Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

I have gotten much more value out of AI tools by focusing on the process and not the product. By this I mean that I treat it as a loosely-defined brainstorming tool that expands my “zone of knowledge”, and not as a way to create some particular thing.

In this way, I am infinitely more tolerant of minor problems in the output, because I’m not using the tool to create a specific output, I’m using it to enhance the thing I’m making myself.

To be more concrete: let’s say I’m writing a book about a novel philosophical concept. I don’t use the AI to actually write the book itself, but to research thinkers/works that are similar, critique my arguments, make suggestions on topics to cover, etc. It functions more as a researcher and editor, not a writer – and in that sense it is extremely useful.

I think it's a U-shaped utility curve where abstract planning is on one side (your comment) and the chore implementation is on the other.

Your role is between the two: deciding on the architecture, writing the top-level types, deciding on the concrete system design.

And then AI tools help you zoom in and glue things together in an easily verifiable way.

I suspect that people who still haven't figured out how to make use of LLMs, assuming it's not just resentful performative complaining which it probably is, are expecting it to do it all. Which never seemed very engineer-minded.