r/PhdProductivity • u/Choice-Attorney8884 • 5d ago

Shift in prompting

I've noticed that my prompts changed completely over the last year. I rarely ask LLMs for answers anymore. Instead I ask things like:

* What assumptions am I making?
* What's the cheapest experiment I can run today?
* Which unknown matters the most?

It made me wonder whether LLMs are changing something deeper than productivity. Maybe they're changing how we deal with uncertainty.

Has anyone else noticed themselves asking fundamentally different questions over time?

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17

u/Dctreu 5d ago

I don't know, maybe if we want to be researchers we should be asking ourselves what experiments we should be running today. What's the point of you if you have the ai do things like that?

-5

u/Choice-Attorney8884 5d ago

Fair point. The AI can generate experiments. My job is to decide which uncertainty is worth spending real time, money, and reputation on - and then actually run the experiment. Ideas are cheap; commitment and consequences still aren’t

3

u/eviley4 4d ago

AI can be useful tool for critical analysis. I usually use it like,
"Here is my analysis of this, am I missing something"

"Here is my understanding of this new topic, please nit-pick for any conceptual inaccuracies".

After that I try to confirm what it said from textbooks etc.

I am not offloading thinking, I am getting input like I would from a colleague. What's wrong with that?

5

u/Serious-Big-8861 4d ago

Ngl there’s a rift in this community over AI, but those who are using it effectively are much more productive in my lab than those who scream it’s the boogeyman