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But do you find the brief flash of "I could just have AI solve this problem" is changing how you think? The presence of this new option changes the experience of confronting the problem.
I'm trying to figure out how the presence of a "Chat can solve this" solution changes how I think through my own solution to a piece of work.
hmm I guess I should first disclose that I don't truly believe that "AI" (I read this as "an LLM") solves anything. Remember that it only does what it is trained to do + your prompt + give or take some fuzziness from randomizers. So the answer is no, I'll try to explain:
What could be the case is that there is some sort of SOP for the thing you're doing that either you don't know about or find too bothersome to follow, but the bot was trained on executing it. Even though bots get nerf'd all the time now (especially Claude), with enough budget and patience you can probably instruct it to do what you need, with some success rate between 50-80% [1]. It's always "bots could maybe solve this" but never a definite yes; it always remains to be seen what comes out.
What did change this past year is how I approach input. LLMs have a better flagging rate than I do because they don't get tired or bored. So I allow bots to pass me slop, then I read the slop, then I assess findings I find worth pursuing one by one. So discovery has gotten some steroids, but you need to be able to assess what it says, which is a good reason to never c&p bot slop to anyone other than yourself (because you asked for it - no one else did and if they wanna, they can ask themselves.)
Bottom line, I see the dilemma as: if you don't care about quality or your reputation, do whatever. If however you do care about these things, there is something to keep in mind: if you have deep understanding of what you're doing, bot output will be inferior to your own. If you don't know what you're doing, bot output will be inferior to those that do know, but you won't notice that.
I really have not succeeded in getting a consistent >80% success rate, in my #1 instruction field, security pre-assessments. I jokingly say that this is a skills issue on my end whenever people challenge me on that, but it's not really... it's more that a lot of anti-patterns are trained into the bots that most people, including the AI labs, would call "good enough" but in reality it's all relatively low standards. I also fear (and hope) that generically trained bots will always be inferior to specialists of the meat or silicon kind (and no, skill files do not remove training correlations.) ↩
I'm on the resistance side too and I publish less posts because of this. It's less enjoyable when choosing between either writing inferior posts or falling back to the monotone, soulless autocorrect.
The third option where we attempt to get the best of both worlds is 2-3x labor and time intensive versus not using the LLM and I am too swamped right now to do it. HitL means you are the bottleneck and this can be rather disillusioning.