Borges' Cartographers and the Tacit Skill of Reading LLM Output — 38 Points on HN
Hacker News·low signal
A thoughtful essay on the emerging cognitive skill of 'reading' LLM output — drawing on Borges' fable of the map that becomes as large as the territory it describes. The author argues that effective use of LLMs requires a new form of literacy: the ability to rapidly assess which parts of generated text carry signal vs. noise, a skill that experienced practitioners develop but rarely articulate. 38 points and 10 comments on HN. For builders: this frames prompt engineering as a reading skill, not a writing skill.