Comment by bpavuk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bpavuk | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

if computers themselves are bicycles for the mind, LLMs are cars. or even motorcycles, if we talk smaller models.

- they require specific roads being paved for them. for example, if your tooling is proprietary and not accessible from the CLI, your agent is pretty much fucked. if your tool is not represented in training data (think, `jj` VCS or your proprietary/tailor-made tooling), you require duct tapes such as "skills" and "memories". a bicycle (that is, your own mind + computer) handles such off-roads much better.

- they get you from A to B faster, sure, but along the way you may encounter something curious - a different road to take, an interesting vista. not to mention, bicycles are actually good for your health, and professional drivers suffer from all the sedentary job diseases we programmers do, unless they actively counter it. with LLMs, we get a "sedentary job disease" of skill atrophy, on top of all the other atrophies us coders should counter with a proper exercise set at least three times a week.

- finally, when you crash in a car (Opus/Sonnet, GPT-5.5) or, worse, on a motorcycle (smaller Qwens, DeepSeek, Haiku/GPT-5.4-nano), you crash very loudly and with a high chance of irrecoverable casualties.

The bike/motorbike/car analogy is good. In each you can find enjoyment that suits your character.

I have been drawn to coding from the first day I took a course at college learning Pascal and assembly on an IBM PC. Hell I even wrote an IEEE/488 driver for an Osborne 1.

As an experimental physicist, coding was always central to my work. I always felt guilty because I had more pleasure coding than tackling the physics itself.

This is a new age we are entering. AI changes how we do things, but I believe that the human passion to be creative and do intellectual work will always be part of it. It's in our nature.

So I'm not worried that we'll all dry up and turn into zombies.

There's one more: The "bicycle for the mind" analogy was one Jobs chose specifically in reference to the fact that a human on a bicycle moves more efficiently than a human on foot—or any other land animal for that matter. But it's still the human's own effort that propels the bike. Motor vehicles require an external energy source, the human only directs it. Similarly, with LLMs, it's no longer the user's own effort that's doing the thinking.

> There's one more: The "bicycle for the mind" analogy was one Jobs chose specifically in reference to the fact that a human on a bicycle moves more efficiently than a human on foot—or any other land animal for that matter.

One of the canonical references of Jobs’ use of “bicycle for the mind” also compared the efficiency of locomotion to the California Condor which was (I’m working from memory, here) 17X more efficient than a human walking.

A human on a bicycle, according to Jobs then, is more efficient than the most efficient animal locomotion known to humankind. The comparison included animals moving through non-terrestrial environments.

And, like cars, our federal/state governments are lighting astronomical amounts of cash to subsidize the infrastructure that makes them operate at the scale they currently operate at.

Just one more ~~lane~~ datacenter, bro. That'll fix it; trust. Please. One more ~~lane~~ datacenter. It'll be so good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com