Turning my brain off actually works really well when I'm doing something more creative, and while I know this isn't exactly what he's talking about, I wonder if we are just offloading things we shouldn't have to think about to have more space to think about other things.

Of course, this becomes a lot more difficult when you're unemployed.

Even pre-LLM: I've found a lot of colleagues (mystifyingly to me, both seniors and juniors) who really want to be able to turn their brain off when doing investigations into complicated cross-system behavior (feedback loops abound), and they don't like hearing that it can't be collapsed into a runbook. If a drinking bird (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_bird) on an Enter key could do it, I could rig something up so I wouldn't need you!

All is possible with good blackbox testing.

"What reason is there for the company to employ the meat proxy?" Maybe some form of liability, accountability...

New concept: the AI patsy

> Let's say that happens. What reason is there for the company to employ the meat proxy? The company can just run the LLM in a loop and lay off the employee. There's no point at which this methodology will work for the employee.

If this is true, turning off the brain... is completely rational. Why burn out the brain for something happening either way? It's not like being fully engaged is going to result in anything that much better for the employee. In a world where code is this disposable, memorizing a codebase that won't recognizably exist in 3 years is also stupid.

     Let's say that happens. What reason is there for the company to employ the meat proxy? The company can just run the LLM in a loop and lay off the employee. There's no point at which this methodology will work for the employee

I would argue that there's still an important role for human employees as compliance ablative armor.

The human's purpose is to keep an eye on the LLM, occasionally intervene/interfere with its work, and most importantly, incur social/legal liability for anything that the LLM does wrong.

Kind of like the backup drivers used by self-driving cars.

Um, some data:

”Nowhere is this clearer than in entry-level software engineering—though the picture depends on whom you ask. Brynjolfsson discovered that employment among developers aged 22 to 25 has fallen nearly 20% from its late-2022 peak. The online job site Indeed also paints a stark picture: software development job postings have fallen 53% from the same starting point.”

https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/the-real-job-destruct...

They aren’t firing the meat proxies to that degree yet, but they absolutely have stopped hiring the meat proxies. It’s going to be a very dirty year on Wallstreet when you’ll see massive sneaky layoffs of the existing meat proxies.

You can turn your brain off with these models. It is what it is.

I think a lot of people are not able to reason to this point and then adjust behaviour accordingly. They probably reason to the point when pressed for it, but cannot resist the low effort and low resistance route of asking AI, and then probably make up reasons why in their case it's fine (typical behaviour to address cognitive dissonance).

Then again, for many people their job security doesn't depend on what work they do, it depends on how well they are embedded in the organisation. Before AI you also already had plenty of people doing their job at a questionable level, yet never seem to get fired.

Turning your brain off is usually a defense mechanism to protect yourself against something bad. dissociate during trauma etc. lighter dissociation points to the interaction trending toward badness, not goodness. Seems like the mind and body is telling us something that we shouldn't ignore

You are a photographer from the olden age. Taking a photo back then took forever. You are standing on a hill trying to get the perfect picture of a sunset. You measure and sort and calculate angles and light. A tourist stands next to you with an high-speed iphone auto-settings camera. They spin around and get thousands of photos from different angles while you are thinking and measuring your one shot. That’s what AI does. It gives you many shots at the same problem. The thinking guy with the one approach will likely lose a photo competition to one of the accidentally better shots of the person who tried a lot more. Make and filter now may be a better approach than overthink and try only once.

That's the smallest dan luu post I've seen.

Airline pilots and train conductors are basically meat proxies 95% of the time and they are still employed. Still necessary for when things really go wrong.

When throughput is an issue, you have to think judiciously. I'm definitely not saying you shouldn't think but we have to think about how to apply human oversight effectively. For me that means front-loading oversight through dialectic planning, and maximizing automation of constraints.

It's an interesting idea. I'm not sure I agree.

Here's the thing I'm finding - LLMs allow me to do more coding when my brain isn't firing on all six cylinders. It means I get more code written because I don't have to be "in the zone" to exhaustively hunt down every piece of API and dependency and have my flow continuously broken up by missing information. The code written in that state is lower quality, but I can patch up five-cylinder-brain code faster than I can synthesize code from a blank page outside of my flow state.

> What reason is there for the company to employ the meat proxy? The company can just run the LLM in a loop and lay off the employee. There's no point at which this methodology will work for the employee.

Company is pleased! Cost savings!

Alas, the joy doesn't last long as pretty soon after the company realizes that after an LLM replaces almost all their employees, the much easier task of replacing the entire company begins, because the company itself has just become a much thinner meat proxy for getting an LLM to do whatever it is the customer relies on the company for.

Customer is pleased! Cost savings!

Alas, the joy doesn't last long as whatever savings they have from replacing the company with their own LLM loop is offset by whatever it is they do to earn income being similarly impacted.

All of the moats degrade together though they may fully give out at slightly different speeds.

It doesn't help that this is being forced from above. I agree you can't turn off your brain, but any time I argue that AI isn't the right tool for something management gets angry. There is a constant push to fully automate things, regardless of what those things are.

Even if I agree that you have to use your brain, when my boss is literally telling me to stop questioning whether AI automation is the right answer in team meetings/chats I'm just going to shut up and give them what they want.

The version of "meat proxy" I've heard is the person who forwards a machine-answer to someone else who didn't ask for a machine answer, and could just as easily made one themselves.

Calling someone a "meat proxy" for being the human in the loop is wild.

I would like to argue opposite.

Developers like to "turn their brain off" during "super hard debuging" sessions. Mental flow state is a well documented as pleasurable experience. It is like a drug!

Auditing and reviewing autogenerated commits, is hard gruelling mental labour, compared to that. You do not even get a credit as an author! You can not get into groove to get your fix!

trends like these remind me very much of how true some of the predictions in Douglas Hofstadter's "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" were: https://ia802903.us.archive.org/6/items/richard-hofstadter-a...

he was writing in reaction to the McCarthy era which, arguably, is very similar to kind of bombastic nativism we're seeing now from our political elites. his argument essentially being that there are cultural and institutionalized forces that are driving people to, well, turn their brains off - specifically to no longer be skeptical of what they consume, to not want to refine and improve their toolbox of analysis, to not want to understand how things work for the sake of knowing

and that these acts were deliberate - a populace is so much easier to control when it's complacent and unknowing, who believes, unskeptically, that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, unquestioning about who was writing the PR missives that feed the news cycle (see also: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/what-is-copaganda), how verbatim they are, and what the real intent of the authors were

like, I get that you don't want to put in effort for a job you don't like. but that effort also makes you better at your work. it makes it easier on you, it lets you create less incidents, it empowers you to be more agent in your own life, to, who knows, have the guts to start a consulting gig because your skill-sets actually are better than the average

there's so many benefits from just being more diligent, longterm, proactive benefits. but that's not everybody's extrinsic motivator and it's so much easier to just be Skinner-boxed by social media companies into doomscrolling, I suppose

Thats not the problem of LLM/AI.

The problem is, that digital work, the new frontier of employment for a lot of epeople, got and will continue to get A LOT cheaper, faster and more accessable.

The PO who always complains about someone? They will just vibe stuff. It might even be shit but it will work good enough until LLMs/AI/AGI/ASI is good enough or better anyway than an avg developer.

Man i have seen so so much shitty code even in software companies.

You know when your HR software takes seconds to load? Yeah an LLM can do that today too

Yes, and: the most important time to use your brain isn't in the loop.

That _is_ valuable, and will remain so, but the temptation to turn it off is there because the loop is good and getting better at what it does.

But the most important time to use your brain is _before the prompt_. Once you engage with your LLM and agent, you start biasing yourself, and its reasonable suggestions constrain your visibility into other options, other worlds.

First, use your brain. Then write the prompt.