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Comment by bluepeter | Hacker News Reader

> Writing requires thinking, don't let an AI do the thinking for you.

Okay, but reading also requires substantial thinking. Moreover, we can say the same about, say, coding. And I am sure there are people who will say, yes, don't use AI to code. But I do, and the results are amazing, and I still think very deeply: in fact, I spend more time with AI coding (and thinking) than before as I do not get hamstrung on, how do I convert this Word doc to PDF in code again? I spend more time in higher order thinking. Same with when I read text written by an AI. I don't believe that writing is any more sacrosanct that coding. And reading and adjusting AI output requires substantial thinking.

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We have copious evidence for behaviors like note taking and writing creates deeper thinking and retention that passively watching / reading

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-ha...

Anyone who has learned a language knows this anecdotally. The linguistic structures need to be marshalled by active cognition (editing and writing). Merely reading and watching is not enough.

> Okay, but reading also requires substantial thinking.

I don't think anyone would argue reading a book takes as much thinking as writing one…

Perhaps not 1:1, but, personally, I can read for much longer than I can write. And so I'd argue that this duration increase matches any deeper thought that comes with shorter writing bursts.

That should tell you something about how much effort (thinking) is required for the activity. The fact you writing is t something you can do as much as reading means you use your brain a bit more. I would claim that consuming information always uses less thought then generating information. For a human brain at least.

I've been watching chess videos for many years but my own chess playing is just recreational.

Writing/programming as a specialization of just going through the damn thing is actually sacrosanct IMO. Spectatorship as a generalization of reading is second-class. You do become a worse programmer as you move to "higher order thinking", it just matters less in a world where LLMs exist.

> And reading and adjusting AI output requires substantial thinking.

It does, but less of that thinking translates to skills transferred. What amount of the creativity and magic of Tolkien transferred to his editor? I'm sure it took substantial thinking to edit Tolkien's work.

AI can’t write for shit because it doesn’t have your experience for context and it doesn’t know what you actually want to say.

Hell, most people barely have a rough idea of what they are trying to say when they sit down to write, and they have all of the context.

Writing and coding do have many similarities, at a high level. But the things that make AI good at coding don’t really apply to writing. The analogy doesn’t work well here.

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