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Re:Writing as a Thinking Tool by billypilgrim on Sunday November 08, 2026 @10:32AM (#50414123)
When I had started my PhD, I thought the writing part of a paper was just the last thing I needed to do to summarize my results, like a boring epilogue to the more exciting science. What surprised me was how much of the scientific process relied on my ability to convey my ideas to someone else. And to be able to do that you need clarity of mind, you need to have worked through multiple drafts to be able to get to your point as efficiently and clearly as possible. So many times I only discovered what I was actually researching during the writing part.

The problem with AI writing is that it makes people believe that writing is just writing and not a tool for thinking very deeply about the topic you are writing about. I am not completely opposed to AI assisted writing, but if I see AI writing, it’s telling me that the author tried to take a shortcut in their own thinking and it’s a good heuristic that the ideas will not be thought through enough to warrant my complete attention.

Re:Writing as a Thinking Tool by jbs789 on Sunday November 08, 2026 @11:03AM (#50414388)
This happened to me recently. I just asked what the prompt was. I found it really tough to read AI words, not knowing the weight to put in each word. A almost gave it more credit than was due and responded in detail, before seeing the prompt and responding barely at all - equivalent to the thought put in.
Re:Writing as a Thinking Tool by torben-friis on Sunday November 08, 2026 @12:31PM (#50415256)
>it’s telling me that the author tried to take a shortcut in their own thinking and it’s a good heuristic that the ideas will not be thought through enough to warrant my complete attention.

Even worse: Facing AI writing, there's a strong suspicion that any concerns or counterpoints you bring won't be actually considered, but rather copypasted into an llm session.

Re:Writing as a Thinking Tool by sublinear on Sunday November 08, 2026 @01:17PM (#50415639)
That's a good thing. The writer who has nothing to say and the dumb audience who doesn't care stay down where they belong pacified by their "AI".
Re:Writing as a Thinking Tool by gonzalohm on Sunday November 08, 2026 @12:42PM (#50415358)
I feel that way about coding. Sometimes you have an idea and a plan to implement it. But once you start coding you realize that some things were not fully right or way more complex that it should If you let AI code for you, you will lose that
Re:Writing as a Thinking Tool by FeteCommuniste on Sunday November 08, 2026 @12:53PM (#50415449)
"Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth (at runtime)." - Mike Tyson
Re:Writing as a Thinking Tool by 0c3ca83 on Sunday November 08, 2026 @12:56PM (#50415468)
Yes. The code I produce in a year I could type in a week. The time goes into understanding the problem.
Re:Writing as a Thinking Tool by mpyne on Sunday November 08, 2026 @01:39PM (#50415789)
This happens a lot, which is why agile-style methods kept popping up to replace waterfall techniques, even before anyone tagged them with the ‘agile’ label.

Ironically, that led to a Agile™ consultant-industrial complex that tried to make it a cookie-cutter process again, but we still haven’t escaped the need to break out the IDE and actually put idea into something concrete, and I doubt we ever will.

Re:Writing as a Thinking Tool by 0c3ca83 on Sunday November 08, 2026 @12:55PM (#50415464)
The problem with AI is that it's entire selling point is saving time by not needing to think very deeply about topics.

The writing is downstream of that.

Re:Writing as a Thinking Tool by steve-atx-7600 on Sunday November 08, 2026 @01:52PM (#50415906)
I think that is a problem between keyboard and chair situation. I use codex in addition to my own thinking through use cases and talking to stakeholders & domain experts to augment my understanding and find gaps in my plan. In other words, I work how I worked before but with a bunch of agents helping me research and diagram out plans faster before I start coding something.
Re:Writing as a Thinking Tool by 0c3ca83 on Sunday November 08, 2026 @01:58PM (#50415960)
I agree, it sounds like you have a problem between your keyboard and chair.
Re:Writing as a Thinking Tool by 8note on Sunday November 08, 2026 @06:00PM (#50418471)
but in actuality, its all about how you use it.

you can dump your thoughts and constraints you can think of, and have it work through untangling, or use it as a summarizing notepad, or yo prototype what you are thinking about in different variations.

its no replacement for pen and paper, but no typed or drawn on tablet picture comes close to a real notebook to scribble on its entirely a thinking tool, as much as a skip-thinking tool

Re:Writing as a Thinking Tool by bartread on Sunday November 08, 2026 @02:00PM (#50415979)
The trick, I think - at least this has helped me - is not to use the AI to write for me, nor to use it to rewrite my drafts, but is to do the writing myself and to ask it for editorial feedback. This forces me to think through what I’ve written more deeply, and then rewrite it according to that deeper understanding.

I think if I used AI for the actual writing then, (a) there’d be a lot missing, and (b) I’d rob myself of much of the value, in better understanding, of writing myself.

We’re not all the same so YMMV, but this is what I’ve found from using AI in various ways to see if and how it can help with writing.

Re:Writing as a Thinking Tool by 4b11b4 on Sunday November 08, 2026 @02:10PM (#50416069)
This is my stance, but I go further to say that that you shouldn't even use it for feedback...

The feedback bit is surely more debatable, but I would argue the initial writing and allowing edits are not.

https://antoaenono.com/write/fragments/writing#:~:text=never...

With respect to seeking feedback, my angle is that: even if you do agree with the feedback then what they do. Are you going to take it as is? Are you going to come up with it and phrase it in your own way?

What next? Next, what if there's a bunch more feedback that you agree with and you incorporate it. Then, where do we go from there?

Can you even go back to (b) and make your own edits at this point? I'm not sure and I worry about a slippery slope where you stray too far from your own original form -- so I landed on not seeking feedback either.

note: this all is definitely under progress and as I'm looking at it it's very noisy with all of the formatting... just finally getting my site put together

also not sure about my fish progress bar hah

Re:Writing as a Thinking Tool by hosh on Sunday November 08, 2026 @03:16PM (#50416699)
One of the things I ask AI to help edit my writing is a consistency pass, making sure my ideas hang together well. The real test is to see if other humans understand it.

I tell mine that line editing and formatting are the very last polish.

Re:Writing as a Thinking Tool by frogulis on Monday November 09, 2026 @01:21AM (#50421771)
I think you make an interesting point.

I generally don't think LLMs writing prose for humans is a good idea (except for perhaps the most boring kinds of copywriting) but I feel a lot more positive about LLMs as reviewers, even if I don't necessarily use them myself often. My positivity comes from how relatively easy it generally is to validate feedback on a piece of writing you're intimately familiar with.

Gotta say, I don't relate to your concerns about "stray[ing] too far" _in the short term_. I think if reading LLM feedback has upset your original thinking that catastrophically you may have either been wrong (in which case, good that you received feedback early?) or writing with little intention.

However in the long term I can totally see how you could get into a habit of laziness, trusting the LLM to fix your stuff, or mindlessly applying fixes without really considering them.

Re:Writing as a Thinking Tool by Imustaskforhelp on Sunday November 08, 2026 @02:02PM (#50415995)
I am starting to believe that if something is worth sharing, it is worth writing (atleast once) by a human completely. An AI clean/pass-up after that might be okay but atleast once, an author should try to create the whole piece.

I used to have a real complicated dilemma on which content exactly to write (& then share), I recently started using handy's TTS and storing it in my scratchpad app within my native language or English and then I paste it into Chatgpt and use its memories to connect with other previous discussions I had.

It helps in saving thoughts which would've otherwise been lost, even provide some new perspectives and get them in a way that I can access them later in more depth.

I think that if I were to now create blogs of these contents. I used to think that it would perhaps be okay to share an blog like thing created by AI if say I spent 10-20 minutes thinking of the rough draft of it, but after reading your comment, I am reflecting on the fact that, atleast once, people should write things themselves no matter which AI thing they use before creating blogs.

As the point of blogs shouldn't be to share unlimited content but rather that it is the specific content where a human effort was placed. Maybe if one still wants, there could be some other blog post which could be written with all the AI blogs content I have created perhaps but still, it should be seperated away from human content.

And there is this fact that as you mention, writing itself forces you to think through ideas and thoughts which are highly relevant. So previously when I used to think that re-writing them would be a waste of time and that AI writes them good enough. I think that writing them still might make a lot of sense as it would be a net benefit if not for anybody else, then for me as it can help me better understand the material myself (even more so than reading/speaking it)

The most typing/writing of myself now occurs in Hackernews comments for me and I do observe that I learn a lot writing them personally.

Re:Writing as a Thinking Tool by cameldrv on Sunday November 08, 2026 @03:07PM (#50416629)
Same with reading actually. Reading a book makes you think for a long time about the subject and form your own judgments. I like audiobooks and online content too, but they don’t seem to stimulate this nearly as much.

For audiobooks, I seem to not have as much of a tendency to pause the audio and stop and think, and it’s harder to reread a passage, so it’s a more passive experience.

For online content, there’s not as much of an intention to fully engage with the material. It’s easy to skim or switch to something else.

Re:Writing as a Thinking Tool by geniium on Sunday November 08, 2026 @06:48PM (#50419013)
> For online content, there’s not as much of an intention to fully engage with the material. It’s easy to skim or switch to something else.

Thanks for writing that down. It explains in simple terms the difference

Re:Writing as a Thinking Tool by zahlman on Sunday November 08, 2026 @08:50PM (#50419976)
Part of the problem is that the English word "writing" refers to both the process and the result.