Addicted to Easy

If I describe someone as “lazy”, what is the image that comes to mind? Is it a 300 pound man sitting on his couch with a coke and bag of chips? Lately, I have thought about being mentally lazy. In his great book, Comfort Crisis, Michael Easter writes about our addiction to comfort. What about comfort of the mind? We have the internet to feed us information until we explode with anxiety. “Experts” on countless podcasts to tell us how to think, move, and connect. Are we addicted to easy?

Sometimes, I have a nagging feeling that I’ve not considered the whole problem. Or I consider my unearned confidence in a solution or initiating a new project. I have no evidence, research, or tests to back up the confidence in my solution. I’ve not inverted the problem to ask what could go wrong. I’ve not researched alternatives to my solution. I’ve not steelmaned the other side. I’ve not considered the opinions of those wiser. These would force me to think hard about the problem.

If you can’t think of at least three things that might be wrong with your understanding of the problem, you don’t understand the problem.

– Are Your Lights On?

Sometimes action can be lazy. I lean towards action, because I tend to overthink and delay action. But there’s a balance between trying something because I’m stuck in a loop and immediately jumping to a solution before understanding the problem. Even knowing this, I still fall into the same trap. Am I addicted to easy?

Lazy thinking quietly seeped in as I started to use LLMs more. Whether on purpose or because someone turned on the feature, instead of attempting to recall or think about where I’m headed while coding, I would pause to see what the LLM would suggest. Instead of carefully considering, what I want to say in an email, I would just use what was suggested. Am I addicted to easy?

I am addicted to easy. It took me a bit to realize that using LLMs to finish my thoughts was having an impact on how I thought (big surprise). I stopped using LLMs as autocomplete. To use an LLM, I initiate the conversation (CLI, web, etc.) and intentionally engage in the conversation. I don’t use LLMs to communicate for me (e.g. email, etc.) or do any writing on this site (hopefully that’s obvious). I’m still finding the balance of using LLMs too much, while also taking advantage of their capabilities as a useful tool. There are times when I need speed and results. LLMs have been fantastic at analyzing environments and summarizing code in my day to day job. LLMs are great at these tasks, and creating summaries sounds like a mind numbing waste of human time.

How do I detox from easy? One solution has been particularly effective for me. Consider this:

Choose your hard. There is no easy path. Do you want it hard now or hard later? Look for the hard later in all your “easy” solutions. It is astonishing what you will see.

Nothing is easy.