artificial brain
It's been over two years since ChatGPT's release and the beginning of LLM models development. During this time, the media hasn't stopped predicting the collapse of civilization, humans being replaced by robots, the disappearance of programmers, copywriters, artists (after Stable Diffusion's release), and so on. And what's most sad is that useless debates continue about whether artificial intelligence will replace humans.1
What if I told you that the idea of this technology has been misunderstood? AI should complement your work by handling routine tasks, not replace you entirely. It shouldn't write code for you - it should offer options suitable for specific situations. By expecting deterministic results from non-deterministic AI, you're setting yourself up for disappointment, as it was created for entirely different purposes, despite what the media's sensational headlines suggest.
Let me give you a clear example. Take the most discussed development tool in recent months - Cursor. Many programmers (at least in my environment) use it as a simple code generator, hoping it will do all the work for them. What's the problem? Generated code usually doesn't consider existing context, creating impractical garbage. This is where all those memes came from about trying to solve a problem with AI and ending up with two problems instead.
Of course, AI has its drawbacks:
- Hallucinations, for instance, due to insufficient information about certain topics. But even this problem can now be solved using RAG.
- The learning paradox - when creating content entirely with LLM, you likely learn nothing, like a monkey pressing buttons hoping to write a bestseller. This isn't a problem with the tool itself - it's a problem with people who use it without understanding what they're doing and why.
Even with these drawbacks, AI (specifically LLM) is a great technology that needs to be learned. You're a professional in your specific craft, and you should know how to use appropriate tools to spend less time on routine tasks. Remember that.
What AI services do I personally use?
Perplexity - for information search. DuckDuckGo only occasionally when I need to find a specific website I already know or some specific information like "keyboard <...> review reddit".
Claude - grammar correction, text summarization, improving work email style, chat for diving deeper into specific questions to understand topics faster than gathering bits of information through search engines.
Cursor - as my main editor alongside Neovim
- Definitely, in some utopia, it would be ideal if all our routine tasks were automated, but this has its downsides beyond the scope of this post.