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Comment by mjburgess

7 months ago

It's not about getting it right, its about having thought about it. Authoring means thinking-thru, owning, etc.

There's a tremendous hollowing-out of our mental capacities caused by the computer science framing of activities in terms of input->output, as-if the point is to obtain the output "by any means".

It would not matter if the LLM gave exactly the same output as you had written, and always did. Because you still have to act in the world with thoughts that you needed have when authoring it.

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mjburgess

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supriyo-biswas  7 months ago

> It's not about getting it right, its about having thought about it. Authoring means thinking-thru, owning, etc.

So much this.

At my current workplace, I was asked to write up a design doc for a software system. The contents of the document itself weren't very relevant as the design deviated significantly based on constraints and feedback that could be discovered only after beginning the implementation, but it was the act of putting together that document, thinking about the various cases, etc. that lead to the formation of a mental model that helped me work towards delivering that system.