[_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.