The Human Is the Loop

I find it interesting that so many of my friends resonate with this. I… don’t, really.

I only ever have 2-4 opencode/claude tabs open at once. And I use them for consistent tasks. There’s no way I’d be able to keep track otherwise. I have an “email reviewer” terminal, and a “doc maker” terminal, and 1-2 “coding” terminals.

But I don’t start a half dozen things simultaneously (which is ironic, because I have ADHD). I don’t feel the need to maximize my efficiency with AI. I also don’t lament the ideas / things I start but don’t finish; that has been my life, lol - see the aforementioned ADHD. So why should I start caring about my half-finished projects now, just because I sunk some tokens into them?

I spent an entire day the other day trying to use an LLM to help me automate something manual and tedious, and it was a failure. Did nothing but waste time in the end. Perhaps it’s those experiences (of which I’ve had plenty) that help me realize the limitations?

I don’t feel like it should make me more productive; it does, because I can offload random tasks that I do not have to be the one to do (“find the function where this happens” or “find all the laundromats in the cities I’m going to”) but I use it for research like that, and not so much “do my taxes for me.”

That’s why I paid a guy to do my taxes. I don’t feel this “need” for sending everything into AI. And just because I can use it to do anything myself… why should I?

There are two caveats: 1) when I’m directly working on something, I don’t want to leave it. I’m hyperfocused on it. But that’s true even without AI; I would have been obsessed with building doughflow.app were it for AI or not. The difference is I may never have finished it without AI.

2) I find myself using it as a crutch sometimes for simple things like sending a message to a colleague. I don’t like that, and have been trying to avoid it. I’ve spent all my life writing naturally, and I don’t need someone to proofread my chats. That’s a habit I am tossing, in general.

Perhaps it is the ADHD that actually helps me focus; that is, perhaps the coping mechanisms built for managing my countless disparate thoughts also work for managing multiple disparate agents? Just thinking out loud.

I'm cautious on the dependency part too. Do I have a bunch of tools now that help me and wouldn't exist without an agent writing them for me? Sure. Will I be able to fix them once their codebase will eventually need maintenance? Most likely not. So I'll better still have access to some decent model then!

Also, especially in work, it undermines skills and experience you then just lack. That also will only be fine as long as you are doing the work somewhere where they provide/allow use of LLMs.

Not for long. It will be outsourced once we have proper verification and receipts for AI agents. But a human will operate multiple loops.

There are tasks where AI genuinely removes tedious work and then there are tasks where the tedious or uncomfortable part is actually the thinking you needed to do

I like this, and resonate with the same thoughts. I do wonder when it comes to work though if the answer isn’t doing less but maybe breaking through in some way. I don’t know what it looks like but I do have the feeling LLMs are here to stay.

Or maybe it’s just keeping them in the work box - if someone wants to pay me to use LLMs and generate code, so be it. But keeping them away from hobbies, plans, art. Noble maybe, but then again there are a lot of projects I’m unlikely to do if I can’t find some way to make the level of effort required fit in with my lifestyle. With young kids, side project time is so incredibly limited.

Sometimes I feel like the main thing I’m learning from the AI wave is how modern life has a way of becoming more frustrating as more technology enters the picture. There’s all sorts of good in it, sure. But I do feel like so many more people are disgruntled by new tech compared to years past. I don’t think our cave man dopaminergic system is well suited for dealing with the expectations or availability of modern productivity and information.

Yes. This is consistent w/ my default position: "if LLMs are good at it, we probably don't need to do it."

> a productivity ouroboros.

This reflects my impression of working with LLM as well.

This post really resonated with me - I’ve been having similar thoughts recently.

That’s why I found the final paragraph to be a bit of a shock - “ More important: it’s freeing me up to do human stuff like write and reflect right now.”

What? How? This doesn’t follow from the rest of the post at all. Maybe your new less frenetic and more human scale AI usage would be a good subject for the next post.

> Equipped with tools that could theoretically make me a faster, more capable builder, I felt a strong urge to maximize my use of the tools by applying them to the task of… maximizing my use of the tools. It’s reflexive in the worst way, a productivity ouroboros.

More flour more water. More water more flour.

One thing I have been doing to avoid the feeling of starting 100 projects and finishing none, is to work on one big ambitious project. That way I don't have a bunch of half finished projects staring at me, each accusing me of abandoning them and competing for my attention. There is always one big project that I return to and continue to invest in.