I haven't touched LLMs since I went on PTO 2 weeks ago. This is a luxury not all knowledge workers can afford, but if you can, I strongly encourage it—especially if you use them daily to do things you used to do yourself. Try to do those things again. See if you're faster than the machine¸ or if it feels better. You might be surprised.
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@mttaggart I don’t work when on PTO. Problem solved. 😉 But seriously, I’m fortunate enough to be in a position where I have a team to cover while I’m gone and management already knows I won’t answer. Told them they can fire me when I get back if they like but I’m done giving them my personal time for free.
As for when I am working, yes, I take days off. Depends on what I’m doing though. Sometimes throwing a Windows log file CSV export into Copilot and telling it to parse the message field into individual columns like I did yesterday is too enticing to resist. Sure, I could have written that PowerShell in (being honest, I HATE PowerShell parsing) an hour, but Copilot did it in 2 minutes and I got 58 minutes of analysis time back. Hard to stay away from that. But then there are times like today when it was old fashioned OSINT the whole day and it was glorious!
@mttaggart ironically, I sometimes have to use it for tone, if you give me a canvas, I cannot (seriously) write in ciso-speak or say shit like “evolving threat landscape” 😂
@mttaggart
In the modern world, this also means "Don't Google things"
😕
@wdormann That's right. Plenty of solid alternatives.
@mttaggart @wdormann some vendors bury their documentation in ONLY the LLM, it’s super frustrating and I can only believe it’s to pump their stats of customer adoption.
@badsamurai @wdormann Gemini just claimed 1 billion MAU and for sure a good chunk of that is just whatever happens when you unlock an Android phone.
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/gemini-app/one-billion-monthly-users/
@mttaggart I tried to talk about the luxury part of being able to avoid LLMs once and got dogpiled.
@heckinteagan It is undeniably a privilege as employers mandate its use.
@mttaggart that. It's part of our annual review but not "officially"
@mttaggart I have to remind myself to use it. I'm old.
@mttaggart I try to avoid it at least one workday a week - so far with about a 50% success rate. I anticipate being able to go to two workdays a week soon, fingers crossed
@mttaggart I took a 1 week break from it at work and it was glorious. I don't feel like a shipped fewer or worse features either. What I did miss was it taking care of random background shit ("add another button to the debug panel to put it in pretty color mode"), but it's very nice to sit here concretely knowing actually everything I did last week 🤣
@ipsquiggle It's a little crazy that "Know what I did at work" is not a given anymore, isn't it?
@mttaggart @ipsquiggle we have moved into a world where it's not clear your coworkers know or understand a single thing they are doing
@ai6yr @mttaggart @ipsquiggle The zombies* are running the asylum.
* everyone’s a zombie
@mttaggart I've been (mostly, outside of meetings and design/noodling sessions) manually approving PRs for the team for ~6 weeks, now (too many coder cooks atm so I'm serving them all better in the review capacity). Feels good knowing how all the parts are working together.
