[RodgerTheGreat]

I think everyone who believes that they can personally resist the detrimental psychological effects of exposure to LLMs by "remaining aware" or "being careful", because they have cultivated an understanding of how language models work, is falling into precisely the same fallacy as people who think they can't be conned or that marketing doesn't work on them.

Don't kid yourself. If you use this junk, it's making you dumber and damaging your critical thinking skills, full-stop. This is delegation of core competency. You may feel smarter, or that you're learning faster, of that you're more productive, but to people who aren't addicted to LLMs it sounds exactly like gamblers insisting they have a foolproof system for slots, or alcoholics insisting that a few beers make them a better driver. Nobody outside the bubble is impressed with the results.

[thesumofall]

I fully agree that it’s close to impossible to not eventually fall into the trap of overrelying on them. However, it’s also true that I was able to do things with them that I would never have done otherwise for a lack of time or skill (all sorts of small personal apps, tools, and scripts for my hobbies). Maybe it’s a bit similar to only reading the comment section in a newspaper instead of the news? They will introduce you to new perspectives but if you stop reading the underlying news you’ll harm your own critical thinking? So it’s maybe a bit more grey than black & white?

[Tade0]

> If you use this junk, it's making you dumber and damaging your critical thinking skills, full-stop.

Arguably I've been using my critical thinking skills more now that I have a smooth talking, but ultimately not actually intelligent companion.

Every time I put undue trust in it, I regret it, so I got used to veryfing what it outputs via documentation and sometimes even library code.

That being said worst part of this mess is that my usual sources of knowledge like search engines or developer forums dried up, as everyone else is also using LLMs.

[MrScruff]

I think this is too broad. If, for example, I get Claude to set up a fine tuning pipeline for rf-detr and it one shots it for me, what have I lost? A learning opportunity to understand the details of how to go about this process, sure. But you could argue the same about relying on PyTorch. Ultimately we all have an overarching goal when engaged in these projects and the learning opportunity might be happening at an entirely different level than worrying about the nuts and bolts of how you build component A of your larger project.

[rdevilla]

> Don't kid yourself. If you use this junk, it's making you dumber and damaging your critical thinking skills, full-stop. This is delegation of core competency.

This is a good way to frame the problem. Consider the offshoring (delegation) of American manufacturing to China, followed by the realization decades later that the US has forgotten how to actually make things and the subsequent frenzied attempt to remember.

I expect the timelines and second-order (third-order...) effects to play out on a similar decadal scale - long after everybody has realized their profits and the western brain has atrophied into slop.

[totierne2]

My mind is already going, old age. You only really try anything when you are already losing it. Especially if you had it once.