I’ve always liked the Steve Jobs quote about computers being bicycles for the mind. A bicycle only moves when you put your own effort into it and it multiplies that effort so you can go further and faster.

Using LLMs as bicycles for your own thinking is the best way to get the most out of them. You need to put the effort into finding the right prompts on the way in. You need to put the effort into interpreting and using the output on the way out.

Blindly accepting the output from a generic prompt question is not going to differentiate you from thousands of others. Using the LLM to ask for improvements, alternatives, summaries, etc. etc. and then working with that output to synthesise solutions faster and better could do.

I think one of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that we’re tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn’t look so good. But, then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts.

And that’s what a computer is to me. What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.” ~ Steve Jobs