Use it or loose it.

We used to do manual labor which had the dual benefit of getting the things we needed (hunt->food, work->money, etc.) and keeping us in reasonable physical (and mental) condition.

No longer for many of us, so our bodies atrophy.

To fight the entropy, many of us go to the gym. We simulate the labor we used to do in order to keep our bodies in good condition and reap the rewards (energy, look/feel better, longer life, etc.).

What else is atrophying because we are using it less?

I’m thinking specifically about the world of cheap+powerful LLMs, i.e 2025.

  • Writing?
  • Programming?
  • Problem Solving?
  • Reading?
  • Copywriting
  • Thinking?

Make no mistake, LLMs are eating our cognitive workload bite by bite.

We don’t need to lift heavy, chatgpt can do it for us.

The skills will atrophy. Use it or lose it, right?!

Paul Graham has tweeted ideas like this many times, mainly about writing is thinking and LLMs are taking away the need to write, and in turn our skills in clear thinking. Nod.

(a quick search on twitter, etc…)

Okay. Paul Graham’s Oct 2024 piece titled “Writes and Write-Nots” is on exactly this, and probably lodged in the back of my head forcing my notions. I never claimed to have original ideas :)

… Almost all pressure to write has dissipated. You can have AI do it for you, both in school and at work. […] Isn’t it common for skills to disappear when technology makes them obsolete? There aren’t many blacksmiths left, and it doesn’t seem to be a problem.

You can blacksmith as a hobby now, sure, but you can also “blacksmith” seriously. No, not a job, but like a pro. A thing you do daily even no one wants/needs you to, because you need to.

I can go for a walk on warm summer afternoons, or I can lift 3 times per/week and run 5km the other days.

So do we let the skills fade?

There are some that can’t. We need gyms for the skills LLMs are eating.

And, like our physical gym, it will probably suck sometimes.

And we will be happy after we have done it.

Writing

Writing’s easy.

Keep a journal or a blog. No brainer.

Log the thoughts of the day.

Escalate to essays, books. Garner feedback.

Programming

What does a programming gym look like? What are the “standard” exercises?

There programming languages that I learned/used a decade or two ago that I would like to keep.

Why not get an email every morning with a request to code something up, reply with the response, an LLM reads and comments on the implementation.

Something like:

(as an aside, I worked through this chestnut back in the day when I wanted to pickup ansi c real fast)

Or

  • Grind through “clever algorithms"-like recipes, code one element of an algorithm per day

You get the progressive load.

You get the space repetition.

What does cross-fit here mean? Language, data structures, algorithms, theory, etc.?

Maybe a bootcamp intensive type thing to get started before the daily gym routine. Just like trainers run for “get fit for the new year” people at the local park.

Webapp, register interests, use an LLM to generate the exercises on demand + some human review, away you go.

You could roll your own of these in an hour.

Machine Learning

What does a “machine learning” gym look like?

Much the same.

  • Code up a linear regression for this data and predict these values.
  • Tell me all the ways kNN is going to have a problem on this data.
  • Use XGB and get an accuracy above 98% on this dataset.

And on.

Stay sharp.

What does “being yoked” mean here? Encyclopedic memory of methods and papers? Like an academic? Na, a kaggle grandmaster? A deepmind/openai/anthropic staffer? I dunno.

Maybe, we could pull ideas from recent (hot) papers and ask for critiques or implementations or similar. It’s hard to find the balance of “we’re doing a workout” and “we’re doing work-work”.

This would be more fun and more current. Staying on top of things is impossible, and this might keep things fun in the losing battle.

The People

One thing is for sure, the people that turn up to one of these gyms are a self-selected community that bond immediately.

Like our classical gym.

We’re all gross, want to get better, and are able to grind through barriers/pain/etc.

This notion feels like a sibling to the “collecting peaks” idea.

Many of the education/learning platforms are probably place holders for these gyms, they just need better positioning (it’ll be a marketing problem).

For now, time to setup some mats in the garage until the idea catches fire.