6 ms·

The Human Is the Loop

200 points by burnto 2mo ago

appplication 2mo ago
I like this, and resonate with the same thoughts. I do wonder when it comes to work though if the answer isn’t doing less but maybe breaking through in some way. I don’t know what it looks like but I do have the feeling LLMs are here to stay. Or maybe it’s just keeping them in the work box - if someone wants to pay me to use LLMs and generate code, so be it. But keeping them away from hobbies, plans, art. Noble maybe, but then again there are a lot of projects I’m unlikely to do if I can’t find some way to make the level of effort required fit in with my lifestyle. With young kids, side project time is so incredibly limited. Sometimes I feel like the main thing I’m learning from the AI wave is how modern life has a way of becoming more frustrating as more technology enters the picture. There’s all sorts of good in it, sure. But I do feel like so many more people are disgruntled by new tech compared to years past. I don’t think our cave man dopaminergic system is well suited for dealing with the expectations or availability of modern productivity and information.
- burnto 2mo ago
  Thank you for your thoughtful response. I was hoping others might relate to this experience in some way. I wonder about the transcendence take as well. I think a lot of us are strapped into this ride regardless. If there’s a fresh new paradigm awaiting, I hope it’s a good one. But my main observation is mostly personal: I get taken in a lot by technology waves, hoping things will get better, but I haven’t ever crisply defined “better.” Or my criteria has been too loose and I conflate novelty with progress. If advanced models eventually accelerate science and medicine so that more people can lead healthy fulfilling lives, that sounds a lot better. But if a model helps me use an undocumented API of a random IoT device tomorrow, I don’t think anything is much better, and I didn’t even get much out of the process. When efficiency isn’t paramount, I’m often not clear on when to take the shortcut versus when to do the work.
  - borski 2mo ago
    > I get taken in a lot by technology waves, hoping things will get better, but I haven’t ever crisply defined “better.” Yeah, I think this is the issue more than anything having to do with LLMs. It’s also why I stopped switching to the latest JS library du jour many years ago. The one I had worked fine. I don’t need to learn React because it just came out after learning fourteen other paradigms / frameworks. > Or my criteria has been too loose and I conflate novelty with progress. Yup. > If advanced models eventually accelerate science and medicine so that more people can lead healthy fulfilling lives, that sounds a lot better. Agreed. > But if a model helps me use an undocumented API of a random IoT device tomorrow, I don’t think anything is much better, and I didn’t even get much out of the process. Disagree, but it depends on what you’re looking to get out of it. Is the interesting part the RE / discovery? Or do you just want to control your car from Home Assistant? That is, once you’ve RE’d a React native app, you don’t really learn anything new by doing it again. I have no problem with an LLM helping me with that. But if I want to learn to RE a binary or app? Then I’ll do that!
- garrickvanburen 2mo ago
  There's a lot of stuff that we just don't need to do. Not right now. Not ever. That's OK.
  - borski 2mo ago
    I could not agree with this more. Just because you can doesn’t mean you must, even if everyone else is.
  - alansaber 2mo ago
    This has always been true. No?
    - borski 2mo ago
      Yes, but people forget that. And when LLMs make it feel like you can offload “for free,” people find themselves trying to do everything. LLMs provide you with the illusion of “free concurrency,” and it sucks people in.
- veunes 2mo ago
  I'm not sure "keep AI out of hobbies" quite works either. With young kids, reducing the activation energy can be the difference between doing a project and never doing it at all.
  - recursive 2mo ago
    Not all projects should be done.
  - duskdozer 2mo ago
    If there's anyone who shouldn't be cognitively disengaging, it's young kids. The push to get kids using LLMs is to create permanently dependent future customers.
inatreecrown2 2mo ago
> a productivity ouroboros. This reflects my impression of working with LLM as well.
stillpointlab 2mo ago
One thing I have been doing to avoid the feeling of starting 100 projects and finishing none, is to work on one big ambitious project. That way I don't have a bunch of half finished projects staring at me, each accusing me of abandoning them and competing for my attention. There is always one big project that I return to and continue to invest in.
- alansaber 2mo ago
  Even before AI this was the best way to sustain attention/effort imo
  - stillpointlab 2mo ago
    I agree, but I really started to feel it more with AI. Before AI there was a little more friction to starting projects. Now the friction from idea to MVP is near zero. So the temptation to take the easy path feels even stronger than it did before.
garrickvanburen 2mo ago
Yes. This is consistent w/ my default position: "if LLMs are good at it, we probably don't need to do it."
- boesboes 2mo ago
  100% Anything worth doing, is worth doing yourself. LLMs create nothing of real value imo. And all my colleagues that whole heartily agree, just to go 'but i use it ...', are not much different from smokers & day traders that think they are the exception.
  - antonvs 2mo ago
    LLMs reduce delivery time, and if you’re not taking advantage of that, you’ll discover first hand why it’s important. Would you also say that any message worth sending is worth writing by hand and mailing via the postal service, instead of emailing? And if you tried to replace your work use of email (or Slack etc.) with handwritten letters, what do you think would happen? That’s essentially equivalent to the position you’re taking.
    - vaylian 2mo ago
      > LLMs reduce delivery time, and if you’re not taking advantage of that, you’ll discover first hand why it’s important. Choose any 2: Cheap, fast, reliable. You might have a faster delivery time, but you cannot cheat on the maintenance burden.
    - garrickvanburen 2mo ago
      I often make the analogy that LLMs are like Amazon same day shipping. You can have later today, but it's unlikely to be the best offering...just the best you can get later today.
  - ky-hy 2mo ago
    if I had to write code by hand and take time to do it, I would be fired long time ago, and as a person with only 2 YoE I don't want to risk going on a job hunt currently. I already get weird looks from people when I say that I take time to review code or change some small parts of it by hand.
BrenBarn 2mo ago
> Equipped with tools that could theoretically make me a faster, more capable builder, I felt a strong urge to maximize my use of the tools by applying them to the task of… maximizing my use of the tools. It’s reflexive in the worst way, a productivity ouroboros. More flour more water. More water more flour.
- burnto 2mo ago
  This metaphor slaps. And folds!
_def 2mo ago
I'm cautious on the dependency part too. Do I have a bunch of tools now that help me and wouldn't exist without an agent writing them for me? Sure. Will I be able to fix them once their codebase will eventually need maintenance? Most likely not. So I'll better still have access to some decent model then! Also, especially in work, it undermines skills and experience you then just lack. That also will only be fine as long as you are doing the work somewhere where they provide/allow use of LLMs.
- KaseKun 2mo ago
  > still have access to some decent model Not really a requirement, if you did fine without the tools before you would do fine again. The difference is you would know which ones are worth manually maintaining
singularityagen 2mo ago
[flagged]
rando103747202 2mo ago
This post really resonated with me - I’ve been having similar thoughts recently. That’s why I found the final paragraph to be a bit of a shock - “ More important: it’s freeing me up to do human stuff like write and reflect right now.” What? How? This doesn’t follow from the rest of the post at all. Maybe your new less frenetic and more human scale AI usage would be a good subject for the next post.
- veunes 2mo ago
  And I think the missing piece is what prevents this new workflow from eventually turning back into the same productivity ouroboros
  - borski 2mo ago
    It isn’t writing the post. It’s doing research, providing background knowledge, evidence, etc… but the work is being done by OP. That was my read, anyway.
- borski 2mo ago
  I think you misunderstood; the point was that not being constantly in front of Claude or another LLM is what has freed OP up. That is, stepping away from the laptop is what has given them back some free time and brain space.
- burnto 2mo ago
  Hi, thanks for reading and your comment. Reviewing now, I can see why the final paragraph might have read this way. What I was hoping to convey in the last two paragraphs was that I was trying to be thoughtful with where I use AI (work project where I did the initial thinking and setup and the agent does a lot of review and aggregation and reports back) and where I don’t (reflecting and writing). And the hope is that if I pay more attention to my values and priorities, I will make better decisions about my goals and how to achieve them, and maybe I’ll get more value out of both the tech and the process. None of this is strictly new or limited to effects of AI. There has always been a process vs outcome calculus. But some of the parameters have changed in the past few years and I think we need to adjust.
borski 2mo ago
I find it interesting that so many of my friends resonate with this. I… don’t, really. I only ever have 2-4 opencode/claude tabs open at once. And I use them for consistent tasks. There’s no way I’d be able to keep track otherwise. I have an “email reviewer” terminal, and a “doc maker” terminal, and 1-2 “coding” terminals. But I don’t start a half dozen things simultaneously (which is ironic, because I have ADHD). I don’t feel the need to maximize my efficiency with AI. I also don’t lament the ideas / things I start but don’t finish; that has been my life, lol - see the aforementioned ADHD. So why should I start caring about my half-finished projects now, just because I sunk some tokens into them? I spent an entire day the other day trying to use an LLM to help me automate something manual and tedious, and it was a failure. Did nothing but waste time in the end. Perhaps it’s those experiences (of which I’ve had plenty) that help me realize the limitations? I don’t feel like it should make me more productive; it does, because I can offload random tasks that I do not have to be the one to do (“find the function where this happens” or “find all the laundromats in the cities I’m going to”) but I use it for research like that, and not so much “do my taxes for me.” That’s why I paid a guy to do my taxes. I don’t feel this “need” for sending everything into AI. And just because I can use it to do anything myself… why should I? There are two caveats: 1) when I’m directly working on something, I don’t want to leave it. I’m hyperfocused on it. But that’s true even without AI; I would have been obsessed with building doughflow.app were it for AI or not. The difference is I may never have finished it without AI. 2) I find myself using it as a crutch sometimes for simple things like sending a message to a colleague. I don’t like that, and have been trying to avoid it. I’ve spent all my life writing naturally, and I don’t need someone to proofread my chats. That’s a habit I am tossing, in general. Perhaps it is the ADHD that actually helps me focus; that is, perhaps the coping mechanisms built for managing my countless disparate thoughts also work for managing multiple disparate agents? Just thinking out loud.
- Systemerror7A69 2mo ago
  I'm in a similar situation is you are, having ADHD, and my observations have been similar. I've been more hestiant to use AI at all for a while at the beginning but even now I only ever use it for one thing at a time. It helps me tremendously with the things I want to have done but not do - find out who clutters my home directory, build a small DMS plugin for local models, stuff like that. But even if I work on a bigger task and idea, it's mostly one thing I use it for at a time. Maybe you're right in the fact that the coping mechanism help with that. Maybe using LLMs is similar in that it is easy to lose focus for neurotypicals so having lived with that we know how to handle it. Or maybe it's just us, who knows.
veunes 2mo ago
There are tasks where AI genuinely removes tedious work and then there are tasks where the tedious or uncomfortable part is actually the thinking you needed to do
rasheed106 2mo ago
Not for long. It will be outsourced once we have proper verification and receipts for AI agents. But a human will operate multiple loops.
- alansaber 2mo ago
  You don't think we already do? What's missing? Better inter-agent communications? Better unit tests and linting?
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
mojo-10 2mo ago
Make rust in the loop. Rust is the best. Only smart people use rust.
lu7897859 2mo ago
[flagged]
songhonglei1985 2mo ago
[flagged]
flemhans 2mo ago
AI is definitely the loop. Humans are at the top (for now) making overall decisions and at the bottom (trivialities that the AI doesn't have access to or requires physical access). Everything in the middle is a black ever-growing and expanding blob / orb. Some people reluctantly position themselves solely at the bottom or at the top.
- alansaber 2mo ago
  Not sure I see what would displace humans from the top. AI keeps getting better at the middle bit. Sure, that means you can be lazier with instructions from the top. But surely we see diminishing returns from that- you can only RL so hard, you need increasingly large inputs to create sufficiently specific outputs
davedx 2mo ago
"I have so many half-baked ideas for tools or services I barely need, sparked by a combo of unaddressed workaholism and techno-optimist wishful thinking." This part resonates. AI has been such an accelerator that just yesterday I told Claude to make a brand new "Christian male meal planner with grace quotes from the Bible", bought a domain name, had the whole thing ready to go then thought "wtf am I doing, I already have half a dozen other side projects in the go, this is insane!" and just stopped it. Human focus is a precious, finite resource. The productivity boom enabled by AI tools is probably going to benefit those capable of laser-like focus the most. Scattered thinkers (like myself, or perhaps the original article author) are in for a struggle at times.
- high_priest 2mo ago
  Brother was so close to winning big, then just stopped digging, when one could smell the success.
- antonvs 2mo ago
  > wtf am I doing Some part of you realized that Bronze Age superstitions aren’t worth that kind of effort.
  - arcanemachiner 2mo ago
    Please provide a couple sentences of your belief system so that I may mock them as well. It's only fair.
    - antonvs 2mo ago
      Beliefs need to be justified by evidence that supports a defensible theory. Otherwise, there’s no meaningful basis for choosing between beliefs. I’m not mocking you. I’m pointing out that you’re making an epistemic mistake, and speculating that at some level, you recognize that, based on your self-described choices.
nicbou 2mo ago
I find that it lets me do a surprising amount of work before the excitement and hyperfocus wear off. This is sometimes good, sometimes bad. Sometimes I'll get a neat little feature out while I feel inspired. This is great for doing something cool on a Sunday afternoon when priorities don't matter. Sometimes I'll start something bigger and get halfway there, then I realise it's not what I should be doing, and it becomes another open tab that does not fit in my list of priorities. Success depends on focus and saying no to most things. AI makes it easy to say yes to everything. Instead of making my todo list shorter, it just makes me add more stuff to it. It allows me to act on impulses instead of thinking carefully.
- burnto 2mo ago
  > Success depends on focus and saying no to most things. AI makes it easy to say yes to everything. Instead of making my todo list shorter, it just makes me add more stuff to it. It allows me to act on impulses instead of thinking carefully. Well said.
sonink 2mo ago
I am coming around to the view that for somethings it is better to not use AI at all. Writing and Strategic thought are those things for me. The problem with writing, and something I am noticing lately, is that AI robs your ability to create prose in your style. Even if you use AI just a little bit to touch up your writing - you start being influenced - And over time it adds up - you start writing like AI just a little bit every now and then. It seems to be robbing me of my ability to create original prose. Strategic thought is the other thing - like if I am deciding what we, as a company should focus on long term, it is easy for LLM's to give you a wrong direction. I think this is more because Strategic directions require a ton of context - and it is almost impossible for you to feed the ai EVERYTHING. There might be some things which are easy to miss out, which might make all the difference, and the LLM would assume that the 'requirements' are complete and would go to town with it. I suspect, this is largely because the current SOTA LLM's are being optimised for code and there isnt enough data in the training set for them to learn long term thought. Coding is I think fine for me. But even there, I dont let the agent use memory at all. I create the context - and it runs from that only. The biggest unlock here is that I can now program in any language. And it frees up sometime to think in systems and come up with more robust architectures.
- embedding-shape 2mo ago
  > Strategic thought is the other thing I feel like LLMs can be very helpful to double-check a bunch of stuff here, and evaluate alternative-paths and so on, but the "direction" really has to come from you, then you can use the LLM to double-check and what not. But if you let the LLM set the "direction", then all bets are off, as they don't have a single care about anything in the world, so they'll just do whatever essentially.
  - sonink 2mo ago
    "Direction" is what I mean by strategic thought - but even if the high level direction came from you - the tactical approach might fall prey to the same over confidence which destroys direction setting in the first place. I use it very sparingly for stuff like this - and even when I do - I discount its outputs heavily and maybe just use it let me see some blind spots and sanity testing.
lubo92 2mo ago
[flagged]
dorienh 2mo ago
"it’s freeing me up to do human stuff like write and reflect right now" --> you are one of the rare humans still writing your own stuff.
- patrickmay 2mo ago
  There are dozens of us!
dhchun1203 2mo ago
[flagged]
dzonga 2mo ago
I look at people spewing propaganda of let agents go wild when building stuff forgetting when building stuff - 'the moat was building the right thing' not building the wrong thing really quickly.
thoughtpeddler 2mo ago
I found myself so strongly endorsing almost every remark and impression in this post - are we the same person?? AI truly is dual-use: it can lead to immense speed ups on 'research rabbit-holes' that used to take a lot of manual work and Google-fu, or it could also just waste a ton of time generating too much output to make meaningful use out of (I almost always now invoke a text expansion snippet like "What's the 2-paragraph-block TLDR of the previous response?"). It's always looming in the mind of an overachiever-type person such as myself that 'AI could search and synthesize better', and so it has a very seductive siren song for almost all tasks. The current moment with AI does very much feel like the early days of atomic energy where people had all kinds of now-crazy-seeming use-cases for the atom, and this showed up again with at-home microwaves, as seen in that "Microwave Cooking for One" book from the 1980s (see: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8m6AM5qtPMjgTkEeD/my-journey-to-the-microwave-alternate-timeline https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8m6AM5qtPMjgTkEeD/my-journey...). I do think with new technologies it's important to try many different forms and applications of it before finding their true practical utility, and this is no different. Maybe we're collectively (at least within the HN crowd) finally feeling the "cool-down of the mania" and starting to shift to more realistic uses of AI (at least until there might be another big capabilities jump...) But at the same time, I cannot deny that AI has also made me become a better person in other areas. I'd always had poor 'handiness' or 'around the house' type skills, and the number of things I've gotten comfortable doing because of AI assistance, like hanging art on the walls, taking on some basic at-home plumbing and fix-it tasks, trying new things in the kitchen with cooking and food prep and brewing coffee etc, is frankly much higher than pre-2022. And that's to say nothing of all the help it's provided getting more fit in the gym. Maybe my upbringing lacked these things that others never had an issue with, but I am grateful to this technology for helping 'level the playing field' in this regard. Just like I know how it's done the same for non-techie people who are now a little more well-versed in the matters that I'd been naturally more fluent in. So, like most tech, we need to be mindful of our use, especially us HN-types that are drawn to information processing systems, optimization, efficiency, etc. It's really a double-edged sword, and I've never felt that more than lately. And this is doubly true for anyone with certain neurodiverse information habits (all the open tabs, 'research trails' with poor follow-up, etc). I often joke that I'll know we've reached AGI when my open browser tab count hovers below ~5!
sagabai 2mo ago
I used to be an AI sceptic, but with newer model being released I come closer to the mid: It's a great tool that amplifies human output, but without human judgement in the loop it's a danger to IT systems. I don't think human should only judge AI design decisions described by LLMs in English. Understanding the codebase is important to be able to judge further development. So reading code, correcting code, articulating on it is still an important skill imo.
chrismdp 2mo ago
Great thoughts. I too came back from vacation this year to find that I wasn't nearly as interested in AI doing certain things for me (like writing) and much more interested in finding the areas it's properly good at. At the moment I'm getting most value out of: - Checking integrity of data through custom scripting - Controlling my smart home stuff via quick commands - Reconciling account software with my bank and uploaded / emails receipts - Researching info across disparate sources - Managing pipelines of work (eg sales cycles or content schedules) reminding me when I need to do something - Parsing interesting articles / videos and pulling out the essentials - Reworking text I've written to work across multiple social accounts - Asking me great questions about whether I'm on track with what I said I wanted to do - Pinging me when an email looks important so I don't have to continually check it. - Coding on projects that I want to make rapid progress on for work (not tinkering) This list is quite different to the one I'd have written a year ago - that would have mostly been about writing, information retrieval and coding. The most obvious use cases are I think the least useful ones. Diffusion of AI will take time!
agenticworldcup 2mo ago
Three things: 1) Read more books, 2) Learn more vocab, 3) Just write more! Nothing crystalizes the thoughts coursing through our heads than writing something out - often times refining it - and forcing yourself to use new vocab that you have independently learned.

200 points by burnto 2mo ago

I like this, and resonate with the same thoughts. I do wonder when it comes to work though if the answer isn’t doing less but maybe breaking through in some way. I don’t know what it looks like but I do have the feeling LLMs are here to stay. Or maybe it’s just keeping them in the work box - if someone wants to pay me to use LLMs and generate code, so be it. But keeping them away from hobbies, plans, art. Noble maybe, but then again there are a lot of projects I’m unlikely to do if I can’t find some way to make the level of effort required fit in with my lifestyle. With young kids, side project time is so incredibly limited. Sometimes I feel like the main thing I’m learning from the AI wave is how modern life has a way of becoming more frustrating as more technology enters the picture. There’s all sorts of good in it, sure. But I do feel like so many more people are disgruntled by new tech compared to years past. I don’t think our cave man dopaminergic system is well suited for dealing with the expectations or availability of modern productivity and information.

burnto 2mo ago
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I was hoping others might relate to this experience in some way. I wonder about the transcendence take as well. I think a lot of us are strapped into this ride regardless. If there’s a fresh new paradigm awaiting, I hope it’s a good one. But my main observation is mostly personal: I get taken in a lot by technology waves, hoping things will get better, but I haven’t ever crisply defined “better.” Or my criteria has been too loose and I conflate novelty with progress. If advanced models eventually accelerate science and medicine so that more people can lead healthy fulfilling lives, that sounds a lot better. But if a model helps me use an undocumented API of a random IoT device tomorrow, I don’t think anything is much better, and I didn’t even get much out of the process. When efficiency isn’t paramount, I’m often not clear on when to take the shortcut versus when to do the work.
- borski 2mo ago
  > I get taken in a lot by technology waves, hoping things will get better, but I haven’t ever crisply defined “better.” Yeah, I think this is the issue more than anything having to do with LLMs. It’s also why I stopped switching to the latest JS library du jour many years ago. The one I had worked fine. I don’t need to learn React because it just came out after learning fourteen other paradigms / frameworks. > Or my criteria has been too loose and I conflate novelty with progress. Yup. > If advanced models eventually accelerate science and medicine so that more people can lead healthy fulfilling lives, that sounds a lot better. Agreed. > But if a model helps me use an undocumented API of a random IoT device tomorrow, I don’t think anything is much better, and I didn’t even get much out of the process. Disagree, but it depends on what you’re looking to get out of it. Is the interesting part the RE / discovery? Or do you just want to control your car from Home Assistant? That is, once you’ve RE’d a React native app, you don’t really learn anything new by doing it again. I have no problem with an LLM helping me with that. But if I want to learn to RE a binary or app? Then I’ll do that!
garrickvanburen 2mo ago
There's a lot of stuff that we just don't need to do. Not right now. Not ever. That's OK.
- borski 2mo ago
  I could not agree with this more. Just because you can doesn’t mean you must, even if everyone else is.
- alansaber 2mo ago
  This has always been true. No?
  - borski 2mo ago
    Yes, but people forget that. And when LLMs make it feel like you can offload “for free,” people find themselves trying to do everything. LLMs provide you with the illusion of “free concurrency,” and it sucks people in.
veunes 2mo ago
I'm not sure "keep AI out of hobbies" quite works either. With young kids, reducing the activation energy can be the difference between doing a project and never doing it at all.
- recursive 2mo ago
  Not all projects should be done.
- duskdozer 2mo ago
  If there's anyone who shouldn't be cognitively disengaging, it's young kids. The push to get kids using LLMs is to create permanently dependent future customers.

inatreecrown2 2mo ago

> a productivity ouroboros. This reflects my impression of working with LLM as well.

stillpointlab 2mo ago

One thing I have been doing to avoid the feeling of starting 100 projects and finishing none, is to work on one big ambitious project. That way I don't have a bunch of half finished projects staring at me, each accusing me of abandoning them and competing for my attention. There is always one big project that I return to and continue to invest in.

alansaber 2mo ago
Even before AI this was the best way to sustain attention/effort imo
- stillpointlab 2mo ago
  I agree, but I really started to feel it more with AI. Before AI there was a little more friction to starting projects. Now the friction from idea to MVP is near zero. So the temptation to take the easy path feels even stronger than it did before.

garrickvanburen 2mo ago

Yes. This is consistent w/ my default position: "if LLMs are good at it, we probably don't need to do it."

boesboes 2mo ago
100% Anything worth doing, is worth doing yourself. LLMs create nothing of real value imo. And all my colleagues that whole heartily agree, just to go 'but i use it ...', are not much different from smokers & day traders that think they are the exception.
- antonvs 2mo ago
  LLMs reduce delivery time, and if you’re not taking advantage of that, you’ll discover first hand why it’s important. Would you also say that any message worth sending is worth writing by hand and mailing via the postal service, instead of emailing? And if you tried to replace your work use of email (or Slack etc.) with handwritten letters, what do you think would happen? That’s essentially equivalent to the position you’re taking.
  - vaylian 2mo ago
    > LLMs reduce delivery time, and if you’re not taking advantage of that, you’ll discover first hand why it’s important. Choose any 2: Cheap, fast, reliable. You might have a faster delivery time, but you cannot cheat on the maintenance burden.
  - garrickvanburen 2mo ago
    I often make the analogy that LLMs are like Amazon same day shipping. You can have later today, but it's unlikely to be the best offering...just the best you can get later today.
- ky-hy 2mo ago
  if I had to write code by hand and take time to do it, I would be fired long time ago, and as a person with only 2 YoE I don't want to risk going on a job hunt currently. I already get weird looks from people when I say that I take time to review code or change some small parts of it by hand.

BrenBarn 2mo ago

> Equipped with tools that could theoretically make me a faster, more capable builder, I felt a strong urge to maximize my use of the tools by applying them to the task of… maximizing my use of the tools. It’s reflexive in the worst way, a productivity ouroboros. More flour more water. More water more flour.

burnto 2mo ago
This metaphor slaps. And folds!

_def 2mo ago

I'm cautious on the dependency part too. Do I have a bunch of tools now that help me and wouldn't exist without an agent writing them for me? Sure. Will I be able to fix them once their codebase will eventually need maintenance? Most likely not. So I'll better still have access to some decent model then! Also, especially in work, it undermines skills and experience you then just lack. That also will only be fine as long as you are doing the work somewhere where they provide/allow use of LLMs.

KaseKun 2mo ago
> still have access to some decent model Not really a requirement, if you did fine without the tools before you would do fine again. The difference is you would know which ones are worth manually maintaining

singularityagen 2mo ago

[flagged]

rando103747202 2mo ago

This post really resonated with me - I’ve been having similar thoughts recently. That’s why I found the final paragraph to be a bit of a shock - “ More important: it’s freeing me up to do human stuff like write and reflect right now.” What? How? This doesn’t follow from the rest of the post at all. Maybe your new less frenetic and more human scale AI usage would be a good subject for the next post.

veunes 2mo ago
And I think the missing piece is what prevents this new workflow from eventually turning back into the same productivity ouroboros
- borski 2mo ago
  It isn’t writing the post. It’s doing research, providing background knowledge, evidence, etc… but the work is being done by OP. That was my read, anyway.
borski 2mo ago
I think you misunderstood; the point was that not being constantly in front of Claude or another LLM is what has freed OP up. That is, stepping away from the laptop is what has given them back some free time and brain space.
burnto 2mo ago
Hi, thanks for reading and your comment. Reviewing now, I can see why the final paragraph might have read this way. What I was hoping to convey in the last two paragraphs was that I was trying to be thoughtful with where I use AI (work project where I did the initial thinking and setup and the agent does a lot of review and aggregation and reports back) and where I don’t (reflecting and writing). And the hope is that if I pay more attention to my values and priorities, I will make better decisions about my goals and how to achieve them, and maybe I’ll get more value out of both the tech and the process. None of this is strictly new or limited to effects of AI. There has always been a process vs outcome calculus. But some of the parameters have changed in the past few years and I think we need to adjust.

borski 2mo ago

I find it interesting that so many of my friends resonate with this. I… don’t, really. I only ever have 2-4 opencode/claude tabs open at once. And I use them for consistent tasks. There’s no way I’d be able to keep track otherwise. I have an “email reviewer” terminal, and a “doc maker” terminal, and 1-2 “coding” terminals. But I don’t start a half dozen things simultaneously (which is ironic, because I have ADHD). I don’t feel the need to maximize my efficiency with AI. I also don’t lament the ideas / things I start but don’t finish; that has been my life, lol - see the aforementioned ADHD. So why should I start caring about my half-finished projects now, just because I sunk some tokens into them? I spent an entire day the other day trying to use an LLM to help me automate something manual and tedious, and it was a failure. Did nothing but waste time in the end. Perhaps it’s those experiences (of which I’ve had plenty) that help me realize the limitations? I don’t feel like it should make me more productive; it does, because I can offload random tasks that I do not have to be the one to do (“find the function where this happens” or “find all the laundromats in the cities I’m going to”) but I use it for research like that, and not so much “do my taxes for me.” That’s why I paid a guy to do my taxes. I don’t feel this “need” for sending everything into AI. And just because I can use it to do anything myself… why should I? There are two caveats: 1) when I’m directly working on something, I don’t want to leave it. I’m hyperfocused on it. But that’s true even without AI; I would have been obsessed with building doughflow.app were it for AI or not. The difference is I may never have finished it without AI. 2) I find myself using it as a crutch sometimes for simple things like sending a message to a colleague. I don’t like that, and have been trying to avoid it. I’ve spent all my life writing naturally, and I don’t need someone to proofread my chats. That’s a habit I am tossing, in general. Perhaps it is the ADHD that actually helps me focus; that is, perhaps the coping mechanisms built for managing my countless disparate thoughts also work for managing multiple disparate agents? Just thinking out loud.

Systemerror7A69 2mo ago
I'm in a similar situation is you are, having ADHD, and my observations have been similar. I've been more hestiant to use AI at all for a while at the beginning but even now I only ever use it for one thing at a time. It helps me tremendously with the things I want to have done but not do - find out who clutters my home directory, build a small DMS plugin for local models, stuff like that. But even if I work on a bigger task and idea, it's mostly one thing I use it for at a time. Maybe you're right in the fact that the coping mechanism help with that. Maybe using LLMs is similar in that it is easy to lose focus for neurotypicals so having lived with that we know how to handle it. Or maybe it's just us, who knows.

veunes 2mo ago

There are tasks where AI genuinely removes tedious work and then there are tasks where the tedious or uncomfortable part is actually the thinking you needed to do

rasheed106 2mo ago

Not for long. It will be outsourced once we have proper verification and receipts for AI agents. But a human will operate multiple loops.

alansaber 2mo ago
You don't think we already do? What's missing? Better inter-agent communications? Better unit tests and linting?

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

mojo-10 2mo ago

Make rust in the loop. Rust is the best. Only smart people use rust.

lu7897859 2mo ago

[flagged]

songhonglei1985 2mo ago

[flagged]

flemhans 2mo ago

AI is definitely the loop. Humans are at the top (for now) making overall decisions and at the bottom (trivialities that the AI doesn't have access to or requires physical access). Everything in the middle is a black ever-growing and expanding blob / orb. Some people reluctantly position themselves solely at the bottom or at the top.

alansaber 2mo ago
Not sure I see what would displace humans from the top. AI keeps getting better at the middle bit. Sure, that means you can be lazier with instructions from the top. But surely we see diminishing returns from that- you can only RL so hard, you need increasingly large inputs to create sufficiently specific outputs

davedx 2mo ago

"I have so many half-baked ideas for tools or services I barely need, sparked by a combo of unaddressed workaholism and techno-optimist wishful thinking." This part resonates. AI has been such an accelerator that just yesterday I told Claude to make a brand new "Christian male meal planner with grace quotes from the Bible", bought a domain name, had the whole thing ready to go then thought "wtf am I doing, I already have half a dozen other side projects in the go, this is insane!" and just stopped it. Human focus is a precious, finite resource. The productivity boom enabled by AI tools is probably going to benefit those capable of laser-like focus the most. Scattered thinkers (like myself, or perhaps the original article author) are in for a struggle at times.

high_priest 2mo ago
Brother was so close to winning big, then just stopped digging, when one could smell the success.
antonvs 2mo ago
> wtf am I doing Some part of you realized that Bronze Age superstitions aren’t worth that kind of effort.
- arcanemachiner 2mo ago
  Please provide a couple sentences of your belief system so that I may mock them as well. It's only fair.
  - antonvs 2mo ago
    Beliefs need to be justified by evidence that supports a defensible theory. Otherwise, there’s no meaningful basis for choosing between beliefs. I’m not mocking you. I’m pointing out that you’re making an epistemic mistake, and speculating that at some level, you recognize that, based on your self-described choices.

nicbou 2mo ago

I find that it lets me do a surprising amount of work before the excitement and hyperfocus wear off. This is sometimes good, sometimes bad. Sometimes I'll get a neat little feature out while I feel inspired. This is great for doing something cool on a Sunday afternoon when priorities don't matter. Sometimes I'll start something bigger and get halfway there, then I realise it's not what I should be doing, and it becomes another open tab that does not fit in my list of priorities. Success depends on focus and saying no to most things. AI makes it easy to say yes to everything. Instead of making my todo list shorter, it just makes me add more stuff to it. It allows me to act on impulses instead of thinking carefully.

burnto 2mo ago
> Success depends on focus and saying no to most things. AI makes it easy to say yes to everything. Instead of making my todo list shorter, it just makes me add more stuff to it. It allows me to act on impulses instead of thinking carefully. Well said.

sonink 2mo ago

I am coming around to the view that for somethings it is better to not use AI at all. Writing and Strategic thought are those things for me. The problem with writing, and something I am noticing lately, is that AI robs your ability to create prose in your style. Even if you use AI just a little bit to touch up your writing - you start being influenced - And over time it adds up - you start writing like AI just a little bit every now and then. It seems to be robbing me of my ability to create original prose. Strategic thought is the other thing - like if I am deciding what we, as a company should focus on long term, it is easy for LLM's to give you a wrong direction. I think this is more because Strategic directions require a ton of context - and it is almost impossible for you to feed the ai EVERYTHING. There might be some things which are easy to miss out, which might make all the difference, and the LLM would assume that the 'requirements' are complete and would go to town with it. I suspect, this is largely because the current SOTA LLM's are being optimised for code and there isnt enough data in the training set for them to learn long term thought. Coding is I think fine for me. But even there, I dont let the agent use memory at all. I create the context - and it runs from that only. The biggest unlock here is that I can now program in any language. And it frees up sometime to think in systems and come up with more robust architectures.

embedding-shape 2mo ago
> Strategic thought is the other thing I feel like LLMs can be very helpful to double-check a bunch of stuff here, and evaluate alternative-paths and so on, but the "direction" really has to come from you, then you can use the LLM to double-check and what not. But if you let the LLM set the "direction", then all bets are off, as they don't have a single care about anything in the world, so they'll just do whatever essentially.
- sonink 2mo ago
  "Direction" is what I mean by strategic thought - but even if the high level direction came from you - the tactical approach might fall prey to the same over confidence which destroys direction setting in the first place. I use it very sparingly for stuff like this - and even when I do - I discount its outputs heavily and maybe just use it let me see some blind spots and sanity testing.

lubo92 2mo ago

[flagged]

dorienh 2mo ago

"it’s freeing me up to do human stuff like write and reflect right now" --> you are one of the rare humans still writing your own stuff.

patrickmay 2mo ago
There are dozens of us!

dhchun1203 2mo ago

[flagged]

dzonga 2mo ago

I look at people spewing propaganda of let agents go wild when building stuff forgetting when building stuff - 'the moat was building the right thing' not building the wrong thing really quickly.

thoughtpeddler 2mo ago

I found myself so strongly endorsing almost every remark and impression in this post - are we the same person?? AI truly is dual-use: it can lead to immense speed ups on 'research rabbit-holes' that used to take a lot of manual work and Google-fu, or it could also just waste a ton of time generating too much output to make meaningful use out of (I almost always now invoke a text expansion snippet like "What's the 2-paragraph-block TLDR of the previous response?"). It's always looming in the mind of an overachiever-type person such as myself that 'AI could search and synthesize better', and so it has a very seductive siren song for almost all tasks. The current moment with AI does very much feel like the early days of atomic energy where people had all kinds of now-crazy-seeming use-cases for the atom, and this showed up again with at-home microwaves, as seen in that "Microwave Cooking for One" book from the 1980s (see: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8m6AM5qtPMjgTkEeD/my-journey-to-the-microwave-alternate-timeline https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8m6AM5qtPMjgTkEeD/my-journey...). I do think with new technologies it's important to try many different forms and applications of it before finding their true practical utility, and this is no different. Maybe we're collectively (at least within the HN crowd) finally feeling the "cool-down of the mania" and starting to shift to more realistic uses of AI (at least until there might be another big capabilities jump...) But at the same time, I cannot deny that AI has also made me become a better person in other areas. I'd always had poor 'handiness' or 'around the house' type skills, and the number of things I've gotten comfortable doing because of AI assistance, like hanging art on the walls, taking on some basic at-home plumbing and fix-it tasks, trying new things in the kitchen with cooking and food prep and brewing coffee etc, is frankly much higher than pre-2022. And that's to say nothing of all the help it's provided getting more fit in the gym. Maybe my upbringing lacked these things that others never had an issue with, but I am grateful to this technology for helping 'level the playing field' in this regard. Just like I know how it's done the same for non-techie people who are now a little more well-versed in the matters that I'd been naturally more fluent in. So, like most tech, we need to be mindful of our use, especially us HN-types that are drawn to information processing systems, optimization, efficiency, etc. It's really a double-edged sword, and I've never felt that more than lately. And this is doubly true for anyone with certain neurodiverse information habits (all the open tabs, 'research trails' with poor follow-up, etc). I often joke that I'll know we've reached AGI when my open browser tab count hovers below ~5!

sagabai 2mo ago

I used to be an AI sceptic, but with newer model being released I come closer to the mid: It's a great tool that amplifies human output, but without human judgement in the loop it's a danger to IT systems. I don't think human should only judge AI design decisions described by LLMs in English. Understanding the codebase is important to be able to judge further development. So reading code, correcting code, articulating on it is still an important skill imo.

chrismdp 2mo ago

Great thoughts. I too came back from vacation this year to find that I wasn't nearly as interested in AI doing certain things for me (like writing) and much more interested in finding the areas it's properly good at. At the moment I'm getting most value out of: - Checking integrity of data through custom scripting - Controlling my smart home stuff via quick commands - Reconciling account software with my bank and uploaded / emails receipts - Researching info across disparate sources - Managing pipelines of work (eg sales cycles or content schedules) reminding me when I need to do something - Parsing interesting articles / videos and pulling out the essentials - Reworking text I've written to work across multiple social accounts - Asking me great questions about whether I'm on track with what I said I wanted to do - Pinging me when an email looks important so I don't have to continually check it. - Coding on projects that I want to make rapid progress on for work (not tinkering) This list is quite different to the one I'd have written a year ago - that would have mostly been about writing, information retrieval and coding. The most obvious use cases are I think the least useful ones. Diffusion of AI will take time!

agenticworldcup 2mo ago

Three things: 1) Read more books, 2) Learn more vocab, 3) Just write more! Nothing crystalizes the thoughts coursing through our heads than writing something out - often times refining it - and forcing yourself to use new vocab that you have independently learned.