There's no such thing as Just a Tool | deadSimpleTech
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Heidegger thinks about tools like so: a tool is something (a thing that has being in the Heideggerian sense, not necessarily an object) that represents an extension of human capabilities in some way. A tool is thus any kind of thing that *lets you do something you wouldn't otherwise have been able to*. The important (for us) conceptual leap here is that when a tool works well, or isn't broken, it develops what Heidegger describes as a "ready-to-hand" quality: the tool fades into the background as a kind of human-tool gestalt of a human with the additional capability afforded by a tool forms. As a simple example of this, consider eating with a fork. When the fork is well-designed and not broken, *you don't explicitly have "I am using a fork" in your conscious mind while eating dinner*.
  • melfie@lemmy.zip
    111·
    9 days ago

    It’s definitely true that LLMs don’t live up to the hype of making everyone 10x faster, and possibly in the aggregate don’t even make anyone that much more productive, perhaps in many cases even reducing productivity overall.

    My use of LLMs is often geared towards improving the quality of my work instead of going faster, though. Sharing a plan and having it point out things I may have failed to consider, having a LLM review a PR and possibly find issues human reviewers overlooked, create multiple HTML + CSS prototypes for a web UI so I can pick the best elements of each design instead of just going with one design I made myself, create and maintain a set of tests I might not otherwise have bothered with, etc.

    Since in software engineering, quality is speed, using LLMs to improve quality can also improve speed.

    Overall, using LLMs to expand your thinking instead of using them to think for you works pretty well, IMO.