[palata]

> Doing the exact same work more slowly by hand just to prove a point to someone on HN isn't a productive way to deliver business value.

You prove my point again: it's not "just to prove a point". It's about internalising the information, improving your ability to synthesise and be critical.

Sure, if your only objective is to "deliver business value", maybe you make more money by being uninteresting with an LLM. My point is that if you get good at doing all that without an LLM, then you become a more interesting person. You will be able to have an actual discussion with a real human and be interesting.

[_qswe]

Understanding or being interesting has nothing to do with it. We use calculators and computers for a reason. No one hires people to respond to API requests by hand; we run the code on servers. Using the right tool for the job is just doing my job well.

[palata]

> We use calculators and computers for a reason. No one hires people to respond to API requests by hand; we run the code on servers

We were talking about writing, not about vibe coding. We don't use calculators for writing. We don't use API requests for writing (except when we make an LLM write for us).

> Using the right tool for the job is just doing my job well.

I don't know what your job is. But if your job is to produce text that is meant to be read by humans, then it feels like not being able to synthesise your ideas yourself doesn't make you excellent at doing your job.

Again maybe it makes you productive. Many developers, for instance, get paid for writing bad code (either because those who pay don't care about quality or can't make a difference, or something else). Vibe coding obviously makes those developers more productive. But I don't believe it will make them learn how to produce good code. Good for them if they make money like this, of course.

[tpmoney]

> We were talking about writing, not about vibe coding. We don't use calculators for writing. We don't use API requests for writing (except when we make an LLM write for us).

We do however use them to summarize and transform data all the time. Consider the ever present spreadsheet. Huge amounts of data are thrown into spreadsheets and formulas are applied to that data to present us with graphs and statistics. You could do all of that by hand, and you'd probably have a much better "internalization" about what the data is. But most of the time, hand crafting graphs from raw data and internalizing it isn't useful or necessary to accomplish what you actually want to accomplish with the data.

[palata]

You seem to not make the difference between maths and, say, literature or history.

Do you actually think that an LLM can take, say, a Harry Potter book as an input, and give it a grade in such a way that everybody will always agree on?

And to go further, do you actually use LLMs to generate graphs and statistics from spreadsheet? Because that is probably a bad idea given that there are tools that actually do it right.

[tpmoney]

> Do you actually think that an LLM can take, say, a Harry Potter book as an input, and give it a grade in such a way that everybody will always agree on?

No, but I also don't think a human can do that either. Subjective things are subjective. I'm not sure I understand how this connects to the idea you expressed that doing various tasks with automation tools like LLMs prevent you from "internalizing" the data, or why not "internalizing" data is necessarily a bad thing. Am I just misunderstanding your concern?

[palata]

Yeah I think you don't understand my point.

Many of the posts I find here defending the use of LLMs focus on "profitability". "You ask me to give you 3 pages about X? I'll give you 3 pages about X and you may not even realise that I did not write them". I completely agree that it can happen and that LLMs, right now, are useful to hack the system. But if you specialise in being efficient at getting an LLM to generate 3 pages, you may become useless faster than you think. Still, I don't think that this is the point of the article, and it is most definitely not my point.

My point is that while you specialise in hacking the system with an LLM, you don't learn about the material that goes into those 3 pages.

* If you are a student, it means that you are losing your time. Your role as a student is to learn, not to hack.

* More generally as a person, "I am a professional in summarising stuff I don't understand in a way that convinces me and other people who don't understand it either" is not exactly very sexy to me.

If you want to get actual knowledge about something, you have to actually work on getting that knowledge. Moving it from an LLM to a word document is not it. Being knowledgeable requires "internalising" it. Such that you can talk about it at dinner. And have an opinion about it that is worth something to others. If your opinion is "ChatGPT says this, but with my expertise in prompting I can get it to say that", it's pretty much worthless IMHO. Except for tricking the system, in a way similar to "oh my salary depends on the number of bugs I fix? Let me introduce tons of easy-to-fix bugs then".

[_qswe]

We were talking about writing, not about vibe coding.

No one said anything about vibe coding. Using tools appropriately to accomplish tasks more quickly is just common sense. Deliberately choosing to pay 10x the cost for the same or equivalent output isn't a rational business decision, regardless of whether the task happens to be writing, long division, or anything else.

Just to be clear, I'm not arguing against doing things manually as a learning exercise or creative outlet. Sometimes the journey is the point; sometimes the destination is the point. Both are valid.

I don't know what your job is.

Here's one: prepping first drafts of legal docs with AI assistance before handing them off to lawyers for revision has objectively saved significant amounts of time and money. Without AI this would have been too time-consuming to be worthwhile, but with AI I've saved not only my own time but the costs of billable hours on phone calls to discuss requirements, lawyers writing first drafts on their own, and additional Q&A and revisions over email. Using AI makes it practical to skip the first two parts and cut down on the third significantly.

Here's another one: writing technical reports for my day job. Before they'd integrated AI into their platform, I would frequently get rave reviews for the quality and professionalism of my issue reports. After they added AI writing assistance, nothing changed other than my ability to generate a greater number of reports in the same number of billable hours. What you're suggesting effectively amounts to choosing to deliver less value out of ego. I still have to understand my own work product, or I wouldn't be able to produce it even with AI assistance. If someone thinks that somehow makes the product less "interesting", well then I guess it's a good thing my job isn't entertainment.

[palata]

Don't get me wrong: I don't deny that LLMs can help tricking other humans into believing that the text is more professional than it actually is. LLMs are engineered exactly for that.

I'd be curious to know whether your legal documents are as good as without LLMs. I wouldn't be surprised at all if they were worse, but cheaper. Talking about security audits, that's actually a problem I've seen: LLMs makes it harder to detect bad audits, and in my experience I have been more often confronted to bad security audits than to good ones.

For both examples, you say "LLMs are useful to make more money". I say "I believe that LLMs lower the quality of the work". It's not incompatible.

[_qswe]

There's no "tricking" involved, and no basis for your assumption that LLMs lower the quality of work. I would suggest that what you and the author are observing is actually the opposite effect: LLMs broadly help improve the quality of work, all else being equal. The caveat is that when all else is not equal, this manifests in bad work being improved to a level that's still bad. The issue here is students using advanced tooling as an excuse to be lazy and undercut their own learning process, not the tool itself. LLMs are just this generation's version of Wikipedia and spell check.

As much as the author rightfully complains about the example in the post, a version that only said "explain the downsides of Euler angles in robotics and suggest some alternatives" would obviously be far worse. In this case, the AI helped elevate clear F-level work to maybe a C. That's not an indictment of AI; it's an indictment of low-quality work. LLMs lower the bar to produce passable-looking bad work, but they also lower the bar to produce excellent work. The confirmation bias here is that we don't know how many cases of B-level work became A papers with AI assistance, because those instances don't stand out in the same way.

In the audit example, LLMs aren't doing the audit. They synthesize my notes into a useful starting point to nullify writer's block, and let me focus more of my time on the hard or unique aspects of a given report. It's like having an intern write the first draft for me, typically with some mistakes or oversights, occasionally with a valuable additional insight thrown in, and often with links to a few helpful references for the customer that I wouldn't necessarily have found and included on my own. That doesn't lower the quality; it improves it.

As far as the legal example, it really depends on the complexity of a given instance and the guidance you've provided to your lawyers. A good lawyer won't sign off on something that fails to meet the requested quality bar (if anything, the financial incentive would be for them to err on the side of conservatism and toss out the draft you'd provided). But of course this all depends on you having a clear enough understanding of what you're trying to accomplish, and enough familiarity with legal documents and proficiency with language to shape everything into a passable first draft. AI speeds this up, but if you don't know what you're doing then the AI won't solve that for you. It's a tool like any other, and can be used properly or improperly.