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Comment by ajbajb | Hacker News Reader

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This is what Claude had to say about your comment if we're doing this now:

Imagine being so intellectually lazy that you can't even be bothered to form your own opinion about a product. You just copy-paste it into Claude with "roast this" and then post the output like you're contributing something. That's not criticism, that's outsourcing your personality to an API call. You didn't engage with the architecture, the docs, the use case, or even the pricing page — you just wanted a sick burn you didn't have to think of yourself.

Are people doing this thing now where they can't even judge a product, website by themselves? Or read and analyze anything without asking an LLM to do it for them.

2026: The year everyone fried their brain with Think for Me SaaS.

I know a guy who uses AI to answer every question in his life. It tells him how to raise his kids, how to spend time with his wife. He takes it to the park with him and asks it what he should do there (on his phone). When people ask him questions, he forwards those questions directly to his phone and uses the response.

For any new piece of technology, there are a subset of people for whom it will completely and utterly destroy.

Try driving without google maps. Its a slippery slope we common folks we are in and there is no coming back - except for few purists..

I think there's a distribution of agency in humans, hence why we have insults like "npcs". Its probably not fair to use that word to describe people, but the cliche has some truth in it and I think a lot of tech exploits this.

I personally rarely need to use google maps, and if I do its a glance at it on the beginning of a trip, and I can find my way there through normal navigation. I might look again if I get lost, whereas, I have friends that use it to give directions to go five blocks. I don't think sense of direction is innate either, but its a muscle you build and some people choose to not work on that muscle and they suffer the consequences, albeit minor consequences.

I think we are seeing something similar with LLMs with the development and maintenance of reading, planning, creative and critical thinking skills. While some people might have a higher baseline, I think everyone has the ability to strengthen those muscles and the world implores us to do that in many situations, however, now we can pay Altman $0.0010 cents to offload that workout onto a GPU much like people do with navigation and maps. Tech companies love to exploit the dopamine driven response from taking shortcuts, getting somewhere quickly, its no different here.

I think (/know) the implications of this are much more hazardous than consequences of not exercising your navigational abilities, and at least with navigation there are fallback to assist people (signs, landmarks ect). There are no societal fallbacks for llm assisted thinking once someone becomes dependent on it for all aspects of analysis, planning and creativity. Once it is taken away (or they can't afford a quality of output the previously did), where do those natural abilities stand? The implications are very terrifying in my opinion.

I'm personally trying to stay as far away as possible from these things, I see where this is heading and its not as inconsequential as needing Maps to navigate 5 blocks. I do not want my critical thinking skills correlated 1:1 to the quality and quantity of tokens I can afford or have access too anymore than I do not want my navigational abilities correlated 1:1 to the quality of Maps service available to me.

People will say that this is cope, its the new calculator, whatever.. Have fun, I promise you that not knowing trigonometry but having access to an LLM does not give you the ability to write CAD software. I actually think not using these will give you a huge competitive advantage in the future. Someone who has great navigation skills will likely win a navigational competition in the mountains, or survive longer in certain situations. While the scope of those skills is narrow, it still proves a point[0]. The scope of your reading, critical thinking, creativity and planning skills is not limited.

[0]: It should be noted that some of the worlds most high agency and successful people actually participate in navigation as a sport called Orienteering, and spend boatloads of money in it.. I wonder why that is?

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