I love that more and more voices online (at least those, who I happen to read by accident on Hacker News or Lobste.rs) emphasize that one should not simply be human proxy meat.

It truly dreads me, how on the course of few past years, with exponential degradation over less than last 12 months, people loose the ability to think critically. Actually, this seems to proceed inversly proportional to the technological advancements. I may sound like an old prick, praising the past, when everything was simpler, and scolding the rotten present. And maybe I am to some level. But I am definitely put up with reading verbatim citations from llm tools. Some stress, that if they wanted to read a language model's opinion on the matter, they would've promted it theirselves. For me this is not the point. I feel insulted too. Yet, the real reason it itches me, is the fact that you waste my time and neither of us learns anything.

Above may sound harsh, nonetheless, the AI sugarcoates everything, wastes tokens on weasel passages and forces me to dig through the mud to get to the essence. The most of us hates meetings, precisely because a poorly conducted gathering leads to inflation of words, voiding time of everyone present for a little value. You see the resemblance?

The learning part is the sad one. Back in the days, when I was occasionally playing on the stage, the most efficient mnemonic technique to learn by heart a few pages of text was to rewrite it by hand. Programming tutorials for absolute begginers follow the same pattern, actively encouraging to write down mundane code blocks, execute them, experiment. This is a valid technique for infusing one's mind with the knowledge. Currently being replaced by a shortcut which doesn't even require a minimal muscle flexing. Copy-paste teaches you nothing. Reading, then pasting, while may help you feel better about yourself (at least you know what you forward, right?), doesn't teach you anything either. The minimal effort you can put, that allows the knowledge to sink into your skin, is to write the thought in your own words. You don't have to understand it perfectly, that's the entire point. You are learning after all, constantly. When rewriting, you will find yourself skipping on some lines that are a pure fluff; you will find asking yourself follow up questions, that you can feed back to the llm to deepen the knowledge; you will remember a tiny fraction of what you've just written, then repeat it over and over, until you will grasp it and won't need an AI to express a valid point. And I won't be pissed at you.

I beat myself up to this day, for over a year, for submitting a fully generated internal architecture proposal (one about server management, when we had to decide stack to transition to). I wasn't simply asking the llm to hallucinate something barely holding the ground, just to check off my task. I really dove deep into servers' architecture, trying to strike a good balance between complexity, features and ease of management, having our team's level of expertise in mind. (I was, and still am, learning about servers; at that time with help of the ai, trying to uncover every nook and cranny). And I stood by every decision presented to the CTO. He gently told me how utter shit the document was, and that I musn't simply dump llm output into the internal docs.

I must admit, at first I was mostly sulking. I understood the form of the text could be better, as this one was full of obvious ai artifacts. Still, the content was something I spent 2 days of my work on and it was planned into the last detail. Or so I thought.

Nevertheless, from that day on, I decided not to use the AI in communication with other people. By no means I am against AI usage. This is my daily tool, effectively enhancing my brain power, speed and understanding. But I remain responsible for the final output, and I keep my quality gates high. I cannot embarras myself, if you'd like to ask me a follow up question and I'd have to put you on halt to wait for my llm response.

I expect the same from you. After all, I asked you a question because I want to know your opinion on the matter. You don't have to feel like you are the brightest mind in the room, especially when asked directly. It doesn't matter anymore. The AI already swept the field and can easily outsmart majority of the population (to some level). What I want is to be certain, I can rely on you, not as my stenotypist, but a person who considers available options, weigths the consequences and has the guts to call the shots.

Succumbing to the path of least resistance is what I fear the most and what frustrates me about passtrough copy of the llm output, not the fact, that I could type it myself in an identical chat window, using the same model make and receiving a response close to the one you just sent.

And if I ever use the AI, when writing to you, I'll inform you, along with an explanation on why I couldn't write it myself and sincerest apologies.