Thoughts on thinking • Dustin Curtis

Thinking is compounding–the more you think, the better your thoughts become.

I come to the same realization: in the context of AI, what I’m doing is a waste of time. It’s horrifying. The fun has been sucked out of the process of creation because nothing I make organically can compete with what AI already produces—or soon will.

I thought I was using AI in an incredibly positive and healthy way, as a bicycle for my mind and a way to vastly increase my thinking capacity. But LLMs are insidious–using them to explore ideas feels like work, but it’s not real work. Developing a prompt is like scrolling Netflix, and reading the output is like watching a TV show. Intellectual rig... See more

But now, when my brain spontaneously forms a tiny sliver of a potentially interesting concept or idea, I can just shove a few sloppy words into a prompt and almost instantly get a fully reasoned, researched, and completed thought. Minimal organic thinking required. This has had a dramatic and profound effect on my brain. My thinking systems have at... See more

I have been stuck. Every time I sit down to write a blog post, code a feature, or start a project, I come to the same realization: in the context of AI, what I’m doing is a waste of time.

Learning by reading LLM output is cheap. Real exercise for your mind comes from building the output yourself.