9 ms·

Will AI Replace Human Thinking? The Case for Writing and Coding Manually

180 points by articsputnik 1y ago

crinkly 1y ago
At best it churns out mediocre to poor code so it’ll produce mediocre to poor thinking. I wonder if some of the proponents know where the line is in the art. I suspect not.
unethical_ban 1y ago
The argument against relying on AI for everything is that the humans who curate and architect systems learned what they did through their experience at lower levels. Overutilization of AI is pulling the ladder up and preventing the next generation of software architects and engineers from learning through experience.
- ewf 1y ago
  well said
serbuvlad 1y ago
I think the whole AI vs non. AI debate is a bit besides the point. Engineers are stuck in the old paradigm of "perfect" algorithms. I think the image you post at the beginning basically sums it up for me: ChatGPT o3/5 Thinking can one-shot 75% of most reasonably sized tasks I give it without breaking a sweat, but struggles with tweaks to get it to 100%. So I make those tweaks myself and I have cut my code writing task in half or one third of the time. ChatGPT also knows more idioms and useful libraries than I do so I generally end up with cleaner code this way. Ferrari's are still hand assembled but Ford's assembly line and machines help save up human labor even if the quality of a mass-produced item is less than a hand-crafted one. But if everything was hand-crafted, we would have no computers at all to program. Programming and writing will become niche and humans will still be used where a quality higher than what AI can produce is needed. But most code will be done by minotaur human-ai teams, where the human has a minimal but necessary contribution to keep the AI on track... I mean, it already is.
- nwatson 1y ago
  Yeah, I'm trying to branch out to build things outside my comfort zone. AI already is helpful in my normal day-to-day (backend engineer, mostly Python w/ PyCharm/Datagrip working in monorepo style), but Claude Code helped me graft on a Typescript/Javascript UI ecosystem with an independent Webstorm IDE setup that will integrate well, along with all the presumably latest build tools and package management. The research and self-education I would have needed to do this without Claude would have been extensive, and would have been nowhere as complete. I don't see any point in going back to pre-AI. And I don't generally use AI results blindly, I go back and review and set some breakpoints in an IDE and watch it do its thing.
- zerocharge 1y ago
  Depends on what you do, and what systems you develop for I would reckon. If it's another TODO app or some kind of table + form system that's been done to death - AI can probably have a go at creating a barebones minimal viable product. Targeting code that's outside the sweet spot of the training data ("blurry" area), you'll start to stumble. I've also found agents to be useless in large code bases with distributed logic where parts are in react, web back-end, service system). Slow and unreliable for large systems. Good for small tasks and scaffolding up proof of concepts.
- simianwords 1y ago
  This comment captures it. AI can do 80% of the work. I can review it later. And I spend much less time reviewing than I would have typing up everything manually. I recently used it to add some logging and exception handling. It had to be done in multiple places. A simple 2 line prompt one shotted it. Why do I need to waste time writing boring code?
  - ok_dad 1y ago
    > Why do I need to waste time writing boring code? Some people actually enjoy that, believe it or not.
    - dingnuts 1y ago
apparent 1y ago
It would be good if there were a mode where AI trained the human operator as it worked, to reduce future reliance. Instead of just writing a document or editing a document, it would explain in a good amount of detail what it was doing, and tailor the information to the understanding level of the operator. It might even quiz the operator to assure understanding. This would take more time in the short run, but in the long run it would result in more well-rounded humans. When there are power/internet/LLM outages, some people are going to be rendered completely helpless, and others will be more modestly impacted — but will still be able to get some work done. We should aim to have more people in the latter camp.
- Dlanv 1y ago
  Claude cli has this, called learning mode, and you can make custom modes to tweak it more
  - apparent 1y ago
    Ah, cool. Is this meant to be used for learning specifically, or just something that can be toggled whenever you're using Claude to help you with anything?
    - elliotto 1y ago
      https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-study-mode/ https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-study-mode/ Openai released study mode. I don't think it's anything special beyond a custom prompt that tells it to act as a teacher. But it's a good example of what these bots can do if you prompt them right. The bots as they stand seem to be sycophantic and make a lot of assumptions (hallucinations) rather than asking for more clarification or instruction. This isn't really a core truth to bot behaviour, and is more based around adhering to American social norms for corporate communication - deference to authority etc. You can prompt the bots to behave more usefully for coding - one of my tricks is to tell the bot to ask me clarifying questions before writing any code. This prevents it from making assumptions around functionality that I haven't specified in the brief. For non-coding use cases, I like exploring ideas with the bot, and then every now and then prompting it to steel-man the opposing view to make sure I'm not getting dragged down a rabbit hole. Then I can take the best of these ideas and form a conclusion - hegelian dialectics and all that.
jjallen 1y ago
I have gone from using Claude Code all day long since the day it was launched to only using the separate Claude app. In my mind that is a nice balance of using it, but not too much, not too fast. there is the temptation to just let these things run in our codebases, which I think for some projects is totally fine. For most websites I think this would usually be fine. This is for two reasons: 1) these models have been trained on more websites than probably anything else and 2) if a div/text is off by a little bit then usually there will be no huge problems. But if you're building something that is mission critical, unless you go super slowly, which again is hard to do because these agents are tempting to go super fast. That is sort of the allure of them: to be able to write sofware super fast. But as we all know, in some programs you cannot have a single char wrong or the whole program may not work or have value. At least that is how the one I am working on is. I found that I lost the mental map of the codebase I am working on. Claude Code had done too much too fast. I found a function this morning to validate futures/stocks/FUT-OPT/STK-OPT symbols where the validation was super basic and terrible that it had written. We had implemented some very strong actual symbol data validation a week or two ago. But that wasn't fully implemented everywhere. So now I need to go back and do this. Anyways, I think finding where certain code is written would be helpful for sure and suggesting various ways to solve problems. But the separate GUI apps can do that for us. So for now I am going to keep just using the separate LLM apps. I will also save lots of money in the meantime (which I would gladly spend for a higher quality Claude Code ish setup).
- pilooch 1y ago
  Losing the mental map is the number one issue for me. I wonder if there could be a way to keep track of it, even at a high level. Keeping the ability to dig in is crucial.
  - mt_ 1y ago
    Spend time reviewing outputs like a tech lead does when managing multiple developers. That's the upgrade you hust got in your career, you are now bound to how many "team members" you can manage at a single time. I'm grateful to live in such a time.
  - 1y ago
kjkjadksj 1y ago
It used to be reading and writing were skills. People would strive to get better, usually by steeping themselves in the work of better writers so some rubs off. Now, the llm summarizes the email, so you only have to be so literate to understand bullet points. The llm takes your bullet points and turns them into long form writing, because you can’t write. They say this is necessary because they aren’t good writers, but this creates a self fulfilling prophecy if they just avoid writing entirely. A sad time when people are allowing their ability to read and write fall by the wayside. These used to be skills people valued and took pride in improving for themselves. Now people shut their brain off.
- SirMaster 1y ago
  The people who do this will probably fall behind, and will maybe learn from that lesson in the long run.
  - micromacrofoot 1y ago
    When has that ever happened?
    - SirMaster 1y ago
      You are saying people who took shortcuts and fell behind because of it never learned a lesson from that? Not saying everyone would, but definitely some people do.
      - micromacrofoot 1y ago
        on an individual level it happens all the time, but I'm not sure it's ever happened broadly on a societal level?
  - coliveira 1y ago
    Most people have only one chance to learn reading and writing, when they are kids. After that it gets exponentially harder.
OldGreenYodaGPT 1y ago
Tools like Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex CLI have boosted my productivity massively. They already handle about 90% of the coding work, and I just step in to finish the last 10%. Every month they get better, maybe in a year it’s 95%, in two years 97%, in three years 98%. We can all see where this is going.
- wrs 1y ago
  You are fortunate to have the pre-AI background experience to know how to recognize the 10%. People graduating college right now may never be so fortunate.
  - utyop22 1y ago
    This doesn't just apply to software development - it applies across the board in any form of knowledge. An example would be economics - an LLM can spit out a bunch of words about an economic model. But if you don't take the time to learn, visualise and understand it for yourself - it means nothing to you. And in that case, if you already possess mastery why would you waste your resources playing around with an inferior tool to you? You wouldn't.
- ewf 1y ago
  You're an early adopter, so you're seeing massive gains. But eventually everyone gets the same productivity boost and that becomes the new baseline expectation. Any clever prompting techniques that give you an edge today will evaporate quickly. People figure out the tricks, models absorb them, and tools automate them away. There's no substitute for actually coding to learn software development. For new engineers, I'd strongly recommend limiting AI code generation on real work. Use it to explain concepts, not do the work for you. Otherwise you'll never develop the judgment to know what that 10% actually is.
- jatora 1y ago
  Absolutely agreed. Thinking anything else is nothing but cope, and these comments are FULL of it. it would be laughable if they weren't so gate keepy and disengenuous about it.
- 1y ago
jrm4 1y ago
I find that all of these discussions are rendered somewhat goofy by our very binary view of "programming" and "not programming." It's like asking -- "will robots be good for building things?" Sure, some things. What things? Personally, I'm hoping for the revival of the idea that Hypercard was intended for; yes, let us enable EVERYONE to build little tools for themselves.
- jonahx 1y ago
  > yes, let us enable EVERYONE to build little tools for themselves. It will enable more people, but "everyone" is never, ever going to happen. This is both because (1) many people don't want to do this, no matter how easy it is -- probably the primary reason and (2) many people won't have the ability to do this in a way that is net profitable for them, because their "tool ideas" just won't be good.
  - msephton 1y ago
    Everyone who wants to. Right now the barrier is too high for some people who want to.
    - jonahx 1y ago
      > Everyone who wants to. Yes, and that's a good thing. Though I'd argue the bar has been on a downward trajectory for decades, is now plummeting with AI, and still we don't see a huge influx of the newly enabled. At the margins, yes. Some small business owners, some curious students, etc, are making things they wouldn't have before. But it doesn't feel like a revolution of self-made tools by the non-technical. And I don't think one is coming. And I don't think it's because it's still too hard.
      - msephton 1y ago
        Rome wasn't built in a day, as they say. It takes time for the information to disseminate. Perhaps tools like this will be the watershed moment that speeds up the flow. Like the time back ~1990 when I received GFA BASIC on a magazine cover disk and it unlocked the knowledge that I could make anything I wanted to. It took me 33 years from then to get a Game Of The Year. Good things take time. Hopefully less in future :)
zeropointsh 1y ago
AI can churn out code that works, but usable, secure code is written for humans first; clear, predictable, and safe by design. Until AI can reason like a team lead and think like an attacker, it’s still just guessing. Usability and security aren’t side effects, they’re intentions, and AI doesn’t have those yet. Code without security is useless[0]. [0] https://www.npr.org/2025/08/02/nx-s1-5483886/tea-app-breach-hacked-whisper-networks https://www.npr.org/2025/08/02/nx-s1-5483886/tea-app-breach-...
- gddgb 1y ago
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akomtu 1y ago
AI is using the well known Embrace Extend Extinguish strategy, coined by Microsoft. Today corporations push us to embrace AI by all means possible, and use where it's useful and where it's not useful. Tomorrow AI will extend our ways of thinking and working in such a ways that we'll have to rely on it, like a medicine that you'd rather not use, but got dependent on. And then AI will extinguish us, for its main selling point is it replaces employees, makes them unnecessary. That's the plan, at least.
photochemsyn 1y ago
The replacement of reading books and writing letters with television/video streaming and phone/texting has done far more to depress average human cognitive skills than LLM code and text generation could ever hope to achieve. As far as code generation, there are some intriguing workflows out there. Eg start by having the LLM generate a git repo for your project. Use the DAG for the repo as the guide for more code generation. Embed the code files into a vector database, differentianting between static and dynamic files and re-embed on commits. Use all those data structures in compilers: ASTs, call graphs, dependency graphs - as guides for the AI along with the git repo's DAG. Then if its proprietary code development, run an open source LLM locally to avoid leaking at the embedding and code generation stages. Now, run an 'overnight build' using your local LLM for code generation. Come in next day, review and test all the code the LLM generated. End of the day, commit all the changes that look good, rinse and repeat. The thing here is you are actively involved at every stage - and the same strategies work for any non-coding writing task. Eg structure your prompts carefully like well-designed short essays. Read the LLM output with an eye out for errors and inconsistencies, copy and paste those into the next prompt and demand a critical review. Once the context window gets too big, boil it all down into a vector database for future reference, generate a new summary prompt from that database, rinse and repeat. I'd suggest thinking of yourself as the conductor of an orchestra, but one who knows what the capabilities of every instrument is, so you're actually thinking harder and working harder than you were before you had access to these AI tools. That at least will keep your cognitive skills in tune. P.S. I tend to get much better critical analysis from the LLM if I start all chats with: > "Preliminary instructions: do not engage in flattery or enthusiastic validation or praise of any kind. Do not offer suggestions for improvement at the end of output. If this is clear, respond with "yes, this is clear"." Don't let the LLM give you roses and lead you down the garden path, instead think of it as a politely-adversarial low-trust relationship.
- utyop22 1y ago
  "instead think of it as a politely-adversarial low-trust relationship." Lol... this sounds terrible.
Animats 1y ago
And get off my lawn. That paper has far too many graphs which are totally made up. It's been less than three years since ChatGPT launched. What's this going to be be like in a decade or two?
throwmeaway222 1y ago
Yes. I've been learning how to build houses as my escape hatch. A lot of people like to talk about how AI isn't capable of this and that - the ONLY thing you will be complaining about in 5 years is the Basic Income programs needing to expand quickly and reform so we people can keep their 1.8M mortgages with $2000/mo taco bell income.
absolute_unit22 1y ago
> The case for writing and coding manually I share much of the same ideas about this as the author. For a long time, to make coding more natural (before and after LLMs) and not having to think about certain keywords or syntax, I would create little Anki decks (10-20 cards) with basic exercises for a particular language or tool I was using. One to two weeks of 5-10 minutes/day of doing these exercises (like, how to redirect both stout and strrr into a file, how to read from a channel in go, etc) and I was working without having to pause. Writing code became less disruptive and much easier to get my ideas into a text editor. I’m also the creator of typequicker.com (disclaimer) and we added Code mode as a typing exercise. At first I thought folks wouldn’t be interested. I was pleasantly surprised though; many people are using it specifically for the same reason that the author is talking about.
coffeecoders 1y ago
I think we’ll need to rethink what it means to be “skilled.” Fewer people will write every line of code themselves, but more will need to understand systems end-to-end, ask the right questions, and guide AIs to meaningful outcomes. AI isn’t replacing thinking, it’s changing what we think about. Coding skill won’t disappear; it’ll just evolve.
- Colony8409 1y ago
  This is the direction it was (and should be) heading in anyways. We're pumping out so many CS grads that pure technical skill is less valued than everything surrounding it.
boshalfoshal 1y ago
Yes, it will replace human thinking. Thats quite literally the explicit goal of every AI company. Historically every technological recolution serves to replace some facet of human labor (usually with the incentive of squeezing profits as technology gets cheaper over time, but wages do not). Industrial revolution == automate non dexterous manual labor Information age == automate "computational"/numerical thinking AI == automate thinking Robotics + AI == automate dexterous manual labor
hinkley 1y ago
“I say ‘your civilization’ because once we started thinking for you it really became our civilization.”
niemandhier 1y ago
I think what we see is the final struggle between the Anglo-Saxon concept of Education ( Locke, Dewy) and the German concept of “Bildung” (Humboldt, Herder). The former puts more emphasis on the pragmatic transmission of knowledge and socialisation, while the latter focuses on self formation via the gaining of knowledge. People will always be educated, acquiring skills and being part of a society does not go out of fashion. I am not sure the ideal of the “gebildeter Mensch” will survive. Self discovery through deep engagement with intellectual tasks requires exactly those skills AI tries to automatise.
- utyop22 1y ago
  The thing is, this is already occurring and seems to be OK as long as there exists a class of individuals who provide the intellectual horsepower to keep society moving forward. But I feel very uncomfortable in the fact that people (who for whatever reason) can't make rational and responsible choices, are not being protected and free to exploitation.
thrown-0825 1y ago
ai gen code is slow, tedious to review, generally shit, and a waste of time. if you need gen ai to be an efficient dev then you are bad at your job.
mediumsmart 1y ago
why would the human controlled AI replace the thinking of remote controlled humans thinking they are thinking? Manual enshittification is still a case of enshittification.
skeezyboy 1y ago
they said the same about google. they said the same about writing. even in the 60s ai boom they were saying stuff like this.
gloosx 1y ago
How is it possible for ai to replace human thinking, if ai needs thinking to work in the first place?
Emma_Schmidt 1y ago
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180 points by articsputnik 1y ago

At best it churns out mediocre to poor code so it’ll produce mediocre to poor thinking. I wonder if some of the proponents know where the line is in the art. I suspect not.

unethical_ban 1y ago

The argument against relying on AI for everything is that the humans who curate and architect systems learned what they did through their experience at lower levels. Overutilization of AI is pulling the ladder up and preventing the next generation of software architects and engineers from learning through experience.

ewf 1y ago
well said

serbuvlad 1y ago

I think the whole AI vs non. AI debate is a bit besides the point. Engineers are stuck in the old paradigm of "perfect" algorithms. I think the image you post at the beginning basically sums it up for me: ChatGPT o3/5 Thinking can one-shot 75% of most reasonably sized tasks I give it without breaking a sweat, but struggles with tweaks to get it to 100%. So I make those tweaks myself and I have cut my code writing task in half or one third of the time. ChatGPT also knows more idioms and useful libraries than I do so I generally end up with cleaner code this way. Ferrari's are still hand assembled but Ford's assembly line and machines help save up human labor even if the quality of a mass-produced item is less than a hand-crafted one. But if everything was hand-crafted, we would have no computers at all to program. Programming and writing will become niche and humans will still be used where a quality higher than what AI can produce is needed. But most code will be done by minotaur human-ai teams, where the human has a minimal but necessary contribution to keep the AI on track... I mean, it already is.

nwatson 1y ago
Yeah, I'm trying to branch out to build things outside my comfort zone. AI already is helpful in my normal day-to-day (backend engineer, mostly Python w/ PyCharm/Datagrip working in monorepo style), but Claude Code helped me graft on a Typescript/Javascript UI ecosystem with an independent Webstorm IDE setup that will integrate well, along with all the presumably latest build tools and package management. The research and self-education I would have needed to do this without Claude would have been extensive, and would have been nowhere as complete. I don't see any point in going back to pre-AI. And I don't generally use AI results blindly, I go back and review and set some breakpoints in an IDE and watch it do its thing.
zerocharge 1y ago
Depends on what you do, and what systems you develop for I would reckon. If it's another TODO app or some kind of table + form system that's been done to death - AI can probably have a go at creating a barebones minimal viable product. Targeting code that's outside the sweet spot of the training data ("blurry" area), you'll start to stumble. I've also found agents to be useless in large code bases with distributed logic where parts are in react, web back-end, service system). Slow and unreliable for large systems. Good for small tasks and scaffolding up proof of concepts.
simianwords 1y ago
This comment captures it. AI can do 80% of the work. I can review it later. And I spend much less time reviewing than I would have typing up everything manually. I recently used it to add some logging and exception handling. It had to be done in multiple places. A simple 2 line prompt one shotted it. Why do I need to waste time writing boring code?
- ok_dad 1y ago
  > Why do I need to waste time writing boring code? Some people actually enjoy that, believe it or not.
  - dingnuts 1y ago

apparent 1y ago

It would be good if there were a mode where AI trained the human operator as it worked, to reduce future reliance. Instead of just writing a document or editing a document, it would explain in a good amount of detail what it was doing, and tailor the information to the understanding level of the operator. It might even quiz the operator to assure understanding. This would take more time in the short run, but in the long run it would result in more well-rounded humans. When there are power/internet/LLM outages, some people are going to be rendered completely helpless, and others will be more modestly impacted — but will still be able to get some work done. We should aim to have more people in the latter camp.

Dlanv 1y ago
Claude cli has this, called learning mode, and you can make custom modes to tweak it more
- apparent 1y ago
  Ah, cool. Is this meant to be used for learning specifically, or just something that can be toggled whenever you're using Claude to help you with anything?
  - elliotto 1y ago
    https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-study-mode/ https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-study-mode/ Openai released study mode. I don't think it's anything special beyond a custom prompt that tells it to act as a teacher. But it's a good example of what these bots can do if you prompt them right. The bots as they stand seem to be sycophantic and make a lot of assumptions (hallucinations) rather than asking for more clarification or instruction. This isn't really a core truth to bot behaviour, and is more based around adhering to American social norms for corporate communication - deference to authority etc. You can prompt the bots to behave more usefully for coding - one of my tricks is to tell the bot to ask me clarifying questions before writing any code. This prevents it from making assumptions around functionality that I haven't specified in the brief. For non-coding use cases, I like exploring ideas with the bot, and then every now and then prompting it to steel-man the opposing view to make sure I'm not getting dragged down a rabbit hole. Then I can take the best of these ideas and form a conclusion - hegelian dialectics and all that.

jjallen 1y ago

I have gone from using Claude Code all day long since the day it was launched to only using the separate Claude app. In my mind that is a nice balance of using it, but not too much, not too fast. there is the temptation to just let these things run in our codebases, which I think for some projects is totally fine. For most websites I think this would usually be fine. This is for two reasons: 1) these models have been trained on more websites than probably anything else and 2) if a div/text is off by a little bit then usually there will be no huge problems. But if you're building something that is mission critical, unless you go super slowly, which again is hard to do because these agents are tempting to go super fast. That is sort of the allure of them: to be able to write sofware super fast. But as we all know, in some programs you cannot have a single char wrong or the whole program may not work or have value. At least that is how the one I am working on is. I found that I lost the mental map of the codebase I am working on. Claude Code had done too much too fast. I found a function this morning to validate futures/stocks/FUT-OPT/STK-OPT symbols where the validation was super basic and terrible that it had written. We had implemented some very strong actual symbol data validation a week or two ago. But that wasn't fully implemented everywhere. So now I need to go back and do this. Anyways, I think finding where certain code is written would be helpful for sure and suggesting various ways to solve problems. But the separate GUI apps can do that for us. So for now I am going to keep just using the separate LLM apps. I will also save lots of money in the meantime (which I would gladly spend for a higher quality Claude Code ish setup).

pilooch 1y ago
Losing the mental map is the number one issue for me. I wonder if there could be a way to keep track of it, even at a high level. Keeping the ability to dig in is crucial.
- mt_ 1y ago
  Spend time reviewing outputs like a tech lead does when managing multiple developers. That's the upgrade you hust got in your career, you are now bound to how many "team members" you can manage at a single time. I'm grateful to live in such a time.
- 1y ago

kjkjadksj 1y ago

It used to be reading and writing were skills. People would strive to get better, usually by steeping themselves in the work of better writers so some rubs off. Now, the llm summarizes the email, so you only have to be so literate to understand bullet points. The llm takes your bullet points and turns them into long form writing, because you can’t write. They say this is necessary because they aren’t good writers, but this creates a self fulfilling prophecy if they just avoid writing entirely. A sad time when people are allowing their ability to read and write fall by the wayside. These used to be skills people valued and took pride in improving for themselves. Now people shut their brain off.

SirMaster 1y ago
The people who do this will probably fall behind, and will maybe learn from that lesson in the long run.
- micromacrofoot 1y ago
  When has that ever happened?
  - SirMaster 1y ago
    You are saying people who took shortcuts and fell behind because of it never learned a lesson from that? Not saying everyone would, but definitely some people do.
    - micromacrofoot 1y ago
      on an individual level it happens all the time, but I'm not sure it's ever happened broadly on a societal level?
- coliveira 1y ago
  Most people have only one chance to learn reading and writing, when they are kids. After that it gets exponentially harder.

OldGreenYodaGPT 1y ago

Tools like Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex CLI have boosted my productivity massively. They already handle about 90% of the coding work, and I just step in to finish the last 10%. Every month they get better, maybe in a year it’s 95%, in two years 97%, in three years 98%. We can all see where this is going.

wrs 1y ago
You are fortunate to have the pre-AI background experience to know how to recognize the 10%. People graduating college right now may never be so fortunate.
- utyop22 1y ago
  This doesn't just apply to software development - it applies across the board in any form of knowledge. An example would be economics - an LLM can spit out a bunch of words about an economic model. But if you don't take the time to learn, visualise and understand it for yourself - it means nothing to you. And in that case, if you already possess mastery why would you waste your resources playing around with an inferior tool to you? You wouldn't.
ewf 1y ago
You're an early adopter, so you're seeing massive gains. But eventually everyone gets the same productivity boost and that becomes the new baseline expectation. Any clever prompting techniques that give you an edge today will evaporate quickly. People figure out the tricks, models absorb them, and tools automate them away. There's no substitute for actually coding to learn software development. For new engineers, I'd strongly recommend limiting AI code generation on real work. Use it to explain concepts, not do the work for you. Otherwise you'll never develop the judgment to know what that 10% actually is.
jatora 1y ago
Absolutely agreed. Thinking anything else is nothing but cope, and these comments are FULL of it. it would be laughable if they weren't so gate keepy and disengenuous about it.
1y ago

jrm4 1y ago

I find that all of these discussions are rendered somewhat goofy by our very binary view of "programming" and "not programming." It's like asking -- "will robots be good for building things?" Sure, some things. What things? Personally, I'm hoping for the revival of the idea that Hypercard was intended for; yes, let us enable EVERYONE to build little tools for themselves.

jonahx 1y ago
> yes, let us enable EVERYONE to build little tools for themselves. It will enable more people, but "everyone" is never, ever going to happen. This is both because (1) many people don't want to do this, no matter how easy it is -- probably the primary reason and (2) many people won't have the ability to do this in a way that is net profitable for them, because their "tool ideas" just won't be good.
- msephton 1y ago
  Everyone who wants to. Right now the barrier is too high for some people who want to.
  - jonahx 1y ago
    > Everyone who wants to. Yes, and that's a good thing. Though I'd argue the bar has been on a downward trajectory for decades, is now plummeting with AI, and still we don't see a huge influx of the newly enabled. At the margins, yes. Some small business owners, some curious students, etc, are making things they wouldn't have before. But it doesn't feel like a revolution of self-made tools by the non-technical. And I don't think one is coming. And I don't think it's because it's still too hard.
    - msephton 1y ago
      Rome wasn't built in a day, as they say. It takes time for the information to disseminate. Perhaps tools like this will be the watershed moment that speeds up the flow. Like the time back ~1990 when I received GFA BASIC on a magazine cover disk and it unlocked the knowledge that I could make anything I wanted to. It took me 33 years from then to get a Game Of The Year. Good things take time. Hopefully less in future :)

zeropointsh 1y ago

AI can churn out code that works, but usable, secure code is written for humans first; clear, predictable, and safe by design. Until AI can reason like a team lead and think like an attacker, it’s still just guessing. Usability and security aren’t side effects, they’re intentions, and AI doesn’t have those yet. Code without security is useless[0]. [0] https://www.npr.org/2025/08/02/nx-s1-5483886/tea-app-breach-hacked-whisper-networks https://www.npr.org/2025/08/02/nx-s1-5483886/tea-app-breach-...

gddgb 1y ago
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akomtu 1y ago

AI is using the well known Embrace Extend Extinguish strategy, coined by Microsoft. Today corporations push us to embrace AI by all means possible, and use where it's useful and where it's not useful. Tomorrow AI will extend our ways of thinking and working in such a ways that we'll have to rely on it, like a medicine that you'd rather not use, but got dependent on. And then AI will extinguish us, for its main selling point is it replaces employees, makes them unnecessary. That's the plan, at least.

photochemsyn 1y ago

The replacement of reading books and writing letters with television/video streaming and phone/texting has done far more to depress average human cognitive skills than LLM code and text generation could ever hope to achieve. As far as code generation, there are some intriguing workflows out there. Eg start by having the LLM generate a git repo for your project. Use the DAG for the repo as the guide for more code generation. Embed the code files into a vector database, differentianting between static and dynamic files and re-embed on commits. Use all those data structures in compilers: ASTs, call graphs, dependency graphs - as guides for the AI along with the git repo's DAG. Then if its proprietary code development, run an open source LLM locally to avoid leaking at the embedding and code generation stages. Now, run an 'overnight build' using your local LLM for code generation. Come in next day, review and test all the code the LLM generated. End of the day, commit all the changes that look good, rinse and repeat. The thing here is you are actively involved at every stage - and the same strategies work for any non-coding writing task. Eg structure your prompts carefully like well-designed short essays. Read the LLM output with an eye out for errors and inconsistencies, copy and paste those into the next prompt and demand a critical review. Once the context window gets too big, boil it all down into a vector database for future reference, generate a new summary prompt from that database, rinse and repeat. I'd suggest thinking of yourself as the conductor of an orchestra, but one who knows what the capabilities of every instrument is, so you're actually thinking harder and working harder than you were before you had access to these AI tools. That at least will keep your cognitive skills in tune. P.S. I tend to get much better critical analysis from the LLM if I start all chats with: > "Preliminary instructions: do not engage in flattery or enthusiastic validation or praise of any kind. Do not offer suggestions for improvement at the end of output. If this is clear, respond with "yes, this is clear"." Don't let the LLM give you roses and lead you down the garden path, instead think of it as a politely-adversarial low-trust relationship.

utyop22 1y ago
"instead think of it as a politely-adversarial low-trust relationship." Lol... this sounds terrible.

Animats 1y ago

And get off my lawn. That paper has far too many graphs which are totally made up. It's been less than three years since ChatGPT launched. What's this going to be be like in a decade or two?

throwmeaway222 1y ago

Yes. I've been learning how to build houses as my escape hatch. A lot of people like to talk about how AI isn't capable of this and that - the ONLY thing you will be complaining about in 5 years is the Basic Income programs needing to expand quickly and reform so we people can keep their 1.8M mortgages with $2000/mo taco bell income.

absolute_unit22 1y ago

> The case for writing and coding manually I share much of the same ideas about this as the author. For a long time, to make coding more natural (before and after LLMs) and not having to think about certain keywords or syntax, I would create little Anki decks (10-20 cards) with basic exercises for a particular language or tool I was using. One to two weeks of 5-10 minutes/day of doing these exercises (like, how to redirect both stout and strrr into a file, how to read from a channel in go, etc) and I was working without having to pause. Writing code became less disruptive and much easier to get my ideas into a text editor. I’m also the creator of typequicker.com (disclaimer) and we added Code mode as a typing exercise. At first I thought folks wouldn’t be interested. I was pleasantly surprised though; many people are using it specifically for the same reason that the author is talking about.

coffeecoders 1y ago

I think we’ll need to rethink what it means to be “skilled.” Fewer people will write every line of code themselves, but more will need to understand systems end-to-end, ask the right questions, and guide AIs to meaningful outcomes. AI isn’t replacing thinking, it’s changing what we think about. Coding skill won’t disappear; it’ll just evolve.

Colony8409 1y ago
This is the direction it was (and should be) heading in anyways. We're pumping out so many CS grads that pure technical skill is less valued than everything surrounding it.

boshalfoshal 1y ago

Yes, it will replace human thinking. Thats quite literally the explicit goal of every AI company. Historically every technological recolution serves to replace some facet of human labor (usually with the incentive of squeezing profits as technology gets cheaper over time, but wages do not). Industrial revolution == automate non dexterous manual labor Information age == automate "computational"/numerical thinking AI == automate thinking Robotics + AI == automate dexterous manual labor

hinkley 1y ago

“I say ‘your civilization’ because once we started thinking for you it really became our civilization.”

niemandhier 1y ago

I think what we see is the final struggle between the Anglo-Saxon concept of Education ( Locke, Dewy) and the German concept of “Bildung” (Humboldt, Herder). The former puts more emphasis on the pragmatic transmission of knowledge and socialisation, while the latter focuses on self formation via the gaining of knowledge. People will always be educated, acquiring skills and being part of a society does not go out of fashion. I am not sure the ideal of the “gebildeter Mensch” will survive. Self discovery through deep engagement with intellectual tasks requires exactly those skills AI tries to automatise.

utyop22 1y ago
The thing is, this is already occurring and seems to be OK as long as there exists a class of individuals who provide the intellectual horsepower to keep society moving forward. But I feel very uncomfortable in the fact that people (who for whatever reason) can't make rational and responsible choices, are not being protected and free to exploitation.

thrown-0825 1y ago

ai gen code is slow, tedious to review, generally shit, and a waste of time. if you need gen ai to be an efficient dev then you are bad at your job.

mediumsmart 1y ago

why would the human controlled AI replace the thinking of remote controlled humans thinking they are thinking? Manual enshittification is still a case of enshittification.

skeezyboy 1y ago

they said the same about google. they said the same about writing. even in the 60s ai boom they were saying stuff like this.

gloosx 1y ago

How is it possible for ai to replace human thinking, if ai needs thinking to work in the first place?

Emma_Schmidt 1y ago

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