[glial]

Yesterday I had semi-coherent idea for an essay. I told it to an LLM and asked for a list of authors and writings where similar thoughts have been expressed - and it provided a fantastic bibliography. To me, this is extremely fun. And, reading similar works to help articulate an idea is absolutely part of writing.

"LLMs" are like "screens" or "recording technology". They are not good or bad by themselves - they facilitate or inhibit certain behaviors and outcomes. They are good for some things, and they ruin some things. We, as their users, need to be deliberate and thoughtful about where we use them. Unfortunately, it's difficult to gain wisdom like this a priori.

[encyclopedism]

As someone said "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes".

[autoexec]

Sadly all the AI is owned by companies that want to do all your art and writing so that they can keep you as a slave doing their laundry and dishes. Maybe we'll eventually see powerful LLMs running locally so that you don't have to beg some cloud service for permission to use it in the ways you want, but at this point most people will be priced out of the hardware they'd need to run it anyway.

However you feel about LLMs or AI right now, there are a lot of people with way more money and power than you have who are primarily interested in further enriching and empowering themselves and that means bad news for you. They're already looking into how to best leverage the technology against you, and the last thing they care about is what you want.

[bugglebeetle]

As a former artist, I can tell you that you will never have good or sufficient ideas for your art or writing if you don’t do your laundry and dishes.

A good proxy for understanding this reality is that wealthy people who pay people to do all of these things for them have almost uniformly terrible ideas. This is even true for artists themselves. Have you ever noticed how that the albums all tend to get worse the more successful the musicians become?

It’s mundanity and tedium that forces your mind to reach out for more creative things and when you subtract that completely from your life, you’re generally left with self-indulgence instead of hunger.

[joquarky]

Well put.

And dishes and laundry can be enjoyable zen moments. One only suffers by perceiving them as chores.

Some people want all yang without any yin.

[xnx]

You don't have to use them.

[wahnfrieden]

Only if you are already wealthy or fine with finding a new job

If I were still employed, I would also not want my employer to tolerate peers of mine rejecting the use of agents in their work out of personal preference. If colleagues were allowed to produce less work for equal compensation, I would want to be allowed to take compensated time off work by getting my own work done in faster ways - but that never flies with salaried positions, and getting work done faster is greeted with more work to do sooner. So it would be demoralizing to work alongside and be required to collaborate with folks who are allowed to take the slow and scenic route if it pleases them.

In other words, expect your peers to lobby against your right to deny agent use, as much as your employer.

If what you really want is more autonomy and ownership over your work, rejecting tool modernity won't get you that. It requires organizing. We learned this lesson already from how the Luddite movement and Jacobin reaction played out.

[catlifeonmars]

You’re assuming implicitly that the tool use in question always results in greater productivity. That’s not true across the board for coding agents. Let me put this another way: 99% of the time, the bottleneck is not writing code.

[tjr]

Why limit this to AI? There have been lots of programming tools which have not been universally adopted, despite offering productivity gains.

For example, it seems reasonably that using a good programming editor like Emacs or VI would offer a 2x (or more) productivity boost over using Notepad or Nano. Why hasn't Nano been banned, forbidden from professional use?

[encyclopedism]

Very well put

[encyclopedism]

You're wrong in saying so. Many companies are quite literally mandating their use, do a quick search on HN.

[coldtea]

That's not how technology works in a society.

[dbtc]

When I do dishes by hand I think all kinds of interesting thoughts.

Anyway, we've had machines that do our dishes and laundry for a long while now.

[bathtub365]

We have machines that only do some parts of these tasks.

[bdangubic]

yet some people still do them by hand…

[coldtea]

>"LLMs" are like "screens" or "recording technology". They are not good or bad by themselves

Screens are absolutely not neutral and are bad by themselves. Might be a bad we've become used to, but they are a bad.

[blks]

So finding out information was fun for you. Would it be also fun if said LLM write your essay for you based on your semi-coherent idea?

[glial]

Maybe, but probably not. For me, an early goal of writing is to get my thoughts in order. A later goal is to discuss the writing with people, which can only happen in a high-quality way if my thoughts are in order. Achieving goals is fun.

Whether the LLM could do a better job than me at writing the essay is a separate question...I suspect it probably could. But it wouldn't be as fun.