> I intensely resent them diluting the word “deep” and the word “research” to mean stupidly skimming and summarising existing texts. I would probably use it twice as often if I didn’t have to play along with this degradation.

I suppose that's how I feel about calling LLMs "Artificial Intelligence" - it cheapens and degrades the goal. Broadly it feels like Marketing departments totally have the wheel with no pushback. Maybe it's always been so, though.

This is the best explanation of why I also don't use LLMs and I'm grateful it has been put into words here. I love every reason and explanation given, except for me personally I am still writing code. It's just that at this point in my career I either don't need help writing the code, or I have run into something really challenging and/or obscure and LLMs are no help at all!

>it confidently makes an appalling error within 5 minutes and I completely lose my appetite.

Everyone that uses LLMs has gone through this, everyone knows it can make mistakes or hallucinate, people use it because of the times it is useful, not because of the times it is not useful. As any tool you can use it wrong, the trick is to learn how to use it for good effect (learn as in short trivial learning curve, it isn't rocket science)

>I like writing so much that reading and improving bad writing can be more effort than doing it myself.

Possibly a misconception based on how a non LLM user "interacts" with LLMs, by consuming slop. It's such a generic technology you can use it a million ways, generating text for others to read is like a sliver of how it can be used.

>me already knowing the basics of many many things.

Oh come off it. You are either aware of your ignorance or ignorant of your ignorance, I think you may be in the latter. There's just so much knowledge out there, unless you are some infinitely flexible polymath, I doubt this.

>me not writing much code atm

I agree, I don't write much code with it, I do make questions about software, and maybe a one off script (write me a python script to split a file into n parts), but I don't think writing code ala Cursor or vibecoding is professional.

>me needing precision and high confidence to learn

Yup, if you need high precision LLM isn't the appropriate tool. That said, you can still verify the content, it's not like you trust 100% what your algebra book or your teacher says anyway, you always verify. In any subject you can ask for a source and then look it up. It's not even a verification step, it's just something that you do. You don't ONLY use the LLM, you complement it with Wikipedia and other sources.

In general, this feels very outdated. You don't get any points for posting online about how the LLM got something wrong, while you were complaining that it got 1 answer wrong, someone else fiddled with the prompt and got the right answer.