When It Doesn't Feel Like Cheating
I agree that using LLMs can very much feel like cheating. In a lot of cases I think it technically it is. I can't imagine being a young person these days with potential shortcuts and answers right at your beck and call.
In my younger days we had things called encyclopedias and we had to search for answers in one of the 27 volumes.
The way I use LLMs is very much like how Simon Willison says:
One trick I've found that helps is to make sure that I am putting in way more text than the LLM is spitting out.
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I hardly ever publish material that was written by an LLM...
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I have a hunch that overcoming the feeling of guilt associated with using LLMs is one of the most important skills required to make effective use of them!
Related, this excellent advice from Laurie Voss:
Is what you're doing taking a large amount of text and asking the LLM to convert it into a smaller amount of text? Then it's probably going to be great at it. If you're asking it to convert into a roughly equal amount of text it will be so-so. If you're asking it to create more text than you gave it, forget about it.
Photo credit: Solen Feyissa on Unsplash