harder tasks
- imadethis 8mo ago
  The same reason we give beginner math students addition and subtraction problems, not Fermat’s last theorem? There has to be a base of knowledge available before the student can even comprehend many/most open research questions, let alone begin to solve them. And if they were understandable to a beginner, then I’d posit the LLM models available today would also be capable of doing meaningful work.
TuringNYC 8mo ago
> This is the ultimate problem with AI in academia. We all inherently know that “no pain no gain” is true for physical tasks, but the same is true for learning. Struggling through the new concepts is essentially the point of it, not just the end result. OK but then why even use Python, or C, or anything but Assembly? Isn't AI just another layer of value-add?
- saulpw 8mo ago
  No, because AI is not deterministic. All those other tools are intentionally isomorphic with machine code, even if there's a lot of optimization going on under the hood. AI may generate code that's isomorphic with your prompt, but it also may not. And you have no way of telling the difference besides reading and understanding the code.
volkanvardar 8mo ago
I think a better analogy is a marathon. If you're training for a marathon, you have to run. It won't help if you take the car. You will reach the finish line with minimal effort, but you won't gain any necessary muscles.
- theshrike79 8mo ago
  But if your goal is to get from A to B, car is more efficient. It's the whole "journey vs destination" thing. Currently AI seems to be the rocket you strap to your back as you put on VR glasses and enjoy the entertainment. You'll get there fast or blow up in the middle. The True Artisanal Coders are the ones running the whole way, enjoying the scenery and the physical conditioning they get. And there are people in between with bikes, cars etc. (different stages of AI use) Analogies are fun =)
  - volkanvardar 8mo ago
    Exactly, if your goal is to reach somewhere fast, you should use the car. Bike, if you can't effort. But if you're a junior developer, you won't be able to gain the most vital skills.
randysalami 8mo ago
A use case I’ve been working through is learning a language (not programming). You can use LLMs to translate and write for you in another language but you will not be able to say, I know that language, no matter how much you use the LLM. Now compare this to using the LLM with a grammar book and real world study mechanisms. This creates friction which actually causes your mind to learn. The LLM can serve as a tool to get specialized insight into the grammar book and accelerate physical processes (like generating all forms of a word for writing flashcards). At the end of day, you need to make an intelligent separation where the LLM ends and your learning begins. I really like this contrast because it highlights the gap between using an LLM and actually learning. You may be able to use the LLM to pass college level courses in learning the language but unless you create friction, you actually won’t learn anything! There is definitely more nuance here but it’s food for thought
rienbdj 8mo ago
Coincidentally, this is why Duolingo doesn’t work. They need to make it easy/low friction to keep you engaged but if it’s not hard you won’t be learning much.

by orev 8mo ago

arghwhat 8mo ago

I do appreciate the visual of driving a forklift into the gym. The activity would train something, but it sure wouldn't be your ability to lift.

Lerc 8mo ago
A version of this does happen with regard to fitness. There are enthusiasts who will spend an absolute fortune to get a bike that is few grams lighter and then use it to ride up hills for the exercise. Presumably a much cheaper bike would mean you could use a smaller hill for the same effect.
- arghwhat 8mo ago
  From an exercise standpoint, sure, but with sports there is more to it than just maximizing exercise. If you practice judo you're definitely exercising but the goal is defeating your opponent. When biking or running you're definitely exercising but the goal is going faster or further. From an an exercise optimization perspective you should be sitting on a spinner with a customized profile, or maybe do some entirely different motion. If sitting on a carbon fiber bike, shaving off half a second off your multi-hour time, is what brings you joy and motivation then I say screw it to further justification. You do you. Just be mindful of others, as the path you ride isn't your property.

frankc 8mo ago

I think this is a pretty solid analogy but I look at the metaphor this way - people used to get strong naturally because they had to do physical labor. Because we invented things like the forklift we had to invent things like weightlifting to get strong instead. You can still get strong, you just need to be more deliberate about it. It doesn't mean shouldn't also use a forklift, which is its own distinct skill you also need to learn. It's not a perfect analogy though because in this case it's more like automated driving - you should still learn to drive because the autodriver isn't perfect and you need to be ready to take the wheel, but that means deliberate, separate practice at learning to drive.

thesz 8mo ago
Weightlifting and weight training was invented long before forklifts. Even levers were not properly understood back then. My favorite historic example of typical modern hypertrophy-specific training is the training of Milo of Croton [1]. By legend, his father gifted him with the calf and asked daily "what is your calf, how does it do? bring it here to look at him" which Milo did. As calf's weight grew, so did Milo's strength. This is application of external resistance (calf) and progressive overload (growing calf) principles at work. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_of_Croton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_of_Croton Milo lived before Archimedes.
- aaronbrethorst 8mo ago
  Dad needs to respect that we need rest days.
  - thesz 8mo ago
    Bulgarian Method does not have rest days: https://www.mashelite.com/the-bulgarian-method-is-worth-a-look/ https://www.mashelite.com/the-bulgarian-method-is-worth-a-lo... Alexander Zass (Iron Samson) also trained each day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Zass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Zass "He was taken as a prisoner of war four times, but managed to escape each time. As a prisoner, he pushed and pulled his cell bars as part of strength training, which was cited as an example of the effectiveness of isometrics. At least one of his escapes involved him 'breaking chains and bending bars'." Rest days are overrated. ;)

jrm4 8mo ago

I like this analogy along with the idea that "it's not an autonomous robot, it's a mech suit." Here's the thing -- I don't care about "getting stronger." I want to make things, and now I can make bigger things WAY faster because I have a mech suit. edit: and to stretch the analogy, I don't believe much is lost "intellectually" by my use of a mech suit, as long as I observe carefully. Me doing things by hand is probably overrated.

quinnjh 8mo ago
This analogy works pretty well. Too much time doing everything in it and your muscles will atrophy. Some edge cases will be better if you jump out and use your hands.
- WorldMaker 8mo ago
  There's also plenty of mech tales where the mech pilots need to spend as much time out of the suits making sure their muscles (and/or mental health) are in good strength precisely because the mechs are a "force multiplier" and are only as strong as their pilot. That's a somewhat common thread in such worlds.
  - ekidd 8mo ago
    Yes. Also, it's a fairly common trope that if you want to pilot a mech suit, you need to be someone like Tony Stark. He's a tinkerer and an expert. What he does is not a commodity. And when he loses his suit and access to his money? His big plot arc is that he is Iron Man. He built it in a cave out of a box of scraps, etc. There are other fictional variants: the giant mech with the enormous support team, or Heinlein's "mobile infantry." And virtually every variantion on the Heinlein trope has a scene of drop commandos doing extensive pre-drop checks on their armor. The actual reality is it isn't too had for a competent engineer to pair with Claude Code, if they're willing to read the diffs. But if you try to increase the ratio of agents to humans, dealing with their current limitations quickly starts to feel like you need to be Tony Stark.
    - 8mo ago

hyperpape 8mo ago

How seriously do you mean the analogy? I think forklifts probably carry more weight over longer distances than people do (though I could be wrong, 8 billion humans carrying small weights might add up). Certainly forklifts have more weight * distance when you restrict to objects that are over 100 pounds, and that seems like a good decision.

burkaman 8mo ago
I think it's a good analogy. A forklift is a useful tool and objectively better than humans for some tasks, but if you've never developed your muscles because you use the forklift every time you go to the gym, then when you need to carry a couch up the stairs you'll find that you can't do it and the forklift can't either. So the idea is that you should learn to do things by hand first, and then use the powerful tools once you're knowledgeable enough to know when they make sense. If you start out with the powerful tools, then you'll never learn enough to take over when they fail.
- bluGill 8mo ago
  A forklift can do things no human can. I've used a forklift for things that no group of humans could - you can't physically get enough humans around that size object to lift it. (of course levers would change this)
- AlexandrB 8mo ago
  Yeah, it's a great analogy. Pushing it even further: a forklift is superhuman, but only in specific environments that are designed for it. As soon as you're off of pavement a forklift can't do much. As soon as an object doesn't have somewhere to stick the forks you need to get a bunch of other equipment to get the forklift to lift it.
_flux 8mo ago
You're making the analogy work: because the point of weightlifting as a sport or exercise is to not to actually move the weights, but condition your body such that it can move the weights. Indeed, usually after doing weightlifting, you return the weights to the place where you originally took them from, so I suppose that means you did no work at in the first place..

stackedinserter 8mo ago

Unlike weightlifting, the main goal of our jobs is not to lift heavy things, but develop a product that adds value to its users. Unfortunately, many sdevs don't understand it.

burkaman 8mo ago
Yes but the goal of school is to lift heavy things, basically. You're trying to do things that are difficult (for you) but don't produce anything useful for anyone else. That's how you gain the ability to do useful things.
- stackedinserter 8mo ago
  I kinda get the point, but why is that? The goal of school is to teach something that's applicable in industry or academia. Forklift operators don't lift things in their training. Even CS students start with pretty high level of abstraction, very few start from x86 asm instructions. We need to make them implement ALU's on logical gates and wires if we want them to lift heavy things.
  - lostdog 8mo ago
    We begin teaching math by having students solve problems that are trivial for a calculator. Though I also wonder what advanced CS classes should look like. If they agent can code nearly anything, what project would challenge student+agent and teach the student how to accomplish CS fundamentals with modern tools.
    - burkaman 8mo ago
      In one of my college classes, after you submitted your project you'd have a short meeting with a TA and/or the professor to talk through your solution. For a smaller advanced class I think this kind of thing is feasible and can help prevent blind copy/pasting. If you wrote your code with an LLM but you're still able to have a knowledgeable conversation about it, then great, that's what you're going to do in the real world too. If you can't answer any questions about it and it seems like you don't understand your own code, then you don't get a good grade even if it works. As an added bonus, being able to discuss your code with another engineer that wasn't involved in writing it is an important skill that might not otherwise be trained in college.

treetalker 8mo ago

Misusing a forklift might injure the driver and a few others; but it is unlikely to bring down an entire electric grid, expose millions to fraud and theft, put innocent people in prison, or jeopardize the institutions of government. There is more than one kind of leverage at play here.

pjc50 8mo ago
> Misusing a forklift might injure the driver and a few others; but it is unlikely to bring down an entire electric grid That's the job of the backhoe. (this is a joke about how diggers have caused quite a lot of local internet outages by hitting cables, sometimes supposedly "redundant" cables that were routed in the same conduit. Hitting power infrastructure is rare but does happen)
- _whiteCaps_ 8mo ago
  At my last job we had the power taken out by a backhoe. It was loaded onto a trailer and either the operator forgot to lower the bucket, or the driver drove away before he had time to lower it. Regardless of whose fault it was, the end result was the bucket snagged the power lines going into the datacentre and caused an outage.
yetihehe 8mo ago
> but it is unlikely to bring down an entire electric grid Unless you happen to drive a forklift in a power plant. > expose millions to fraud and theft You can if you drive forklift in a bank. > put innocent people in prison You can use forklift to put several innocent people in prison with one trip, they have pretty high capacity. > jeopardize the institutions of government. It's pretty easy with a forklift, just try driving through main gate. > There is more than one kind of leverage at play here. Forklifts typically have several axes of travel.
- mystifyingpoi 8mo ago
  The level of pettiness in this comment is through the roof. I love it.

_heimdall 8mo ago

The real challenge will be that people almost always pick the easier path. We have a decent sized piece of land and raise some animals. People think we're crazy for not having a tractor, but at the end of the day I would rather do it the hard way and stay in shape while also keeping a bit of a cap on how much I can change or tear up around here.

wklm 8mo ago

I like the weightlifting parable!

boilerupnc 8mo ago

I feel like the aviation pilot angst captured by "automation dependency" and the fears around skills loss is another great analogy. [0] [0] https://eazypilot.com/blog/automation-dependency-blessing-or-blind-spot-for-new-pilots/ https://eazypilot.com/blog/automation-dependency-blessing-or...

ModernMech 8mo ago

I've been showing my students this video of a robot lifting weights to illustrate why they shouldn't use AI to do their homework. It's obvious to them the robot lifting weights won't make them stronger. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Be7WBGMo3Iw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Be7WBGMo3Iw

MyHonestOpinon 8mo ago

Thanks for the analogy. But I think students may think to themselves:"Why do I need to be stronger if I can use a forklift?"

MarsIronPI 8mo ago
Hey, I guess that means there's less competition for me. I don't mind.
fragmede 8mo ago
Same reason to still memorize basic math in the time of calculators. gotta learn the fundamentals and you're not always going to have one.

kwikiel 8mo ago

Wondering why the obvious solution isn’t applied here - instead of giving already well known problems that have been solved thousand times give students open research opportunities- stuff which is on the edge of being possible, no way to cheat with Ai. And if Ai is able to solve those - give harder tasks

imadethis 8mo ago
The same reason we give beginner math students addition and subtraction problems, not Fermat’s last theorem? There has to be a base of knowledge available before the student can even comprehend many/most open research questions, let alone begin to solve them. And if they were understandable to a beginner, then I’d posit the LLM models available today would also be capable of doing meaningful work.

TuringNYC 8mo ago

> This is the ultimate problem with AI in academia. We all inherently know that “no pain no gain” is true for physical tasks, but the same is true for learning. Struggling through the new concepts is essentially the point of it, not just the end result. OK but then why even use Python, or C, or anything but Assembly? Isn't AI just another layer of value-add?

saulpw 8mo ago
No, because AI is not deterministic. All those other tools are intentionally isomorphic with machine code, even if there's a lot of optimization going on under the hood. AI may generate code that's isomorphic with your prompt, but it also may not. And you have no way of telling the difference besides reading and understanding the code.

volkanvardar 8mo ago

I think a better analogy is a marathon. If you're training for a marathon, you have to run. It won't help if you take the car. You will reach the finish line with minimal effort, but you won't gain any necessary muscles.

theshrike79 8mo ago
But if your goal is to get from A to B, car is more efficient. It's the whole "journey vs destination" thing. Currently AI seems to be the rocket you strap to your back as you put on VR glasses and enjoy the entertainment. You'll get there fast or blow up in the middle. The True Artisanal Coders are the ones running the whole way, enjoying the scenery and the physical conditioning they get. And there are people in between with bikes, cars etc. (different stages of AI use) Analogies are fun =)
- volkanvardar 8mo ago
  Exactly, if your goal is to reach somewhere fast, you should use the car. Bike, if you can't effort. But if you're a junior developer, you won't be able to gain the most vital skills.

randysalami 8mo ago

A use case I’ve been working through is learning a language (not programming). You can use LLMs to translate and write for you in another language but you will not be able to say, I know that language, no matter how much you use the LLM. Now compare this to using the LLM with a grammar book and real world study mechanisms. This creates friction which actually causes your mind to learn. The LLM can serve as a tool to get specialized insight into the grammar book and accelerate physical processes (like generating all forms of a word for writing flashcards). At the end of day, you need to make an intelligent separation where the LLM ends and your learning begins. I really like this contrast because it highlights the gap between using an LLM and actually learning. You may be able to use the LLM to pass college level courses in learning the language but unless you create friction, you actually won’t learn anything! There is definitely more nuance here but it’s food for thought

rienbdj 8mo ago

Coincidentally, this is why Duolingo doesn’t work. They need to make it easy/low friction to keep you engaged but if it’s not hard you won’t be learning much.