READING: Is Writing → Dialoguing :: Grunt-Programming → Vibe-Coding?
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
-
Phaedrus (dialogue)
1 min read
The article centers on extended quotations from Plato's Phaedrus dialogue, particularly the critique of writing. Understanding the full context of this dialogue—its structure, themes of rhetoric and love, and its place in Plato's corpus—would deeply enrich the reader's engagement with the article's argument about AI tools degrading skills.
-
Adonia
11 min read
Sokrates uses the 'gardens of Adonis' as a metaphor for superficial versus deep learning—seeds planted for quick bloom versus patient cultivation. This ancient Greek ritual practice, where women planted fast-sprouting seeds that quickly died, provides rich context for understanding Plato's critique of writing as shallow compared to dialogue.
Programming secrets of Hellenic intellectuals from 2500 years ago; an extended passage from Phaidros by Platon of the Athenai that I want to park where I can immediately find it...
As is so often the case, it is fruitful to enter a modern moral-philosophical and social-scientific tag-team debate by treating it as a footnote to the writings between the year -400 and the -345 of Aristokles son of Ariston and Periktione, nicknamed Platon.
In this case, I am thinking about the ongoing tag-team discussion about how to use MAMLM—Modern Advanced Machine-Learning—technologies as front-end word-processing tools for us. Who is this “us” here? This “us” is composed of those who serve as calculation and output nodes of the real ASI we East African Plains Apes have constructed over the past 5000 years since the invention of writing: the Anthology Super-Intelligence of humanities collective mind.
You see, I noticed John Anderson here:
Josh Anderson: I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right <https://leadershiplighthouse.substack.com/p/i-went-all-in-on-ai-the-mit-study>: ‘I forced myself to use Claude Code exclusively to build a product. Three months…. It worked. I was proud…. Then… I needed to make a small change and realized I wasn’t confident I could do it…. Twenty-five years of software engineering experience, and I’d managed to degrade my skills to the point where I felt helpless looking at code I’d directed an AI to write. I’d become a passenger…. 100% [AI] looks like… failure. Not immediate[ly, but]… three months later, you realize nobody actually understands what you’ve built…. Bob Galen… called it perfectly…. “Who owns that product, Josh? You or Claude Code?” The answer was Claude Code. I’d abdicated ownership while telling myself I was being innovative…. [There is a] gap between who you are and who you’ve been pretending AI makes you. You can close that gap by developing your actual skills, using AI as a training partner rather than a replacement. Or you can keep abdicating…
And here we have, once again, what the character King Thamus tells the character god Theuth in the story told by the character Sokrates in Platon’s Phaidros about people who try to learn by reading rather than by discussion:
...Platon: Phaidros <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1636>: ‘Sokrates: “[That will] introduce forgetfulness… [for] they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external…instead of trying to remember from
This excerpt is provided for preview purposes. Full article content is available on the original publication.