Decision after decision after decision

I have access to a Large Language Model. It can do things for me. Most anything I can imagine done with ones and zeroes. It used to be that I’d come up with an idea, and then had the puzzle part where I tried to make the code fit together so it did the thing I wanted it to do.

Alan Watts tells a story:

See, there’s this guy, a farmer, who ordered a helping man to come in and found that he was an extraordinarily efficient worker. For the first day he put him on sawing logs. And he sawed more logs than anybody had ever sawed. It was fantastic. They were all done in one day. So the next day he put him on to mending fences. And there were all kinds of broken fences around the farm. And in one day he had the whole thing done. So he thought, “What am I gonna do with this guy?” So he took him down into a basement and said, “Look, here are all the potatoes that have come in from this harvest. And I want you to sort them into three groups: those that we sell, those that we use for seeding, and those that we throw away.” So he left him at that. At the end of the day the laborer came back and said, “Well that’s enough, mister. I quit.” “No!” he said, “You can’t quit! I’ve never had such an excellent worker. I’ll raise your salary. I’ll do anything to keep you around here.” “Eh,” he said. “No. It’s alright mending fences and chopping wood, but this potato business is decision after decision after decision after decision!

Yes, I can see why. It turns out instantly getting anything you want leaves you just making decision after decision after decision. And it’s extremely tiring.

Side projects balloon from two thousand lines to twenty thousand lines in a blink of an eye. Then I no longer understand the code, so I can’t even attempt to read it and understand it. I just ask the LLM what the current state is. And then ask it how we could implement whatever. It quickly lays out the available options. It’s a decision after decision after decision.

No one has read a draft of this post, not even my LLM…