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I still code daily without any coding assistance mostly because I believe this is the way to not forget how things are done, even trivial things. My main point

I still code daily without any coding assistance mostly because I believe this is the way to not forget how things are done, even trivial things. My main point against using AI is that I do not want to depend basically on anything when I'm in front of the screen (obviously not including, documentation, books, SO and alike). I closely see people that are 100% dependent on AI for literally everything, even the most trivial daily tasks and I find that truly scarly because it means that brain effort drops drammatically to a minimum level. To be stolen mental effort is not a minor thing. Giving away that at least for me means to become a dependent zombie. Knowledge comes basically from manual trial/error almost daily. Technology being technology if anything has shown us that we can be pushed and manipulated in every single conceivable way. And in my opinion depending on AI is the ultimate way for companies to penetrate and manipulate a very delicate ability of a human being: to think and wonder about things.

sahilagarwal 6mo ago
I generally don't have as much time (or patience / fucks) anymore in my day. So, I use AI 3 days a week. On the other two days, I don't use assistants to code, just ask them to review my work after its done. Helps me keep sane tbh. And keeps the edge sharp.
- wreath 6mo ago
  At work we are literally forced to use AI and it’s part of our performance review. Even though I really like coding by hand, I have to now use AI so I can keep my job. I will try this out though, 2 days per week using AI and the rest handcoding, enough to stave off the inevitable lay off perhaps.
  - irishcoffee 6mo ago
    Surely it can’t be hard to token max at work the same fucking way people have games Jira metrics for years and years. If I’m ever in that position (everything I work on it air-gapped, it’ll never happen) I would make it a priority to figure out how to game that bullshit metric so I could get on with solving actual problems. I imagine a lot of people do this. Metric becomes a target, etc.
    - Izkata 6mo ago
      I recommend trying "make this code more enterprise", it seems to pull in the joke and start overengineering everything and giving them absurd names.
ReptileMan 6mo ago
>I closely see people that are 100% dependent on AI for literally everything, even the most trivial daily tasks and I find that truly scarly because it means that brain effort drops drammatically to a minimum level. To be stolen mental effort is not a minor thing. I find myself thinking more and my thinking is of higher quality. Now I have 30 years of fucked up projects experience, so I know all the rakes I could step into.
- LtWorf 6mo ago
  You probably overestimate yourself.
  - mewpmewp2 6mo ago
    I relate to the idea of having a different level of thinking now with AI. How would you evaluate that someone is overestimating themselves? As in every little thing that used to be too much effort before, I can just easily get the info, the data now with prompt. The data analysis of something, which otherwise might have taken hours to figure out, I can just have AI write scripts for everything, which allows me to see more data about everything that previously was out of touch. Now you will probably ask of course "how do I know the data is accurate?" -- I can still cross reference things and it is still far faster because even if I spent hours before trying to access that data there wouldn't have been similarly guarantees that it was accurate. I am thinking so much more about the things now that I couldn't have possibly time to think about before because they were so far out of reach, or even unimaginable to do in my lifetime. Now I'm thinking about automating everything, having perfect visualizations, data about everything, being able to study/learn everything quickly etc.
    - fluoridation 6mo ago
      It sounds like you're optimizing for a system of self-deception. If you never check how the data is collated, but rather whether the collation appears consistent, you will eventually be left only with data that has the appearance of consistency, regardless of how correct it is.
mewpmewp2 6mo ago
I hear this a lot, but also I'm curious. How can you really forget coding? It doesn't seem to me a thing that I could suddenly forget? Without AI I will feel frustrated that I'm now much slower, but ultimately it's just describing logic. So I'm a bit skeptical of the claim. My brain effort is also on other things now, such as how to orchestrate guardrails, how to build pipelines to enable multiple agents work on the same thing at the same time, how to understand their weaknesses and strengths, how to automate all of that. So there's definitely a lot of mental effort going into those things.
- vjsrinivas 6mo ago
  If you are not practicing an activity consistently, you'll forget some of the finer grained aspects. When I'm coding, I subconsciously create a continuous logic map. Having someone or something just generate (and generate so quickly) destroys that and makes it easier for bugs to slip through.
  - mewpmewp2 6mo ago
    I mean if e.g. AI stopped existing all of sudden, it doesn't mean you would have forgot how to code and couldn't all of sudden anymore, right? You could forget maybe how a certain lib or framework worked or things like that, or more so how you wouldn't have been up to date with all the new ones, but ultimately code can be represented as just functions with input and output, and that's all there is to it. As in how could I possibly forget what loops, conditionals or functions are? I haven't written code myself for 1+ year (because AI does it), but I feel like I have forgot absolutely nothing, in fact I feel like I have learned more about coding, because I see what patterns AI uses vs what I did or people did, and I am able to witness different patterns either work out or not work out much faster in front of my eyes.
    - Jtarii 6mo ago
      A writer will never forget what adjectives, verbs, and nouns are. But if they use LLMs to write for them for years they will be worse at writing on their own.
cpursley 6mo ago
Another perspective: AI reduces brain effort in some domains which actually frees up brain juice that can be applied elsewhere.
- whompyjaw 6mo ago
  Ya this has been my sentiment. If i need to one-off a quick script that does some processing on data, it’s nice to offload that so i can focus on pieces of my code that are more important and interesting to me. The context switching cost is still there tho…
- wolvesechoes 6mo ago
  Show us effects. What amazing breakthroughs were achieved thanks to brain juice freed by AI usage? What great works of art were created?
  - owebmaster 6mo ago
    Exactly. What service got better and/or cheaper?
    - kristofferR 6mo ago
      Most software, other than Windows and macOS, seems to have gotten better more quickly lately. Hard to quantify though, as most, other than the AI companies don't usually advertise their AI usage.
      - dieortin 6mo ago
        Could you give some examples?
        wolvesechoes 6mo ago
        Of course not. If they could, they would already.
        6mo ago
whywhywhywhy 6mo ago
I'm the opposite I don't think I've read a single line of code I've shipped in over 6 months. I'd say it's far more tiring working that way though, you're breaking the satisfaction loop so you never really get the dopamine you used to get coding by hand, when you had a problem figuring it out was like solving a puzzle and you feel satisfaction at the end of it. With AI it feels most of my day is spent being a QA than a puzzle solver and its exhausting and even when it solves difficult problems for me the LLM slot machine is far less satisfying than if I'd figured it out myself.
- confiq 6mo ago
  why I agree with both of you?
- tim-projects 6mo ago
  I find this interesting as someone who does primarily devops, my satisfaction has increased with ai. Since for me the code isn't the puzzle but an annoying inconvenience in the way of completing the entire system. For me QA is a big part of solving the puzzle.
  - app134 6mo ago
    DevOps is a huge part of my job as a systems engineer and I too have found increased satisfaction with AI. I think the reason (for me, at least) is that my markers of success were always perched precariously atop a mountain of systems that I had varying levels of understanding of anyway. Seeing a pipeline "doing the thing" is satisfying regardless of how I sorted it out.
- cableshaft 6mo ago
  Agree with you for my day job (which is coding corporate web app), for sure. I'm still letting A.I. drive more nowadays, but it does feel less fulfilling than it used to. But for my personal projects, I work on games, and by offloading a lot of the coding work to A.I., my puzzle solving is no longer 'how to fix this stupid library spitting stupid errors at me' or 'how to get this shader working' or 'why is this upgrade breaking all the things' and more 'what does this game need in order to be fun and good?', which I find a lot more fulfilling. It's also why I switched my focus to board game design for the longest time. I didn't have to fight my tools or learn some new api or library frequently. And if I wanted to try a new mechanic, I didn't need to spend 20 minutes or 2 hours or 2 days implementing it, I could write something on an index card in five seconds and shift mid-game most of the time. A.I. just brought video games closer to that experience, which actually has made them more fun to work on again, because board games has the immense (financial/logistical if self-publishing or social/networking if attempting to get published through a publisher) challenge of getting physical games published to worry about.
Forgeties79 6mo ago
To add to this issue, a lot of people then offload their mental load and work to the people downstream of their LLM results. Someone on HN put it well the other day: everyone wants to deliver AI results, no one wants to receive them.
dd8601fn 6mo ago
I have always had a problem, worse than most I think, where if I’m away from a language for a bit I lose my ability to write it quickly and competently, real quick. It doesn’t matter if I was quite competent in it… the mechanical bits fade fast. Doing llm assisted work is going to be like pouring bleach on my brain. I can feel it. The more I use it the worse it will be for me. I can still formulate what I need, and problem solve just fine, but all the nuts and bolts evaporate.
- RataNova 6mo ago
  There is a difference between understanding the shape of a solution and keeping the "finger memory" of a language alive
  - dd8601fn 6mo ago
    For sure. I just… I feel really really dumb every time I have to knock the rust off to use a language again.
afarah1 6mo ago
I've had the "problem" of forgetting syntax before any AI, with IDE autocomplete. It was only ever a problem when switching jobs and being expected to write syntactically correct code on platforms without syntax checks or autocomplete. So I did some exercises on such platforms in preparation for interviews. In the real world, reliance on syntax autocomplete and checks was never an issue. The important thing has always been understanding the core concepts of the language and the runtime, e.g. how the event loop works with Node.js and how to write asynchronous and event driven programs.
andai 6mo ago
Recently, after a month of heavily AI assisted programming, I spent a few days programming the good old fashioned way. I spent most of the time confused and frustrated, straining painfully against the problem. I spent most of my 7 hour session this way, and the task was successfully completed. But I was startled by the difficulty. I began to worry that I had given myself some kind of brainrot from disuse. Then I remembered, my goodness, it always felt that way, if I was ever doing something new. That's just what it feels like, grappling with a problem you haven't seen before. It was always as hard as that, I was just no longer used to the feeling. You get used to the difficulty, and then it feels normal. Or indeed: you get used to its absence, and then it suddenly feels overwhelming and "wrong" ! I think maintaining the capacity to tolerate difficulty and discomfort is a "muscle" well worth preserving.
- MengerSponge 6mo ago
  I'm biased, but I think you're on to something. People are writing about this under the broad framing of "cognitive surrender"
RataNova 6mo ago
The danger is not using a tool. We all use tools... The danger is skipping the part where your own brain builds a model of the problem
black3r 6mo ago
> Knowledge comes basically from manual trial/error almost daily. This is the important statement, although I'd swap the word "knowledge" for "experience" here. You can gain "knowledge" from books, but only trial & error will give you experience to know "which" knowledge to use in which situations. And what's important about this in the context of working with AI is the "error" part. You have to experience errors to become truly experienced. And part of the experience is to recognize when you're about to make an error - to avoid it. AI-driven processes mess up our natural trial & error learning curve in multiple ways: - the AI push forces us to ship features faster (cause if we don't, our competitors will), reviews are sloppier, we discover errors later on, the feedback loop gets longer... - using AI to debug and fix errors means we spend less time understanding what the error was about, which means we learn less about how to avoid the error in the first place... - AI itself sounds overly confident, so reading its outputs without previous experience you may be less likely to recognize when it's making an error, which makes it harder for you to recognize when you're making an error trusting it... On the other hand, this last point I tried to make is also why I don't think avoiding AI completely is a good strategy. Whether we like it or not, AI is becoming a part of developer's workflow. And as such, we also need to learn the trial & error process of using AI - what makes AI make errors and how to prompt it to avoid that.
coffeefirst 6mo ago
I really don't understand the people who use it for everything. It's become my first stop for search because it's doing it in bulk—read 50 results and lead me to something useful. But I just got Claude MCP connected to my personal email/calendar/etc and I can't figure out what to do with it. It wrote a summary of my inbox that took as long to read as flipping through my inbox. And since it makes no sense to delegate decision making, I'm not sure what the actual work I'm supposed to give it would be.
Server6 6mo ago
I think your forgetting what programming actually is. Its a way convert instructions into 1 & 0s. The programming language your using is irrelevant. If AI can do the same thing with natural language is just a matter of time before we drop the "programming language" layer and AI just creates programs using straight up machine code.
- premun 6mo ago
  Conceptually, this is correct, but you must account for the fact that some problems are so hard to explain in English and have so many restrictions and strict rules that you end up writing a much longer and much more brittle program. In the end, you need to explain the real world problem as without it, the AI does not know what to do, however smart it is.
AlecSchueler 6mo ago
> Giving away that at least for me means to become a dependent zombie. I suppose people felt the same way in the agrarian revolution and later again with inventions like the plough. Suddenly a lot of people offloaded their food independence onto the work of a few. What might it open up in our lives to be free of knowledge? That said, these machines don't run themselves, if we disengage our minds we might get stuck in a dead end with them.

sahilagarwal 6mo ago

I generally don't have as much time (or patience / fucks) anymore in my day. So, I use AI 3 days a week. On the other two days, I don't use assistants to code, just ask them to review my work after its done. Helps me keep sane tbh. And keeps the edge sharp.

wreath 6mo ago
At work we are literally forced to use AI and it’s part of our performance review. Even though I really like coding by hand, I have to now use AI so I can keep my job. I will try this out though, 2 days per week using AI and the rest handcoding, enough to stave off the inevitable lay off perhaps.
- irishcoffee 6mo ago
  Surely it can’t be hard to token max at work the same fucking way people have games Jira metrics for years and years. If I’m ever in that position (everything I work on it air-gapped, it’ll never happen) I would make it a priority to figure out how to game that bullshit metric so I could get on with solving actual problems. I imagine a lot of people do this. Metric becomes a target, etc.
  - Izkata 6mo ago
    I recommend trying "make this code more enterprise", it seems to pull in the joke and start overengineering everything and giving them absurd names.

ReptileMan 6mo ago

>I closely see people that are 100% dependent on AI for literally everything, even the most trivial daily tasks and I find that truly scarly because it means that brain effort drops drammatically to a minimum level. To be stolen mental effort is not a minor thing. I find myself thinking more and my thinking is of higher quality. Now I have 30 years of fucked up projects experience, so I know all the rakes I could step into.

LtWorf 6mo ago
You probably overestimate yourself.
- mewpmewp2 6mo ago
  I relate to the idea of having a different level of thinking now with AI. How would you evaluate that someone is overestimating themselves? As in every little thing that used to be too much effort before, I can just easily get the info, the data now with prompt. The data analysis of something, which otherwise might have taken hours to figure out, I can just have AI write scripts for everything, which allows me to see more data about everything that previously was out of touch. Now you will probably ask of course "how do I know the data is accurate?" -- I can still cross reference things and it is still far faster because even if I spent hours before trying to access that data there wouldn't have been similarly guarantees that it was accurate. I am thinking so much more about the things now that I couldn't have possibly time to think about before because they were so far out of reach, or even unimaginable to do in my lifetime. Now I'm thinking about automating everything, having perfect visualizations, data about everything, being able to study/learn everything quickly etc.
  - fluoridation 6mo ago
    It sounds like you're optimizing for a system of self-deception. If you never check how the data is collated, but rather whether the collation appears consistent, you will eventually be left only with data that has the appearance of consistency, regardless of how correct it is.

mewpmewp2 6mo ago

I hear this a lot, but also I'm curious. How can you really forget coding? It doesn't seem to me a thing that I could suddenly forget? Without AI I will feel frustrated that I'm now much slower, but ultimately it's just describing logic. So I'm a bit skeptical of the claim. My brain effort is also on other things now, such as how to orchestrate guardrails, how to build pipelines to enable multiple agents work on the same thing at the same time, how to understand their weaknesses and strengths, how to automate all of that. So there's definitely a lot of mental effort going into those things.

vjsrinivas 6mo ago
If you are not practicing an activity consistently, you'll forget some of the finer grained aspects. When I'm coding, I subconsciously create a continuous logic map. Having someone or something just generate (and generate so quickly) destroys that and makes it easier for bugs to slip through.
- mewpmewp2 6mo ago
  I mean if e.g. AI stopped existing all of sudden, it doesn't mean you would have forgot how to code and couldn't all of sudden anymore, right? You could forget maybe how a certain lib or framework worked or things like that, or more so how you wouldn't have been up to date with all the new ones, but ultimately code can be represented as just functions with input and output, and that's all there is to it. As in how could I possibly forget what loops, conditionals or functions are? I haven't written code myself for 1+ year (because AI does it), but I feel like I have forgot absolutely nothing, in fact I feel like I have learned more about coding, because I see what patterns AI uses vs what I did or people did, and I am able to witness different patterns either work out or not work out much faster in front of my eyes.
  - Jtarii 6mo ago
    A writer will never forget what adjectives, verbs, and nouns are. But if they use LLMs to write for them for years they will be worse at writing on their own.

cpursley 6mo ago

Another perspective: AI reduces brain effort in some domains which actually frees up brain juice that can be applied elsewhere.

whompyjaw 6mo ago
Ya this has been my sentiment. If i need to one-off a quick script that does some processing on data, it’s nice to offload that so i can focus on pieces of my code that are more important and interesting to me. The context switching cost is still there tho…
wolvesechoes 6mo ago
Show us effects. What amazing breakthroughs were achieved thanks to brain juice freed by AI usage? What great works of art were created?
- owebmaster 6mo ago
  Exactly. What service got better and/or cheaper?
  - kristofferR 6mo ago
    Most software, other than Windows and macOS, seems to have gotten better more quickly lately. Hard to quantify though, as most, other than the AI companies don't usually advertise their AI usage.
    - dieortin 6mo ago
      Could you give some examples?
      - wolvesechoes 6mo ago
        Of course not. If they could, they would already.
      - 6mo ago

whywhywhywhy 6mo ago

I'm the opposite I don't think I've read a single line of code I've shipped in over 6 months. I'd say it's far more tiring working that way though, you're breaking the satisfaction loop so you never really get the dopamine you used to get coding by hand, when you had a problem figuring it out was like solving a puzzle and you feel satisfaction at the end of it. With AI it feels most of my day is spent being a QA than a puzzle solver and its exhausting and even when it solves difficult problems for me the LLM slot machine is far less satisfying than if I'd figured it out myself.

confiq 6mo ago
why I agree with both of you?
tim-projects 6mo ago
I find this interesting as someone who does primarily devops, my satisfaction has increased with ai. Since for me the code isn't the puzzle but an annoying inconvenience in the way of completing the entire system. For me QA is a big part of solving the puzzle.
- app134 6mo ago
  DevOps is a huge part of my job as a systems engineer and I too have found increased satisfaction with AI. I think the reason (for me, at least) is that my markers of success were always perched precariously atop a mountain of systems that I had varying levels of understanding of anyway. Seeing a pipeline "doing the thing" is satisfying regardless of how I sorted it out.
cableshaft 6mo ago
Agree with you for my day job (which is coding corporate web app), for sure. I'm still letting A.I. drive more nowadays, but it does feel less fulfilling than it used to. But for my personal projects, I work on games, and by offloading a lot of the coding work to A.I., my puzzle solving is no longer 'how to fix this stupid library spitting stupid errors at me' or 'how to get this shader working' or 'why is this upgrade breaking all the things' and more 'what does this game need in order to be fun and good?', which I find a lot more fulfilling. It's also why I switched my focus to board game design for the longest time. I didn't have to fight my tools or learn some new api or library frequently. And if I wanted to try a new mechanic, I didn't need to spend 20 minutes or 2 hours or 2 days implementing it, I could write something on an index card in five seconds and shift mid-game most of the time. A.I. just brought video games closer to that experience, which actually has made them more fun to work on again, because board games has the immense (financial/logistical if self-publishing or social/networking if attempting to get published through a publisher) challenge of getting physical games published to worry about.

Forgeties79 6mo ago

To add to this issue, a lot of people then offload their mental load and work to the people downstream of their LLM results. Someone on HN put it well the other day: everyone wants to deliver AI results, no one wants to receive them.

dd8601fn 6mo ago

I have always had a problem, worse than most I think, where if I’m away from a language for a bit I lose my ability to write it quickly and competently, real quick. It doesn’t matter if I was quite competent in it… the mechanical bits fade fast. Doing llm assisted work is going to be like pouring bleach on my brain. I can feel it. The more I use it the worse it will be for me. I can still formulate what I need, and problem solve just fine, but all the nuts and bolts evaporate.

RataNova 6mo ago
There is a difference between understanding the shape of a solution and keeping the "finger memory" of a language alive
- dd8601fn 6mo ago
  For sure. I just… I feel really really dumb every time I have to knock the rust off to use a language again.

afarah1 6mo ago

I've had the "problem" of forgetting syntax before any AI, with IDE autocomplete. It was only ever a problem when switching jobs and being expected to write syntactically correct code on platforms without syntax checks or autocomplete. So I did some exercises on such platforms in preparation for interviews. In the real world, reliance on syntax autocomplete and checks was never an issue. The important thing has always been understanding the core concepts of the language and the runtime, e.g. how the event loop works with Node.js and how to write asynchronous and event driven programs.

andai 6mo ago

Recently, after a month of heavily AI assisted programming, I spent a few days programming the good old fashioned way. I spent most of the time confused and frustrated, straining painfully against the problem. I spent most of my 7 hour session this way, and the task was successfully completed. But I was startled by the difficulty. I began to worry that I had given myself some kind of brainrot from disuse. Then I remembered, my goodness, it always felt that way, if I was ever doing something new. That's just what it feels like, grappling with a problem you haven't seen before. It was always as hard as that, I was just no longer used to the feeling. You get used to the difficulty, and then it feels normal. Or indeed: you get used to its absence, and then it suddenly feels overwhelming and "wrong" ! I think maintaining the capacity to tolerate difficulty and discomfort is a "muscle" well worth preserving.

MengerSponge 6mo ago
I'm biased, but I think you're on to something. People are writing about this under the broad framing of "cognitive surrender"

RataNova 6mo ago

The danger is not using a tool. We all use tools... The danger is skipping the part where your own brain builds a model of the problem

black3r 6mo ago

> Knowledge comes basically from manual trial/error almost daily. This is the important statement, although I'd swap the word "knowledge" for "experience" here. You can gain "knowledge" from books, but only trial & error will give you experience to know "which" knowledge to use in which situations. And what's important about this in the context of working with AI is the "error" part. You have to experience errors to become truly experienced. And part of the experience is to recognize when you're about to make an error - to avoid it. AI-driven processes mess up our natural trial & error learning curve in multiple ways: - the AI push forces us to ship features faster (cause if we don't, our competitors will), reviews are sloppier, we discover errors later on, the feedback loop gets longer... - using AI to debug and fix errors means we spend less time understanding what the error was about, which means we learn less about how to avoid the error in the first place... - AI itself sounds overly confident, so reading its outputs without previous experience you may be less likely to recognize when it's making an error, which makes it harder for you to recognize when you're making an error trusting it... On the other hand, this last point I tried to make is also why I don't think avoiding AI completely is a good strategy. Whether we like it or not, AI is becoming a part of developer's workflow. And as such, we also need to learn the trial & error process of using AI - what makes AI make errors and how to prompt it to avoid that.

coffeefirst 6mo ago

I really don't understand the people who use it for everything. It's become my first stop for search because it's doing it in bulk—read 50 results and lead me to something useful. But I just got Claude MCP connected to my personal email/calendar/etc and I can't figure out what to do with it. It wrote a summary of my inbox that took as long to read as flipping through my inbox. And since it makes no sense to delegate decision making, I'm not sure what the actual work I'm supposed to give it would be.

Server6 6mo ago

I think your forgetting what programming actually is. Its a way convert instructions into 1 & 0s. The programming language your using is irrelevant. If AI can do the same thing with natural language is just a matter of time before we drop the "programming language" layer and AI just creates programs using straight up machine code.

premun 6mo ago
Conceptually, this is correct, but you must account for the fact that some problems are so hard to explain in English and have so many restrictions and strict rules that you end up writing a much longer and much more brittle program. In the end, you need to explain the real world problem as without it, the AI does not know what to do, however smart it is.

AlecSchueler 6mo ago

> Giving away that at least for me means to become a dependent zombie. I suppose people felt the same way in the agrarian revolution and later again with inventions like the plough. Suddenly a lot of people offloaded their food independence onto the work of a few. What might it open up in our lives to be free of knowledge? That said, these machines don't run themselves, if we disengage our minds we might get stuck in a dead end with them.