Thoughts on Thinking

I am feeling this statement and this article hard.

Developing a prompt is like scrolling Netflix, and reading the output is like watching a TV show. Intellectual rigor comes from the journey: the dead ends, the uncertainty, and the internal debate. Skip that, and you might still get the insight–but you’ll have lost the infrastructure for meaningful understanding. Learning by reading LLM output is cheap. Real exercise for your mind comes from building the output yourself.

I don’t presently agree that the outputs of LLMs are so much better than what humans can produce. I find most of them boring to read. It comes down to time. LLMs are just so darn fast.