ak39
Joined 14 years ago
Joined 14 years ago
This is what I think is the solution - I've tried it a few times with good results.
1. We need our own project or task plan. A simple forward-thinking TODO list is good enough. This needs to be prepared before the day begins. Daily.
2. Focus and limit scope. Focusing on doing ONLY what's on the list is the discipline I (we) lack and which we need badly.
3. Side quests are killing us. Allowing ourselves to veer off the planned daily tasks should require a complete away-from-the-keyboard planning session with pen and paper. Print it out but plan it away from the LLM. Use the LLM to summarise the problem, by all means, but do the thinking away from the LLM. The current TODO list needs to be the main input of such a deliberation. The output is the new TODO list. The objective of this away-from-keyboard exercise is simply to maintain control of the next steps.
On days where I worked with my TODO lists, I clocked out and joined the family for activities, slept sooner and better. On days I lost control of that list, the exhaustion mounted almost on the same day.
Make a finite list for the day, tick it off and go spend time with the missus, the kids or the dog. 2c.
This is, as you say, exactly the paradox of having ourselves assisted by LLMs. We are no different from our cats. Except imagine the cats start making the laser lights for themselves.
That means folks using LLMs starting off with 300 bits KNOW that they lack the full payload of information to transfer to you. IOW, they know they need to transfer much more than 300, so they use LLM to fill those gaps. That's the crux of the slop universe out there. Folks are using LLMs for the 700 bits on top of their 300 bits and passing off the full 1000 bits as their own.
I echo the writer's sentiment. "I don't want to read the clanker's 700 bits. I want only your synthesis." (I can get the clanker to generate those 700 myself. Unless ... unless this whole LLM slop market is all about saving you the time to get an LLM to generate those 700!)
I believe the universal answer is: incompetent malicious actors are now capable too. Which implies the pool from which to draw the intersection between capable and malicious has grown. (That's my reading)