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Samuel Johnson, the Unexpected Grandfather of LLMs

Cassia Scheffer

31 Jan 2025 — 1 min read

As many people have I've been trying out a handful of LLMs to assist with coding. I've found them very useful tackling mundane tasks that might otherwise take me a few minutes, or at times hours, to accomplish on my own

This reminds me of a good corruption of a Samuel Johnson quote:

The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.

The real quote is:

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. – https://www.samueljohnson.com/apocryph.html

Thank you to an LLM for uncovering this for me. To me, LLMs are the second kind of knowledge, and very useful for my day to day work. They let me focus on the big picture while taking care of the small details.

Interestingly, the LLM I used also uncovered this quote:

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book. https://www.samueljohnson.com/attentio.html

It is as if Johnson knew the environmental impact of LLMs before computers even existed. An LLM undoubtedly turns over half a library to write one good line of code.

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How Do LLM-Suggested Edits Work in Text Editors

My Distraction-free Work Setup

Assumptions

But First, Why?