[headcanon]

Since LLMs were introduced, I've been of the belief that this technology actually makes writing a *more* important skill to develop than less. So far that belief has held. No matter how advanced the model gets, you'll get better results if you can clarify your thoughts well in written language.

There may be a future AI-based system that can retain so much context it can kind of just "get what you mean" when you say off-the-cuff things, but I believe that a user that can think, speak, and write clearly will still have a skill advantage over one that does not.

[sothatsit]

FWIW, I've heard many people say that with voice dictation they ramble to LLMs and by speaking more words can convey their meaning well, even if their writing quality is low. I don't do this regularly, but when I have tried it, it seemed to work just as well as my purposefully-written prompts. I can imagine a non-technical person rambling enough that the AI gets what they mean.

[headcanon]

Thats a fair counterpoint, and it has helped translate my random thoughts into more coherent text. I also haven't taken advantage of dictation much at all either, so maybe I'll give it a try. I still think the baseline skill that writing gives you translates to an LLM-use skill, which is thinking clearly and knowing how to structure your thoughts. Maybe folks can get that skill in other ways (oration, art, etc.). I don't need to give it essays, but I do need to give it clear instructions. Every time it spins off and does something I don't want, its because I didn't clarify my thoughts correctly.

[arcanemachiner]

Setting up SpeechNote with Kokoro is one of the the best things I've ever done.

I can speak faster than I type, and the flow state is much smoother when you can just dump a stream of consciousness into the context window in a matter of seconds. And the quality of the model is insane for something that runs locally, on reasonable hardware no less.

Swearing at an LLM is also much more fun when done verbally.

[dworks]

The prompt the user enters is actually not the prompt. Most agents will have an additional background step to use the user's prompt to generate the actual, detailed instructions, which is then used as the actual prompt for code generation. That's how the ability to build a website from "create a website that looks like twitter" is achieved.

[patja]

My 85 year-old father could probably resolve 90% of his personal technology problems using an LLM. But for the same reason every phone call on these subjects ends with me saying "can it wait until I come over for lunch next week to take a look?", an LLM isn't a viable solution when he can't adequately describe the problem and its context.

[Workaccount2]

I showed my father how to use the live camera mode with Gemini and it's been a boon for him

[imiric]

> No matter how advanced the model gets, you'll get better results if you can clarify your thoughts well in written language.

Imagine what we could accomplish if we had a way of writing very precise language that is easy for a machine to interpret!

[TeMPOraL]

Yeah, we've already seen that over the past few decades. It's both a limitation and a benefit, but until recently it was the only thing we had (well that, and just hiring another person to act as an LLM for us). LLMs are an upgrade.

[frumiousirc]

> No matter how advanced the model gets, you'll get better results if you can clarify your thoughts well in written language.

This definitely agrees with my experience. But a corollary is that written human language is very cumbersome to encode some complex concepts. More and more I give up on LLM-assisted programming because it is easier to express my desires in code than using English to describe what forms I want to see in the produced code. Perhaps once LLMs get something akin to judgement and wisdom I can express my desires in the terms I can use with other experienced humans and take for granted certain obvious quality aspects I want in the results.

[SecretDreams]

> So far that belief has held. No matter how advanced the model gets, you'll get better results if you can clarify your thoughts well in written language.

I've heard it well described as a k-type curve. Individuals that already know things will use this tool to learn and do many more things. Individuals that don't know a whole lot aren't going to learn or do a whole lot with this tool.

[tomjen3]

It is absolutely true, with the interesting caveat that the basic (spelling grammar) doesn’t matter. Clarity and detail of your ideas do.