I use AI a lot for work, pretty much all day every day. I use coding assistants and custom agents I’ve built. I use AI to help code review changes, dig into bugs, and keep track of my projects. I’ve found lots of things it’s very helpful with, and lots of things it’s terrible at. If there’s one thing I have definitely learned: it does not work the way I imagined.

People keep asking me If I use Generative AI tools for coding and what I think of them, so this is my effort to put my thoughts in writing, so that I can send people here instead of having to repeat myself every time I get the question.

One of the major turning points in my life was reading my dad’s copy of Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion as a teenager. […] But Cialdini’s book was a turning point because it highlighted the very real limitations to human reasoning. No matter how smart you were, the mechanisms of your thinkings could easily be tricked in ways that completely bypassed your logical thinking and could insert ideas and trigger decisions that were not in your best interest.

The conversation isn’t over, but I don’t think I have much to add to it.

Interesting read that does not address the ethics of LLM training.