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I’ve written about this before, but I really hate the way people compare LLM’s to “junior engineers” or even “students”.

Take this example from HackerNews:

Good to know that ChatGPT 5.5 Pro can produce a publishable paper, but from what I have seen so far with Gemini, it seems to me that it is better to consider LLMs as very efficient students who can read papers and books in no time but still need a lot of mentoring.

Making this comparison between students and LLMs implies that you think students are tools to help you write research papers. Efficient students are ones who read papers and books quickly, and mentoring is a strategy one can apply to get better results out of the students.

I’m used to this kind of thinking from the management types. The bosses of “unskilled” laborers have long treated their employees as disposable, fungible, tools, and the leadership of white collar workers are drooling at the idea that AI may let them do the same.

But it breaks my heart to see this mentality coming from other more senior workers, to watch them try to pull the ladder up in real time.

I don’t think I can change their minds, but I’m doing my best to at least pay forward the mentorship that I was lucky enough to get, and I encourage anybody reading to do the same.