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Comment by tkgally | Hacker News Reader

The results are not surprising to me personally. When I have used AI to help with my own writing and translation tasks, I do not feel as mentally engaged with the writing or translation process as I would be if I were doing it all on my own.

But I have found that using AI in other ways to be incredibly mentally engaging in its own way. For the past two weeks, I’ve been experimenting with Claude Code to see how well it can fully automate the brainstorming, researching, and writing of essays and research papers. I have been as deeply engaged with the process as I have ever been with writing or translating by myself. But the engagement is of a different form.

The results of my experiments, by the way, are pretty good so far. That is, the output essays and papers are often interesting for me to read even though I know an AI agent wrote them. And, no, I do not plan to publish them or share them.

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I use AI tools for amusement and asking random questions, but for actual work, I basically don't use them at all. I wonder if I'll be part of the increasingly rare group who is actually able to do anything while the rest become progressively more incompetent.

My nickel - we are in the primary stages of being given something like the famed "bicycle for the mind", an exoskeleton for the brain. At first when someone gives you a mech, you're like "woah, cool", let's see what it can do. And then you zip around, smash rocks, buildings, go try to lift the Eiffel.

After a while you get bored of it (duh), and go back to doing what you usually do, utilizing the "bicycle" for the kind of stuff you actually like doing, if it's needed, because while exploration is fun, work is deeply personal and meaningful and does not sustain too much exploration for too long.

(highly personal perspective)

“Bicycle for the mind” analogy is actually really good here. Since bicycles and other transportation technology has made us increasingly weak, which has a negative impact on physical health. At this point it has reached such a critical point that people are taking seriously the fact that we need physical exercise to be in good health. My company recently introduced 60 minutes a week of activity during work hours. It’s probably a good investment since physical health affects performance and mental health.

Coming back to AI, maybe in the future we will need to explicitly take mental exercise as seriously as we do with physical exercise now. Perhaps people will go to mental gyms. (That’s just a school you may say, but I think the focus could be different: Not having a goal to complete a class and then finish, but continuous mental exercises..)

> bicycles ... has made us increasingly weak

This is pretty difficult for me to buy. Cycling has been shown time & again to be a great way to increase fitness.

I once had blood clots in my legs. I couldn't walk in the worst parts of it but cycling down the street was easier than walking for more than ten metres. It's better than sitting on your butt for hours on end, sure.

> Cycling has been shown time & again to be a great way to increase fitness.

Compared to sitting on your butt in a car or public transport.

Perhaps not compared to walking everywhere and chasing the antelope you want to cook for lunch.

I think what he meant is that both bicycles and LLMs are a force multiplier and you still provide the core of the work, but not all of the work any more.

Cycling, in my experience, is usually way more intense than walking or even running/jogging. It just lets you cover larger distance and gives you more control over how your energy is used.

With the example of LLMs, sure, you could cycle the initial destination you were meant to walk to - write an article with its help, save a few hours and call it a day. Or you could cycle further and use the saved time to work on something a text model can't help you well with.

If we're nitpicking, are we talking about cycling as a sport or cycling as a means for getting from point A to point B?

I'm sure cultures where they cycle to everywhere all the time take it easier than cultures where going out for a bike ride is an event.

Not nitpicking, just playing along with the analogy, which i found not that far fetched

Just like with LLMs, cycling will allow you to expand your destinations significantly, so comparison with walking is irrelevant.

if you will use exoskeleton for walking, eventually you will have muscle wasting and depends on type of exoskeleton degradation of neural pathways that you need to use for walking

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