Comment by niemandhier

I'm on the optimistic side with how useful LLMs are, but I have to agree. You cultivate the instinct for how to steer the models and reduce hallucinations, but you're not building articulable knowledge or engaging in challenging thinking. It's more learning muscle-memory reactions to certain forms of LLM output that lean you towards trusting the output more, trying another prompting strategy, clearing context or not, and so on.

To the extent we can call it skill, it's probably going to be made redundant in a few years as the models get better. It gives me a kind of listlessness that assembly line workers would feel.

You tend to remember trouble more than things going smoothly, so I'd say you remember the parts you had to fix manually.

Most intelligent people are aware of the fact that writing is about thinking as much as it is about getting the written text.

LLMs can be great sparring partners for this, if you don't use it as a tool that writes for you, but as a tool that finds mistakes, points out gaps and errors (which you may or may not ignore) and helps in researching general questions aboit the world around you (always woth caution and sources).