Be Intentional

Be intentional about what you do. In the era of Cursor and Copilot and vibe coding this has become all but lost. We start with vague thoughts, ideas teetering on the precipice of our minds, and let a computer take over to fill in the rest. We've let LLMs completely invade our thought space and have lost vertical integration of reasoning.

I've been using Cursor for the past few weeks and every time I use it, I go into a sort of fugue state where I'm vaguely aware of what I'm doing but no longer in control of what's happening. The direction of thought has been inverted so much that the practical usage of an LLM is to start typing and keep tabbing until it defers back to you. It's beginning to use us, not the other way around.

You could argue this isn't a problem, that it makes us X times more productive. I don't disagree, but I'm not willing to bet my own mind on it. I want to be deliberate in what I'm doing. The in-between state where I'm half depending on an LLM and it's half depending on me is simply unbearable. I'm starting to lean toward only using LLMs for asynchronous tasks, and it feels freeing. Somewhat surprisingly, it actually allows me more time to architect systems. I'm not so distracted by optimizing for autocompletion and the next token. It's sort of like how writing in pencil forces you to be more intentional: you spend a lot more time thinking about each word because the cost of an error is so much higher. This inevitably results in more fleshed-out ideas.

Let's not become lazy thinkers and let's not cede complete control of ourselves to the machines. If an agent replaces me, it's going to have to be all or nothing. I won't have it slowly consume my mind until all that remains is a quality source of entropy.