We have machines lift weights for us all the time. Claude is a forklift for the mind, perhaps?

That has become pretty controversial recently, but I think the difference is that in software development, building knowledge is the work. You write software and simultaneously build expertise in your team regarding what the software does that allows you to maintain it and move forward.

Some of us hate this part. They don’t want to learn the domain to that degree. It’s not always the dumb ones either.

However there’s not a lot of overlap I’ve noticed between the craftsman crowd and that one.

Using forklifts has made us overall less healthy and less physically fit than moving things by hand

Will LLMs, "the forklifts of the mind" make us less mentally fit?

Seems like a pretty likely outcome to me

Strawman. Forklifts usually do work we physically can't do (or sometimes could do if ignoring personnel risks and costs).

> Forklifts usually do work we physically can't do

Is that any different from doing work we can do, but way faster than we could realistically do it?

Change the analogy to an excavator then. I could move a pile of dirt with a shovel, or I could write code with my brain

Or I could move a pile of dirt with an excavator or write code with an LLM