Re:Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking
by spiderfarmer on Friday January 23, 2026 @12:25AM
(#46728743)
LLM’s are tools. A huge differentiator between professionals in any profession is how well they know their tools.
But one of the first things to understand about power tools is to know all the ways in which they can kill you.
Re:Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking
by nurettin on Friday January 23, 2026 @12:26AM
(#46728752)
I often discuss ideas with peers that I trust to be strong critical thinkers. Putting the idea through their filters of scrutiny quickly exposes vulnerabilities that I'd have to patch on the spot, sometimes revealing weaknesses resulting from bad assumptions.
I started to use LLMs in a similar fashion. It is a different experience. Where a human would deconstruct you for fun, the LLM tries to engage positively by default. Once you tell it to say it the way it is, you get the "honestly, this may fail and here's why".
To my assessment, an LLM is better than being alone in a task and that is the value proposition.
Most of the time, the LLM’s framing of my idea is more generic and superficial than what I was actually getting at. It looks good, but when you look closer it often misses the point, on some level.
There is a real danger, to the extent you allow yourself to accept the LLM’s version of your idea, that you will lose the originality and uniqueness that made the idea interesting in the first place.
I think the struggle to frame a complex idea and the frustration that you feel when the right framing eludes you, is actually where most of the value is, and the LLM cheat code to skip past this pain is not really a good thing.