A lot of the comments on HN lately are rightfully focused on this formative brain exercise that leads to intuition and conceptual understanding that is chiselled away by the shortcuts that GenAI provides. I wonder where the gain of productivity from GenAI and the drop off in 'our brain'-quality intersects.
It's actually not that different than talking with employees, however, the LLMs still have very significant shortfalls (which you know about after using them a lot.)
If a manager doesn't know anything about what their employees are working on, they are basically fucked. That much holds up with LLMs. The simple stuff mostly works, but the complex stuff isn't going to pan out for you, and it will take a while to figure out that's the direction you went in.
One comparison is with Stack Overflow (SO). Given a task, there are usually multiple answers. The question may not even be relevant; often, multiple question pages must be compared.
The best answer is the one that fits the aesthetics of my approach--one that didn't exist before (there was only the problem before), but the answer is simple, straightforward, or adaptable.
Having multiple answers is good because different minds evaluated the question. It is a buffet of alternatives, starting from others' first principles, mistakes, and experience. Some are rejected outright from some tacit taste organ. Others become long-lived browser tabs, a promise to read carefully someday (never).
All this is void if it turns out using SO is similarly degenerative in the same way, though.
