The peril of laziness lost

Bryan Cantril:

LLMs inherently lack the virtue of laziness. Work costs nothing to an LLM. LLMs do not feel a need to optimize for their own (or anyone’s) future time, and will happily dump more and more onto a layercake of garbage. Left unchecked, LLMs will make systems larger, not better .

That’s a good answer for the next job interview.

“What’s your best attribute?”

“That I’m lazy”

To be human is to want something simple because simple is the only thing intelligible to our limited intellectual and temporal capacities.

The best engineering is always borne of constraints, and the constraint of our time places limits on the cognitive load of the system that we’re willing to accept.