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AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

• joe_the_user 5mo ago
  Post title is completely misleading relative to the article. Article title: "A.I. Should Elevate Your Thinking, Not Replace It"
• koshyjohn 5mo ago
  [dead]
• CorbenDallas 5mo ago
  There are plenty of engineers, who simply can't think, AI will not change anything in this regard.
  • joe_mamba 5mo ago
    How do you graduate your engineering degree without being able to think? Even my colleagues who cheated their way through uni still needed critical thinking to do that and get away with cheating without being caught. People might hate this but being a good cheat requires a lot of critical thinking.
    • ironman1478 5mo ago
      You don't need a 4.0 to graduate. And even if you got one, a lot of grades are composed of tests, not projects. You can just memorize your way through things if you were dedicated enough. It's not really that hard to get a degree in engineering if your only goal is the degree itself.
      • johndough 5mo ago
        > a lot of grades are composed of tests, not projects (Take home) projects are easier than ever thanks to AI. In the past, you at least had to track down some person to do the work for you.
      • sersi 5mo ago
        That does seem to depend on countries and universities. I do have to say I was appalled by some of the tests I had as an exchange student in the US (will not name the Uni in question but ranked around 60 in us rank). I remember a computer graphics test where a lot of questions were of the type "Which companies created the consortium maintaining the opengl specification?"... it was fully possible to obtain a passing grade just by rote memorization of facts. So I have no trouble believing that in the US it's possible in some unis to get a software engineering degree without understanding or critical thining
    • awesome_dude 5mo ago
      Mate, have you never had to deal with over-confident graduates who think they've got the complete answers, but, in reality, they only have a sliver of the whole picture in their minds?
      • operatingthetan 5mo ago
        That is different than the suggestion that one could graduate with a CS degree and "never think." Which is absurd.
    • lispisok 5mo ago
      Grade inflation and schools passing kids who should fail to game metrics and keep collecting student loans is a problem. I wouldnt consider hiring anybody from my alma mater who didnt score a sandard deviation or higher on the tests.
      • 23df 5mo ago
        Unis imo are irrelvant in the context of software production. Id take someone who didnt finish or dropped out provided they can answer the question below. The only thing worth asking people is: what have you produced? Within this one question is so much detail that any other artifact is moot.
        • joe_mamba 5mo ago
          >Unis imo are irrelvant in the context of software production. Id take someone who didnt finish or dropped out provided they can answer the question below. What you'd take is irrelevant if the HR/recruiter doing the initial screening of resumes is looking at an oversupply of candidates with degrees. Hiring is broken is many ways. Candidates without degrees are faring even worse now are the initial recruiter screening stage due to the poor market. In my EU country, academic inflation is so bad due to free education and psyopping everyone to path of academia, that not having a MSc is basically a red flag to companies for getting a SW job as most candidates have one, which means you're expected to have one too if you want to get a job.
    • spacechild1 5mo ago
      OP should have put "engineers" in double quotes. Many software developers like to describe themselves as engineers although they don't have an actual engineering degree. A lot of software development resembles plumbing more than engineering, so most devs don't really need an engineering degree anyway, but they should be more honest about what they're actually doing and not try to elevate themselves with fancy titles. You are, of course, right that the idea that someone could finish a serious engineering degree without being able to think is ridiculous.
      • dml2135 5mo ago
        You can do engineering without an engineering degree. A degree is just a piece of paper.
    • vips7L 5mo ago
      Half of my graduating class could barely program.
      • spacechild1 5mo ago
        What did you study?
        • vips7L 5mo ago
          Computer Science.
          • spacechild1 5mo ago
            I see. Computer Science is not an engineering degree and it is not about programming. That's what Software Engineering degrees are for.
            • LtWorf 5mo ago
              Software engineers graduates I've met are usually much worse at programming than computer science graduates.
              • traderj0e 5mo ago
                That too
              • whstl 5mo ago
                I'm gonna strongly +1 on this. Most of the "Software Engineering" curricula I've seen is catered towards "getting a job as a programmer", and is mostly focused on languages, frameworks and outdated processes. As an engineer in another discipline, there's no engineering there. I would rank like this: Computer Science > Self Taught > Software Engineering.
                • a96 5mo ago
    • shagie 5mo ago
      A degree is passing the test. Not all degree programs get into more advanced topics nor do they necessarily require that someone is able to work through how to solve a problem that they haven't seen before. -- A lot of students (and developers out there too) are able to pass follow instructions and pass the test. A smaller portion of them are able to divide up a task into the "this is what I need to do to accomplish that task". Even fewer of them are able to work through the process of identifying the cause of a problem they haven't seen before and work through to figure out what the solution for that problem is. -- ... There are also a lot of people out there that aren't even able to fall into the first group without copying and pasting from another source. I've seen the "stack sort" at work https://xkcd.com/1185/ https://xkcd.com/1185/ https://gkoberger.github.io/stacksort/ https://gkoberger.github.io/stacksort/ professionally. People copying and pasting from Stack Overflow (back in the day) without understanding what they're writing. Now, they do it with AI. Take the contents of the Jira description, paste it into some text box, submit the new code as a PR, take the feedback from the PR and paste it back into the box and repeat that a few times. I've seen PRs with "you're absolutely correct, here are the updates you requested" be sent back to me for review again. This is not a new thing. AI didn't cause it, but AI is exacerbating the issue with professional programming by having the people who are not much more than some meat between one text box and another (yes, I'm being a bit harsh there) and the people who need instructions but don't understand design to be more "productive" while overwhelming the more senior developers. ... And this also becomes a set of permanent training wheels on developers who might be able to learn more if they had to do it. That applies at all levels. One needs to practice without training wheels and learn from mistakes to get better.
    • what-the-grump 5mo ago
      I don't know but I can point at more than half of the people that I work with that can't think, and every time they try to, takes a whole group of people that can think to undo their mess, they all have degrees and I don't. So what does that tell me? Better yet, for about 30% having the LLM slop it would have yielded better outcomes, but having them slop something nets terrible slop. But at least I can reshape because even the LLM wont do something that stupid.
    • patrick-elmore 5mo ago
      I've seen it happen multiple times. Engineering degrees are no different than a vast majority of degrees in that if you are good at the read and regurgitate cycle, you can make it through. Not only can you make it through, but you can do it with a very respectable GPA. They come out with a large dictionary of keywords in their arsenal, but no idea how to put them into practice. Some are able to put it into practice and tie it all together. As they see practical examples of those keywords in the real world, it starts falling like dominoes, and at an accelerating rate. For some, it never goes much beyond keywords. The dominoes fall, but it is slow, and they stop falling for extended periods of time for them. Not many mature engineering organizations can tolerate that sort of progression rate. They usually don't last very long at any one place, until they find a company where they can blend into the background due to a combination of company culture, and low complexity systems being worked on.
    • YZF 5mo ago
      The practice of software engineering is not what they teach in university. I would say that today's graduates are IMO a bit better than a few decades ago but there are still many graduating who are just not good at writing computer software and don't really have the aptitude for that (or maybe the interest in getting good). That's what happens when the pipeline of people coming in are people who want to make money and the institution is mostly a degree factory.
  • quantum_state 5mo ago
    Can’t think properly seems to be the real issue. That’s one of the reasons that SE domain is mostly in ruin. AI won’t help, only to delay a bigger mess.
    • taurath 5mo ago
      Ever since the standard office setup went from offices or cubicles to bullpens and hot desks there is less and less time to think, and all of that is a management decision to ship things as fast as possible
  • jfreds 5mo ago
    I agree in part, but I think AI does meaningfully make it harder for leadership to detect their bullshit.
• sharts 5mo ago
  Meh, there’s plenty that rise in their careers while being mediocre.
  • joe_mamba 5mo ago
    The tech industry lost the plot when SCRUM Masters and AGILE coaches were highly paid con-men to waste everyone's time and add no value while raking in the coal. AI doesn't impact something already broken.
    • operatingthetan 5mo ago
      When was tech not bureaucratic and political?
      • joe_mamba 5mo ago
        60's, 70's, 80's, 90's, basically before the Google and Meta found out ads and money printing run the world, and after the tech industry was run by nerds with mullets, New Balance sneakers and khaki shorts.
        • operatingthetan 5mo ago
          Oracle, HP, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Apple, Xerox and countless other names were internally bureaucratic and political in the 80's and 90's. Like famously so.
          • joe_mamba 5mo ago
            Every single one of those companies you mentioned was lean, agile and run by skilled motivated nerds with mullets and thick glasses in the beginning when they started in a garage. And every single major company becomes bureaucratic and political after 30+ years in the business when the original founders are long retired, and the Wall Street friendly beancounters take over, caring only about the quarterly reports.
• sheepscreek 5mo ago
  AI is creating problems. This isn’t one of them. Engineers are going to now think at a higher level of abstraction. No one misses coding in assembly.
  • orblivion 5mo ago
    Compilers are a layer of abstraction that we can ask another human about. Some human is there taking care of it. Until we get to the point where we trust AI with our survival it would be good to be able to audit the entire stack.
    • andsoitis 5mo ago
      any human can read the code an AI produces.
      • hun3 5mo ago
        How can you read a language you didn't learn?
      • kirth_gersen 5mo ago
        for now. some people seem to think we should make ai native programming languages and just let them be black boxes. which is a bad idea imo
      • dawnerd 5mo ago
        Have you tried to shift through a whole lot of vibe coded slop? It’s really mentally draining to see all of the really bad techniques they fall back on just to brute force a solution.
      • cyclopeanutopia 5mo ago
        Nope, not anymore. Many already forgot how to do that and it's not a joke. And putting aside the vanishing skill, there is also an issue of volume.
        • 5mo ago
• nickandbro 5mo ago
  I think there are engineers that can’t think without AI. But the best think with it. Unfortunately, we are now living in a day and age where simply ignoring AI is no longer an option.
  • fnordpiglet 5mo ago
    There were always engineers who didn’t think and depended on crutches around them like senior engineers and politicizing the perf cycle. Most people got into this because their parents told them it makes a lot of money, and they never had the drive and curiosity to develop the passion required to truly think through the problems in computing and computer science. They will continue to use crutches to survive. Those that are driven by the problems for the problems will continue to think and use AI as a tool for leverage. This is no different than any other assistive technology.
• saadn92 5mo ago
  Hard disagree. I feel like I'm thinking a lot more now because I have so many parallel projects going on at the same time. AI has allowed me to really, truly create in a way that I've never done before. Yes, my coding skills probably aren't as sharp as they used to be, but my system design skills are at an all time high. Don't blame the tool.
  • klodolph 5mo ago
    What part do you disagree with? It sounds like you don’t disagree with either the title of the article or its contents. > In talking to engineering management across tech industry heavy-weights, it's apparent that software engineering is starting to split people into two nebulous groups: > The first group will use A.I. to remove drudgery, move faster, and spend more time on the parts of the job that actually matter i.e. framing problems, making tradeoffs, spotting risks, creating clarity, and producing original insight.
    • enraged_camel 5mo ago
      The HN title is heavily editorialized. Actual article title is far less controversial: "A.I. Should Elevate Your Thinking, Not Replace It"
      • klodolph 5mo ago
        Ah, I was thinking of the editorialized HN title.
  • Jcampuzano2 5mo ago
    "Hard disagree because it doesn't affect me personally" There is already research literally showing that on average it is a net loss on focus, learning and critical thinking skills.
    • LtWorf 5mo ago
      I think the type of people who get hyped about the cool thing aren't the kind of people who pay much attention to research and science.
• zulux 5mo ago
  Yes.... and I can't think without compiled languages. Missed out on assembler. Becoming dependent on a technology is to be expected. I'm pretty sure 95% of us are dependent on packaged meat and don't know how to hunt.
  • awepofiwaop 5mo ago
    I'm seeing plenty of internal work where I ask someone about their code, they ask Claude, and reply with "Claude says...". That's substantively different than going from assembly to C.
    • puapuapuq 5mo ago
      I am that someone thinking why you can't ask Claude yourself.
      • koshyjohn 5mo ago
        The better question may be "What value did that person acting as a glorified front-end for Claude create?" (vs. what they were expected to).
      • awepofiwaop 5mo ago
        I wasn't really interested in asking Claude myself, because I wasn't really able to verify the claims being made so it's just noise. I'd hoped that the person who had written the code and put it up for review would be able to.
    • ben_w 5mo ago
      Every time things change, the change itself is different. I remember some of my earlier issues with various languages. `Dim A, B as Int`, in VisualBasic one of them is an Int the other is a Variant, in REALbasic (now Xojo) they're both Int. `MyClass *foo = nil; [foo bar];` isn't an error in ObjC because sending a message to nil is a no-op. Or how, back when I was a complete beginner, if I forgot a semicolon in Metrowerks, the compiler would tell me about errors on every line after (but not including!) the one where I forgot the semicolon. "Docs say", "Compiler says", "StackOverflow says", "Wikipedia says"; either this tool is good enough or it isn't; it not being good enough means we're still paid to do the thing it can't do, that only stops when nobody needs to because it can do the thing. The overlap, when people lean on it before the paint is dry, is just a time for quick-and-dirty. LLMs are in the wet-paint/quick-and-dirty phase. You could get suff done by copy-pasting code you didn't understand from StackOverflow, but you couldn't build a career from that alone. LLMs are better than StackOverflow, but still not a full replacement for SWeng, not yet.
• joshcramer 5mo ago
  First, it was pencil and paper. Then it was calculators. Then computers! It’s a slippery slope, this technology business.
• awesome_dude 5mo ago
  In answer to the headline - it's not, no more than calculators stopped people from thinking. It's changing the way we think, and reason. Speaking as a BE focused Go developer, I'm now working with a typescript FE, using AI to guide me, but it scares the shit out of me because I don't understand what it's suggesting, forcing me to learn what is being presented and the other options. No different to asking for help on IRC or StackOverflow - for decades people have asked and blindly accepted the answers from those sources, only to later discover that they have bought a footgun. The speed at which AI is able to gather the answers from StackOverflow coupled with its "I know what I am talking about" tone/attitude does fool people at first, just like the over-confident half assed engineers we have always had to deal with. Unlike those human sources, we can forcefully pushback on AI and it will (usually) take the feedback onboard, and bring the actual solution forward. Thus proving the engineer steering it still has to know what they are doing/looking at.
• journal 5mo ago
  A.I. is creating engineers who can't WORK without it
  • erdaniels 5mo ago
    I think if anyone is looking for a concise way to talk about the problems with LLM and agentic coding, it's this. People say AI assisted coding but for much of what I've seen (and tried), it's the tool, gateway, and interface to some people's work now.
• 0xbadcafebee 5mo ago
  No, AI is not creating that group of people. They already existed. They were the people who would google for StackOverflow snippets and copy+paste them without even reading the entire snippet, much less understand them. Same people, new tool.
  • clutter55561 5mo ago
    Exactly what I posted as well!
  • koshyjohn 5mo ago
    100% agree. The key difference now though is that it's no longer 'swim or sink immediately' situation - which used to be a forcing function against intellectual laziness where it was a choice.
  • traderj0e 5mo ago
    Many people by now have probably seen a teammate who used to be a good SWE, now spamming slop code that puts all the real work on the reviewer. That's the "second group."
    • therealdrag0 5mo ago
      Tell them no. Thats what I do. I have rejected multiple PRs that were too large and lacked proper design or alignment upfront. With code being so cheap, rejecting it should be just as cheaper. Set cultural standards that devs need to review their code before asking for reviews. Etc etc
      • Kiro 5mo ago
        I don't think it has the effect you think it has. No-one takes a rejection personally anymore since it's so easy to just tell an AI to fix the comments. So a rejection does not make them rethink like it would have back in the day.
        • traderj0e 5mo ago
• stavros 5mo ago
  Skills you don't need, atrophy. Skills you need, don't. It's very simple, and the "you won't have the skills you used to need but don't need any more!" line of reasoning is tired and invalid.
  • miyoji 5mo ago
    That's not how it works, unfortunately. Skills you use stay fresh, skills you don't practice get rusty and fade away. You might need things you aren't using anymore. If you never walk, your legs get weak, you gain weight, your aerobic system loses capacity, and you lose the ability to walk. You don't need it, you say, because you have your car and your mobility scooter and you'll always have these things. Your crutches don't make you weaker, you can still do everything the walkers can do, you say. Good luck with the nature hike!
    • stavros 5mo ago
      Sure. What are these programming skills you never need but that you're going to need at some indeterminate time in the future?
  • mtrifonov 5mo ago
    Half-agree. "Skills you need, don't atrophy" assumes you know which skills you need. You usually don't, until something happens and the skill that would've caught it is the one you stopped maintaining. Most "I didn't realize I needed that" moments arrive after the atrophy is already done.
• jasonjmcghee 5mo ago
  There are plenty of engineers that couldn't work without a modern IDE or in languages without memory management. Or without the ability to use a library from GitHub / their package manager. It doesn't feel THAT much different to me. "Engineer" as a term might drift. There are "web developers" that can only use webflow / wordpress.
  • bpye 5mo ago
    At least today, it isn't practical for most people to run these models locally- I think adding a dependency on a cloud service is different enough to some local (possibly open source) tool like an IDE.
    • jasonjmcghee 5mo ago
      Slack, GitHub, Figma, AWS, etc Lots of people use firebase, supabase etc. Many people's jobs are centered around using Salesforce It all makes me uncomfortable- I want to be able to work without internet. But it's getting more difficult to do it
    • StrauXX 5mo ago
      Self hosting at a reasonable scale is much cheaper than people think. I am running clusters of DGX Spark machines with BiFrost load balancers in our company and for client projects. They work flawlessly! 128 GB unified memory, Nvidia chip and ARM CPU for just around 3k€ net. They easily push ~400 input and ~100 output tokens per second per device on say gpt-oss-120b. With two devices in a cluster, thats enough performance for >20 concurrent RAG users or >3 "AI augmented" developers. And they don't even pull that much power.
      • byzantinegene 5mo ago
        factor in depreciation and energy costs, and a subscription might just be cheaper.
        • StrauXX 5mo ago
• _pdp_ 5mo ago
  Huberman: Your brain has a region that only grows when you do things you don't want to do ...or as I interpret it your brain grows only when it does things that are difficult. If you remove the difficulty, it will atrophy into a hum of a mindless chit-chat. Engineering the data structures and control flows from scratch is a completely different than asking an LLM to scaffold them for you.
  • clutter55561 5mo ago
    I love programming, but I don’t love working. I’m about 10 years away from retiring and can’t wait. Does that count? ;-)
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  • operatingthetan 5mo ago
    Huberman is a grifter.
• erxam 5mo ago
  Here's the question I want to posit and nobody who's against AI has managed to answer satisfactorily: what is it in for me if I were to acquire all those skills? I don't give a shit about this career. I don't give a shit about engineering. I despise every second of it. There's nothing to aim for other than being a drone that does whatever is asked of it. If AI can reduce my mental workload, why wouldn't I want to delegate everything over to it so I can save my faculties for what I truly enjoy? For the art of a worthless craft?
  • _pdp_ 5mo ago
    Some people enjoy working with computers. :) It is not always about the money. It is also about having fun and learning new things. For you, it seems that you are not cut for it judging from what you say. So yes, use LLMs.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  • sumeno 5mo ago
    Why are you employable if the AI does everything for you?
    • deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    • erxam 5mo ago
      Mostly to do the work that AI can't do just yet. I've got the feeling that, by the time AI can do those jobs, we'll be mired in bigger issues.
  • LtWorf 5mo ago
    I mean… there's other jobs in the world. If you chose to do something you hate, that's maybe a bit your fault too?
    • erxam 5mo ago
      Tell me where these mythical jobs that won't leave me broke as shit and that I'll enjoy are. I'm very much a humanities person, and it was already a sad tragicomedy of a sphere before AI hit the ground. It's probably even more dire now, let's be real. And I don't have the personality for running a start-up or any company, unfortunately. I'm extremely risk-averse and withdrawn. If I really had no other choice, I'd probably have to budget in a ton of... chemical helpers (stimulants).
• m4rkuskk 5mo ago
  Before AI I would spend multiple days mapping out my database tables and queries while now I ask AI to propose multiple different approaches and I pick the best one. But then on the other hand I’m working on 10 features at the same time and have to carefully look through them. But I can see that I’m totally dependent on the AI now. Creating a full plan by yourself feels like a waste of time, since you know the AI can create the same or better plan in a split second. So when Claude is down, I end up not being productive at all.
  • nkrisc 5mo ago
    > Creating a full plan by yourself feels like a waste of time, since you know the AI can create the same or better plan in a split second. It IS a waste of time if your only goal is the creation of the plan. However, one must be very self-aware of their goals because if one of the unacknowledged ones is to retain the ability to create plans, then you must continue creating plans yourself.
• halamadrid 5mo ago
  This is true. Speaking only based on personal experience. My team had started treating AI like a super intelligent being. “AI suggested we do it that way” And we’ve been degrading our systems rapidly for last several weeks. We’ve decided to pause and reflect and change how we use AI on tasks that are not dead simple.
• Unmotivator2677 5mo ago
  That why I don't use AI for any personal projects, I like to keep my mind sharp. Unless it's a projects that incorporates AI in some way, but don't use AI to code it. But at work I don't care, I do what I am paid for, if my manager wants me to entirely vibe code using Claude, his choice, I will not be the one paying for technical dept that creates.
  • beej71 5mo ago
    100% agree. In the middle ground: I'm putting together exercises for a C/Systems programming class I'm teaching in the fall. Partway through this, for some reason [cough procrastination cough], I thought it would be fun to implement them in Scheme. My Scheme was already poor, and what meager skills I had are completely rusty. I used Claude to great effect as a tutor for that, but didn't have it code any of the solutions at all, of course. I could tell I was leveling up fast as I coded the things up. Gotta use it in the right way if one wants to sharpen ones skills.
• chromacity 5mo ago
  Aaand it's the second "AI is bad" story on the front page today that's evidently generated by AI.
• srcreigh 5mo ago
  Is it wise to understand everything that AI does for you? Let’s say a person has 10 units of learning per week. Is the author actually claiming that that person must not deliver any results beyond their 10 units? It makes some sense to have say 20 units of results and prioritize which ones to fully comprehend. I suspect APIs / libraries / languages / platforms will have more churn due to AI. New platform new system need to learn. Once every 5 years might become every year or even more frequent. That would be a sort of inflation of knowledge and skills. It would affect the decision making about how to spend one’s 10 units per week.
  • addaon 5mo ago
    > Let’s say a person has 10 units of learning per week. This is… not how humans work? If you have the time and energy to learn ten things, and then spend time babysitting a random number generator to produce evidence of 10 more units of work, you’re paying an opportunity cost compared to someone who spends the time learning an eleventh thing. You can argue who has more short term value to a company… but who is the wiser person after a thirty year career?
  • koshyjohn 5mo ago
    > Is the author actually claiming that that person must not deliver any results beyond their 10 units? No, I'm claiming that if someone or something else produced your 10 units of work, you better be able to verify that those 10 units of work are of at least the same quality as you producing them yourself. This is the bare minimum and not something to shift onto other people reviewing your work. Beyond that, if that's all you do, you are basically proving you're replaceable. If you're smart, you'll reallocate intellectual capacity that was freed up by A.I. onto something A.I. can't do today.
  • SkyPuncher 5mo ago
    It's really no different than managing people. Managers simply cannot know all of the details of what their reports write. They have to build abstractions.
• conqrr 5mo ago
  This is a huge concern and I fully agree with the post. Even though one might think I am not fully giving into AI, this was always the case etc. It still affects YOU and everyone else. 1. Software, often, isn't built in vacuum. Lots of companies are shoving AI down throats like it or not. Most Bigtech is heavily using metrics to get to 100% AI generated code. Reviewing is a nightmare. 2. New entrants (new grads etc) are largely AI first and are losing out on the safety and reliability aspects that are enforced automatically when you learn coding without AI. IMO, teams need to agree on a set of principles on AI usage, concrete examples of where and how to use it. Perhaps its much more useful in parts of your system that's faster evolving and doesn't have too much core logic like testing frameworks etc Simply discarding it as 'yet another tool' is part of the problem.
• staticshock 5mo ago
  The eloquence with which this point gets (repeatedly) made is continuing to improve each next time I read it. However, I still feel like we haven't nailed it. That is, we are not yet at the "aphorism" stage of the discourse (e.g. "the medium is the message", "you ship your org chart", "9 mothers can't make a baby in a month"), in which the most pointed version of this critique packs a punch in just a few words that resonate with the majority of people. That kind of epistemological chiseling takes years, if not decades. And AI certainly won't do it for us, because we don't know how to RL meaning-making. Edit: 9 babies → 9 mothers
  • xnx 5mo ago
    This concept won't reach that point because when you chisel too hard it crumbles. There are countless lower level tasks that typical programmers no longer learn how to do. Our capacity for knowledge is not unlimited so we offload everything we can to move to the next level of abstraction.
    • ua709 5mo ago
      I get your point, I just wonder how accurate it is. We basically never look at the output of the compiler, so I agree that tool allows one to operate at a higher level than assembly. But I always have to wade through the output from AI so I’m not sure I got to move to the next level of abstraction. But maybe that’s just me.
      • willhslade 5mo ago
        Are compilers deterministic?
        • 23df 5mo ago
          For all intents and purposes yeh. Its really about the variance in actual outcomes vs the expected. The variance is not much is it? With LLMs that absolutely isnt the case.
        • ua709 5mo ago
• xyproto 5mo ago
  Calculators and computers are creating engineers that can't think without them either. There are many problems with AI, but from my point of view, the title has not thought things through.
  • AndrewDucker 5mo ago
    We teach kids basic maths before we give them calculators. University degrees certainly used to teach computing fundamentals without you having a computer in front of you.
    • xyproto 5mo ago
      I am all for taking AI out of education, like China recently announced that they will do.
• samuelknight 5mo ago
  We are in a transition phase where you need systems and coding skill but you can't be sufficiently productive without AI.
• Waterluvian 5mo ago
  I think AI can generally be utilized in two ways: 1) you use it to help write code that you still “own” and fully understand. 2) you use it as an abstraction layer to write and maintain the code for you. The code becomes a compile target in a sense. You would feel like it’s someone else’s code if you were asked to make changes without AI. I think 2) is fine for things like prototypes, examples, references. Things that are short lived. Where the quality of the code or your understanding of it doesn’t matter. I think people get into trouble when they fool themselves and others by using 2) for work that requires 1). Because it’s quicker and easier. But it’s a lie. They’re mortgaging the codebase. And I think the atrophy sets in when people do this.
  • kylebyte 5mo ago
    And any push to use 2 to build infra to make 1 easier is hard to sell when a lot of engineers think AI will be able to perfectly do 1 in some nebulous time in the near future.
  • p_stuart82 5mo ago
    the thing is it doesn't even feel like mortgaging. shipping, features going out, everything looks fine. then something breaks and you realize you can't debug your own code without asking the model again.
    • pona-a 5mo ago
      It feels like an addiction. Normal coding requires sustained attention, you can sense how deep you are in the progress and when you're too tired to continue, but with LLMs the next feature always feels like another prompt away, having sessions go well into the early morning/late-night. You rationalize you can quit, that you've been reading the source and each diff enough to "understand" the codebase. But the truth is when the rate limit runs out, you'll be absolutely helpless, crawling back for extra-usage, until you finally see the total bill at the end of the month.
      • anygivnthursday 5mo ago
• clutter55561 5mo ago
  AI isn’t creating the problem, it is just showing the problem. Those who did not want to learn before AI did so reluctantly, mixing Google and SO. Now they ask AI. An existing problem found a new solution. Personally, I really enjoy using AI. I have created my own cascade workflow to stop myself from “asking one more question”. Every session is planned. Claude and Codex can be annoying as hell (for different reasons). Neither is sufficiently smart for me to trust them. I treat them as junior devs who never get tired, know a lot of facts but not necessarily how to build.
  • rangestransform 5mo ago
    Funnily enough, I learned to code “depth first” by putting together enough documentation examples and stackoverflow answers to reach a working Android app, long before I learned to code “breadth first” in school.
  • YZF 5mo ago
    I wrote tens of thousands of lines of code before Google and SO. I also enjoy using AI. It makes it easier to get mundane work done quickly. Junior devs who never get tired is a great analogy. It's a force multiplier and for people with limited time (meetings, people management, planning etc.) they enable doing a lot in limited time. I can relate to more junior people being worried and/or some senior people concerns of quality though. I get a task done, review it, get another task done. I won't let it build something large on auto-pilot. One thing that should be noted is that life was simpler back then. You could know the syntax of C or Pascal. You knew all the DOS calls or the standard libraries. You knew BIOS and the PC architecture. I still used reference manuals to look up some details I didn't have in my head. Today software stacks tend to be a lot more complicated.
• hpbc5 5mo ago
  Theory of Bounded Rationality and its implications is something they should teach everyone.
  • koshyjohn 5mo ago
    Thank you for sharing this. We are all less rational than we imagine ourselves to be, even if we're hyper-critical of ourselves and exercise a lot of intellectual humility.
• Chrisszz 5mo ago
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• julienfr112 5mo ago
  Structure engineer can't either any more build bridge or tower without CAD or FDM
• tripleee 5mo ago
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• smj-edison 5mo ago
  On the point of avoiding the struggle of learning, I think it's easy to swing too far the other direction and go back to not using modern development tools. I think it is doing a new learner a disservice by saying something like "don't use GDB/REPL/AI tool to learn, since you'll never learn the fundamentals". I think all of these tools allow for learning, if that's how the learner engages with them. So I hope that AI becomes integrated in the learning process, as far as it accelerates and doesn't replace understanding.
• TrackerFF 5mo ago
  For all we know, we're in the early stages of making traditional (software) engineering obsolete. As in, we don't know if the role of software engineer as we know it today will still exist in 10-15-20 years. I mean, right now we're at the stage where any user can get AI to make you software to solve very specific things - almost no technical knowledge needed. My prediction is that first will software engineers be rendered obsolete. After that, small businesses will disappear, as users can simply get those products/services directly via AI.
  • 23df 5mo ago
    Your prediction is... missing so much detail of how that prediction actually happens that it is pointless. This is my big dislike re. the discussion of LLMs and the effect of AI more broadly. Unless you bother to make an effort in going deeper why post it? Theres no value. The same stuff has been posted for months and even years at this point.
    • TrackerFF 5mo ago
      When GPT 3.5 was released, it could handle maybe a 500 LOC codebase. Experienced engineers were calling it cute, but zero threat to actual programmers. Then it became thousands. Now models can handle and operate on code bases with hundreds of thousands LOC, even low MLOC. So in just 3.5 years we've gone from LLMs being cute toys, to being powerful enough to actually replace junior engineers. Even if we hit a new AI winter tomorrow, the proverbial damage is already done.
      • ekeke 5mo ago
        What damage lmao? Let’s see the llm producers raise the price to what is necessary to generate viable returns. BTW they need to make enough to finance reinvestment internally… so it’s a lot more than you think. When they raise the price firms will then have to do a deep dive analysis on what to do - for they cannot see operating expenses climb incrementally without seeing revenue and costs of operations go in a favourable direction. It’s easy when prices are lower than they should be. Your prediction is missing all this detail. So….
• dyauspitr 5mo ago
  Convenience is king. We became fat and unhealthy because high calorie foods are cheap and easy. We will become stupid because AI will do our thinking for us. There’s no way around it. Only a small percentage of the population are capable of perpetual self control. The old world forced you to be healthy, there was no other choice. Now there are like 15 things you have to have self control to do the hard work at even though you can get the same results the easy way. Working out, dieting, “proper” social interaction, sleep timing, child rearing, social meetups, career networking etc. The list is never ending and none of it is organic like it used to be.
• teaearlgraycold 5mo ago
  I think many of us have interviewed people with 10+ YoE, and resumes that seem impressive, and then seen them fail to do much of anything in evaluations. I expect this problem to get significantly worse. There will be a class of people tucked into organizations where they can get away with sitting in meetings and YOLOing AI code for years.
• fermatf 5mo ago
  For couple of last weeks, I use AI to speedup my thinking process. Instead of think about something to come up to conclusion, I let AI brainstorm for me and then select. Not for everything, but I found it faster with AI. Having taste on select the ai output is important though.
• mrdootdoot 5mo ago
  I’ve never been busier and more challenged than I am now.
• naveen99 5mo ago
  Employees should elevate your thinking not replace it.
• luckystarr 5mo ago
  The way I use AI now feels more exhausting than the programming I did for the last 20 years. I pose a problem, then evaluate proposals, then pick the one I think is the "right one"(tm), then see the AI propose a bunch of weird shit, then call it out, refine the proposal until it feels just about right (this is the exhausting part), then let it code the proposal. The coding will then run for 1-5 hours and produce something that would have taken me at least 2 or 3 weeks (in that quality). After 5 hours or so of doing this planning, I'm EXHAUSTED. I never was exhausted in this manner from programming alone. Am I learning something new? Feels like management. :)
  • m463 5mo ago
    I think one of the benefits of AI is that it will get started, and keep going. But maybe pacing/procrastination might be relief valves?
  • whatspt_anyway 5mo ago
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  • dwaltrip 5mo ago
    I feel this as well. I think it’s something to do with having to be more “on” as you slowly work with the LLM to define the problem and find a reasonable solution. There’s not much of a flow-state. You have to process mountains of output and identify the critical points, over and over, endlessly. And it will always be an off in this unsettling little way, even when it’s mostly quite good. It’s jarring. The strange sorts of errors and reasoning issues LLMs have also require a vigilance that is very draining to maintain. Likewise with parsing the inhuman communication styles of these things…
    • luckystarr 5mo ago
      Its the "unsettling little ways", right. So you can't skip whole paragraphs, you literally have to read everything. And sometimes its worded in ways I don't understand at all (due to missing implications that the LLM conveniently omitted), so I have to re-ask it about that point as well. For every major feature or work-unit it takes up to 2 or 3 hours. I figured out some patterns in the way it behaves and could put more guard-rails in place so they hopefully won't bite me in the future (spelled out decision trees with specific triggers, standing orders, etc.), but some I can't categorize right now.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• Deeds67 5mo ago
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• alecco 5mo ago
  CoRecursive had a really good episode about this last August: "Coding in the Red-Queen Era" https://corecursive.com/red-queen-coding/ https://corecursive.com/red-queen-coding/
• dannersy 5mo ago
  No one uses it this way, despite what people say. They hit any sort of wall and then ask the robot. Thought ends.
  • girvo 5mo ago
    Same way everyone gives lip service to reviewing output. I know for a fact that at work most don't, not deeply/properly. You basically can't and hit the volume that's been demanded.
    • 23df 5mo ago
      I mean the workplace dynamics are such that nobody really cares unless they find themselves in a position of committing something that could get them fired. Most companies dont treat their workers all that well. Why would you as a worker bother doing everything pristine? Theres no reward for you. The management of the company will fire you the day they see fit anyway. Not to mention companies tend to give higher salary raises to those who leave and later return - a true slap in the face of 'loyalty'.
      • dannersy 5mo ago
        While I agree, I think that the reward is that when I write things myself I have to revisit that code much less frequently than those who are vibing their services. I'm sure someone will tell me that the person didn't prompt it right. Anyway, until we no longer live in this crumbling semblance of a capitalist society, then I will continue to do my job to not just keep it but also make my life easier.
    • nunez 5mo ago
      it's practically impossible when Claude flings like 1000-line diffs to your face and the tests are green
      • girvo 5mo ago
        Yeah I know. Which is why I wish we’d (the royal we) all stop pretending and lying about it haha.
• bimbobruno 5mo ago
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• eleumik 5mo ago
  Bellissimo
• bilsbie 5mo ago
  It’s weird I have basically a free private tutor in any subject and I use it a lot. Yet nothing has actually changed.
• throwyawayyyy 5mo ago
  > Going back to the analogies: This is like copying answers through university and then showing up to a job that requires independent thought. That's exactly what is happening now. I wouldn't even call it an analogy, I'd call it an example of where AI is already having a baleful effect. FWIW I don't disagree with the article's thesis or the examples: yes, absolutely, if used well AI can elevate engineers in exactly this way and it behooves us engineers to use it in that way. We can also say that the deliberate design of the AI systems we are constantly being exhorted to use inclines them towards work-slop and abdicated thinking.
• hibouaile 5mo ago
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• nengil 5mo ago
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• oxag3n 5mo ago
  > split people into two nebulous groups shows both groups using AI differently. Hard to continue reading the article that excludes your group entirely.
• cvanelteren 5mo ago
  Wrote a similar take on it here:https://thefriendlyghost.nl/chinese-room-ai/ https://thefriendlyghost.nl/chinese-room-ai/
• 3vo-ai 5mo ago
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• archfrog 5mo ago
  Very apt headline, IMHO. I have been an ardent opponent of AI since it came up a few years back. I refuse to vibe code and I refuse to let AI think for me. I won't be an AI controller. However, two days ago I found a nice, personal use case for AI: Advanced writing checks (grammar checks, mostly, and some rewordings) in Word using a rather expensive app. I write a lot of US English, despite it not being my native language, and AI is now helping me to write much better than I did before. Also, I discovered that I am much worse at writing Danish than I was believing. In fact, I think I am better at writing US English than at Danish, that's a bit surprising as I am a Dane. No AI was used during the writing of this entry, but I dearly love the writing tool already! I have heard similar stories from friends who say that AI is very good at summarizing long documents and stuff like that. So, I personally think that AI CAN elevate one's thinking. I am learning more about Danish and US English grammar every day, now, than I did during a decade before. Writing is suddenly so fun because it involves growing my skills.
• HgT3 5mo ago
  It doesn't elevate thinking no matter how you use it. It is a lookup tool at best. For the new prompt engineers I suggest the following title: MCSE => Microsoft Certified Slop Engineer
• woeirua 5mo ago
  I don’t get why we shouldn’t outsource our thinking to the AI. As it becomes more capable, eventually it will be more competent than the average engineer. At that point companies should be _requiring_ the AI to make the larger decisions. By the end of this year AI might be better than all but the very best engineers. Then what?
  • apsurd 5mo ago
    that's a lot of speculation based on one year of data. We don't actually have the results yet, is the main issue as i understand.
• 1ncorrect 5mo ago
  ‘AI’ is my newest litmus test for whether who I’m engaging with should be taken seriously or not. ‘AI’ doesn’t exist, and LLMs have vanishingly narrow legitimate justifiable use cases. Any output from one is intrinsically, explosively, imprecise, and can’t be trusted to be build upon without specialist treatment. I’m yet to identify any application of a LLM which can rationally be mistaken for intelligence. Anyone who persists in referring to LLMs as ‘AI’ is either betraying they don’t understand what they’re talking about, or they’re invested too deeply in an active grift.
  • j-conn 5mo ago
    > ‘AI’ doesn’t exist, and LLMs have vanishingly narrow legitimate justifiable use cases. … I’m yet to identify any application of a LLM which can rationally be mistaken for intelligence. What’s the opposite of AI psychosis? Burying your head in the sand? Because anyone who could write this unironically today is certainly afflicted.
    • 1ncorrect 5mo ago
      No one who is impressed by the current applications of LLMs should be in any way involved with making decisions which affect those not similarly cognitively impaired. It’s no different to religions or economics.
      • sirsau 5mo ago
        Hard to argue with you when disagreeing with your point makes me cognitively impaired.
        • 1ncorrect 5mo ago
          I always welcome, and look forward to, being proven wrong.
  • koshyjohn 5mo ago
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• kajaktum 5mo ago
  I am rebuilding numba. It is very hard for me to imagine doing it by hand. I tried it a couple of years ago but it was excruitiangly painful. It was slow and messy. So many small things that gets stacked on top of each other over years of abstraction. I am doing it again using LLM. Legitimately, things that would have taken weeks is now done overnight. I still have to look at the code, at the generated C output, still have control over the architecture to make it easy for me and the LLM to work with in the future, etc Is this replacing my thinking? I am not sure. I suppose I would have learnt a lot more about compilers/transpilers had I preserver through it for months with manual writes and rewrites but I would solely be working on this. Instead, I also had some time to write a custom NFS server support for a custom filesystem in Golang.
  • patrick-elmore 5mo ago
    I too worry about the aspects that using AI is replacing in my thought process. I've built a sophisticated enough system to where agents can go out and determine the changes that need to be made for entire features and pretty much nail it out of the box. Everything is laid out in high detail during the planning phase. The implementation phase of actually writing the code is almost always unremarkable. I have found myself going out and actually reading code less and less over the past year. I would be lying if I said that there are not fairly regular moments where I question the comfort level I have obtained with the system that I have built. I've seen it work with such a high accuracy and success rate so many times that my instinct at this point is to not question it. I keep waiting for this to really bite me in the ass somehow, but it just keeps not happening. Sure, there have been minor issues that have slipped through the cracks that caused me to backtrack, but that is nothing new. The difference is that with the previous way, I had painstakingly written that code and had a much more personal relationship with it. The code was the problem. Now whenever that does happen, I'm going back to the system and figuring out why it didn't get the answer right on its own, or why it didn't surface the whole thing in the plan to me prior to implementation.
  • beej71 5mo ago
    > Is this replacing my thinking? I'm extremely confident the answer is yes. But we have to judge how much value that particular thinking has. As an instructor, I've implemented linked list functionality a zillion times. I'm on the long tail of skills-gain from each reimplementation. But every time I implement it, I'm gaining a little more. Now, is it worth it? Probably not. The time spent on that marginal gain would be better spent implementing something more novel by hand. So punting to an LLM, while it costs me, might be a net gain in that case. But implementing another compiler? Hell yeah, that would be replacing my thinking. I've only ever made one PL/0 compiler plus that one yacc thing in compiler theory class, and those were a long time ago. We should quantify the loss of thinking when we decide how much to punt the code creation to someone or something else.
• phpisatrash 5mo ago
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• techpulselab 5mo ago
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• dkrich 5mo ago
  This is so spot on and I’ve been harping on this for about two years based on my own professional experiences. The surprising thing, though, is that upper management is ostensibly cool with incompetent people using AI to produce things that are clearly not accurate and have no idea whether it is or not. I believe this is because upper management themselves believe AI is much more accurate in its current form than it is. It’s not clear what if anything will change this but I believe many organizations are rotting from within because they no longer have stringent requirements.
  • Havoc 5mo ago
    It’s because senior management builds processes with a base assumption of unreliability because a good chunky of employees are. Thats why they’re relaxed - it’s just switching from one sort of unreliability to a slightly different flavour
• shumatsumonobu 5mo ago
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• protocolture 5mo ago
  This is why I feel like its fine that AI stay as inaccurate as it is. I learn so much arguing with it.
• lvl155 5mo ago
  95% of the population is educated to think inside of the box and just rely on repetition/memorization. There’s not a lot of thinking happening in this world outside of a very small group of people. AI is not going to change that reality at least not until we educate our children for the AI age.
• 000ooo000 5mo ago
  People who let AI do their thinking at any level never valued it in the first place. "Use it or lose it", as they say. The count of studies backing this up continue to rise and yet so do the articles saying LLM use in software development is fine because our value is in our thinking.
  • waffleman21 5mo ago
    It may be a byproduct of my ADHD and general anxiety, or it's a common trait among all of us workers of computers, but I am thinking almost all the time. It's one of the beautiful things about the gig to be able to be completely engrossed in something else and then have an inspired thought hit you, some solution that took you not looking at it for a moment. AI now helps me turn those thoughts into action faster than I ever could. Without it, I'd lose the thread before it ever got off the ground sometimes. Now a thought can be made at least partly real from my phone in minutes, then I can go back to what I was doing without feeling like I might lose it if I look/think away again. Just my two cents on what the technology has enabled for me.
• krishna3145 5mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47916430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47916430 Check this out on LLMS security.
• lo_zamoyski 5mo ago
  Absolutely. When used correctly, it can become a tool for pulling our minds out of the gutter of pedantic pocket lint and distracting ephemera and keep it in a space where it is intellectually rewarding and fruitful. It can help you grasp a code base more quickly. It can help you debug things more effectively. But that's up to how you use it. If all you do is point your LLM at your Jira tickets, then you are failing to be an engineer. I mean, if that's all you are doing, then who needs you? One of the most important things to learn is what the right questions to ask are and what the right decisions to make are when guiding the LLM, as well as the ability to judge the output it produces.
• ambicapter 5mo ago
  > There is No Shortcut to Judgment > This is the part that some people may not want to hear -- > There is no generated explanation that transfers mastery into your brain without you doing the work. > There is no way to outsource reasoning for long enough that you still end up strong at reasoning. This is in relation to early-career engineers, but I wonder why people think this won't apply to mid- and late-career engineers. Are they not also constantly learning things on the job? Are they not thus shortcutting their own understanding of what they are learning day-to-day?
• placebo 5mo ago
  I think the great advantage of AI in software is that it enables you to create code faster. I think that the great disadvantage is that it tempts you to create code incredibly faster.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• ebipaul5194 5mo ago
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• ebipaul5194 5mo ago
  > To be very frank if professional with 10 year experience they know the flow and logic to code if they use the AI they can make the code and improve they way they code but if new bee is coding he doesn't what the flow or logic he simply copy paste AI won't allow those people to think.
• pylonpeng 5mo ago
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• EthanFrostHI 5mo ago
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• synergy20 5mo ago
  Easier said than done. once you are given a lazy way to do things faster and easier and mostly better, it's hard to go back. this is by design. there is no turning point. this addiction is as strong as drugs I feel.
• wasabinator 5mo ago
  Is anyone tired of being told what AI is supposed to mean for the individual? As a software guy it's supposed to mean I am now a team lead of sorts. However all the people I see crowing about this never sought to become team leads in their career, nor did I. Yet now suddenly everyone is supposed to want to become a team lead of sorts (ie. the agents becoming your team). I don't want to do that, I treat an AI agent as a pair in a pair programming unit. Nothing more, nothing less. If someone wants to treat it differently, good on them, but they have no place telling what works for thee works for me.
  • linsomniac 5mo ago
    I agree, nobody should be telling you, specifically, how you are going to use AI in programming. I think a lot of people are getting caught up in the discussion about how we, generally as technologists, are going to use AI. And it is looking like the industry is moving towards what used to be programmers now being team leads or project managers of AI teams. So it's probably best for you to try to not get involved in those discussions, and when someone says "you" assume they mean "you (generally)"?
  • annjose 5mo ago
    I don't understand why people crave to assign a new role for themselves (team lead, manager). AI is a tool that augments your skill and you use it carefully. It doesn't require a change in your role. A farmer with a tractor is a farmer, not a lead. An accountant with spreadsheets is an accountant. A software engineer using a coding agent is a software engineer who has a powerful tool in their toolbox.
  • randusername 5mo ago
    I think it's a good idea for specialists / ICs to peek up from their work every now and then to understand how it fits into overall technical operations and the business as a whole. Other than that... I think the managerial class is used to telling people what to do, so they have an outsized impact on "public opinion." They probably see technical work converging on agent orchestration as validation of their skills and perspective. Management is challenging to do well and it has value, but I think viewing IC work through this lens is pure hype. Good ICs achieve relatively constant velocity throughout a project. The idea of throwing that away so they can herd digital cats for spikey output is just not a great trade to blanket apply to the whole industry.
• jacobmei 5mo ago
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• panavm 5mo ago
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• maininformer 5mo ago
  What if AI elevates your thinking by replacing the lower forms of thinking and making room for elevated forms?
• resident423 5mo ago
  I feel like these articles are just a reasurance for people who don't want to accept that AI will automate their jobs. It becomes easier to focus on a lesser group of AI users and feel superior than to confront the reality of things.
  • rimliu 5mo ago
    So, how many jobs were automated by AI? Or is that "in six to eight months"?
    • resident423 5mo ago
      130000 so far https://jobloss.ai/ https://jobloss.ai/
  • erfgh 5mo ago
    Even if AI does automate some jobs (or even most of them) then people doing them will just do something else. It's not like the world has a limited demand of computer code.
• avaer 5mo ago
  I hope it's not reductionist, but this kind of thinking always feels like cope in the face of The Bitter Lesson.
• nunez 5mo ago
  > If the job were mainly about producing syntactically valid code, then of course A.I. would be on a direct path to replacing large parts of the profession. But that was never the highest-value part of the work. The value was always in judgment. > The valuable engineer is the one who sees the hidden constraint before it causes an outage. The one who notices that the team is solving the wrong problem. The one who reduces a vague debate into crisp tradeoffs. The one who identifies the missing abstraction. The one who can debug reality, not just read code. The one who can create clarity where everyone else sees noise How do you think engineers in the second half got there? By writing tons and tons of code to "build those reps" and gain that experience. The author tries to answer this: > That process is not optional. It is how engineers acquire and elevate their competency. If early-career engineers use A.I. to remove all struggle from the learning loop, they are hurting their development. but in a world wherein writing code by hand (the "struggle") is "artisinal" and "outdated", this process being non-optional (which I agree with) is contradictory. How juniors and fresh grads do that with AI that is designed to give you whatever answer you need in a given moment is unclear to me. I don't see how that's possible, but maybe I'm thinking too myopically.
  • chii 5mo ago
    > I don't see how that's possible, but maybe I'm thinking too myopically. you are thinking too myopically. We have people who can still do maths well after the introduction of the calculator. We have people who can still spell after the introduction of spell check. The junior only need to train without using AI to gain the skills needed - that's called education. If they choose to rely on AI solely, and gimp their own education, that's on them.
    • krilcebre 5mo ago
      Yes but currently I don't know of a single company in my area that doesn't make you use AI daily because of the supposedly increased productivity. That means that juniors also absolutely have to use AI, probably sabotaging their learning process in the long run.
    • deafpolygon 5mo ago
• sbinnee 5mo ago
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• shevy-java 5mo ago
  What if the use of AI makes them dumber though?
• lovelearning 5mo ago
  The post's recommendations and analogies kind of go against two shortcut approaches that have helped a lot of people in the pre-AI real world: 1) perfect is the enemy of good 2) fake it till you make it The analogies imagine difficult scenarios where the habit of taking shortcuts doesn't help. But most people most of the time don't run into those scenarios at all.
• bowsamic 5mo ago
  For me the widespread fear over this is evidence that it’s different from syntax highlighting and stuff
• deterministic 5mo ago
  I am using AI at work. And it definitely makes me (say) 10% more effective. However my #1 productivity tool is still a custom code generator I have been using for years. It routinely generates 90+% of the code needed to write a typical biz web application, leaving just the business logic. No AI. Just straightforward high-level-spec-to-server-client-DB code that is 100% trusted and proven in battle.
• billbrown 5mo ago
  I've told everyone I hire that "I hired you for your mind so always use it." Push back on requirements, question my decisions, think about your approaches. I can''t imagine telling them now to stop—use the Ersatz Intelligence instead of Actual Intelligence.
• breve 5mo ago
  People are lazy. AI will replace thinking for many people. Augmentation always leads to atrophy.
  • falcor84 5mo ago
    > Augmentation always leads to atrophy. That's a very bold claim. As a small example let's look at calculators - I remember a lot of claims that having access to calculators would make people's brains atrophy and they'll never be able to do actual math, but what I'm seeing in myself and most people around me is that we're using calculators (and more mathematical software) to tackle significantly more complex problems than people would be able to do if they rejected calculators. To be clear, I'm not arguing that kids should be using a calculator from the first day of pre-school, but I do absolutely think that using them as later on as augmentation is clearly beneficial.
    • rimliu 5mo ago
      a lot of people indeed cannot do even simple calculations by themselves. Your example just adds to the point.
      • falcor84 5mo ago
        "A lot of people" never could do simple calculations, regardless of calculators. But if you're interested in actual figures over time, this data from nationsreportcard.gov would probably be the best longitudinal data source we have about the US, showing a strong general increase in mathematical scores, both for 9 and 13 year-olds, from when calculators started being introduced in the 70s and until the 2010s. Note that there's a recent decline over the last decade, partially explained by the pandemic, but even with it, current scores are higher than what they were in the 70s. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/mathematics/scores-percentiles/?age=9 https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/mathematics/scores-per... https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/mathematics/scores-percentiles/?age=13 https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/mathematics/scores-per...
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• kernalix7 5mo ago
  Caught myself in this one. The dependency creeps in faster than I'd noticed and the laziness becomes the justification. Reviewing what comes out of the machine is the part I keep skipping. Useful read, thanks.
• e1ghtSpace 5mo ago
  what if it seems ai has literally replaced your thinking? Is there a way to unreplace it? im talking literally.
• eolgun 5mo ago
  The 'Socrates worried about writing' analogy is usually deployed to dismiss concerns, but it misses an asymmetry which is writing preserved thought, it didn't generate it on demand. The real question is whether AI is closer to a pencil or a ghostwriter. For junior engineers the distinction matters most. The reps are not just about getting the right answer, they are about building the intuition for when the answer is wrong. That's the hardest thing to transfer between people, and the thing AI is currently worst at self-verifying.
  • ekeke 5mo ago
    Yep writing works what I call the instinctive memory - and it’s more powerful than pure memorisation alone as it builds intuition - this is much cheaper to act on than continually re-engaging with the brain which is resource intensive. This is why people who have been programming for 20 years don’t get the big hoo-ha about the effect on juniors.
• Traubenfuchs 5mo ago
  My director expects me to get things done at an accelerated rate. I don't have the time to read code and gain in depth understanding of issues he wants me to fix which requires me to understand multiple repos I have never touched. I have no choice but let claude explore them for me and return me its summarized understanding. As next step, only claude can apply the required cross repo fixes, not me. I just don't have the time. Meanwhile my skills as classical programmer atrophy, while my experience with and trust in claude go up...
• flowdesktech 5mo ago
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• pkphilip 5mo ago
  Just as the advent of palm-sized organizers reduced our ability to recall dozens and sometimes even 100s of phone numbers of friends etc, AI will reduce our ability to perform a range of functions. I think the evidence for this is quite clear. Humans are NOT going to expend any energy - even mental energy, to think about something if they don't have to.
  • anygivnthursday 5mo ago
    Or Google Maps our ability to navigate when GPS signal is lost
    • falcor84 5mo ago
      But on the flip side of the coin, I've been traveling so much more since I got access to map software on my phone. Especially when vacationing abroad, remembering the days before smart phones, we would need to carefully plan specific attractions on a map ahead of time, and would generally not go far from these areas, unless we had the entire rest of the day available and didn't mind getting lost. But these days, I can be in a foreign city where I don't know more than a dozen words of the language and spontaneously pick a spot on the map and get there with local public transport in a very predictable time, being able to focus my time on deciding where I want to be, rather than how I get there.
    • pkphilip 5mo ago
      Google Maps has made me a total idiot. I can't remember routes to places where I have gone quite a few times!
• tarcon 5mo ago
  Mechanical exoskeletons should amplify your strength, not atrophy it. If the brain is like a muscle, it won't work.
• jillesvangurp 5mo ago
  Use AI like you would use any other tool: to work for you. There are all sorts of things you can probably do manually that just go a bit faster or more efficient with AI. It's not that different to using an electrical drill vs. a manually operated one. You end up with holes in both cases. But one achieves that a bit faster and neater. Nobody is going to pay you for your artisanally crafted CSS code or whatever you were coding manually until last year. If you can do it faster/better than the AI, good for you. But it's not a contest and possibly your days of maintaining that lead might be numbered. In the end, as long as the UI is styled alright, nobody will care that you pieced it together manually for hours and hours. More importantly, people are not going to pay you more for it than they'll pay the next guy getting a similar result in an hour of prompting AIs. They'll want you to move faster and do more. That's what better tools do, they just cause people to expect more, better, and faster. And their expectations expand until they match the limitations of the new tools. People seem to have this mental block where somehow the amount of stuff we ship is going to be a constant in the universe and we'll all be out of work and descend in despair. That's something that in the history of our species inventing tools has never really happened. I don't see any reason why AI would change that. Sure, there's a lot more we can do now. And it's a lot cheaper now. So we can now have a bit more of our proverbial cake and eat it. People will push this as far as they can and will want more and more of the good stuff. And they'll need help getting all that stuff built. One way is a painful process of slowly prompting things together. Most people lack the skills to do that, don't know what to ask for and are in any case busy doing other things. That job, building stuff using tools, is still a job that needs doing. I'm quite busy currently doing that.
  • rimliu 5mo ago
    good luck with ignoring what's under the hood. One day you will experience how it does translate to the things people pay for.
    • jillesvangurp 5mo ago
      Some people are mastering the use of skills and guard rails. I have a few decades of experience to lean on, which seems to help. My guard rails tend to capture what I appreciate in software. AI tools seems to be pretty much a shit in, shit out kind of thing. If I want better output, I put some work in it. Mostly all you need to do is ask for better and be able to articulate what better means for you. Of course that requires understanding what that is. It's early days for a lot of people. Even some of the more experienced prompters have only a few months to at best a year of experience developing software that way. Early last year was when Claude Code first appeared. And mostly the tools didn't really get usable on non trivial code bases until later in the year. Anyway, there are a lot of people producing mediocre software (with or without AI). That's pretty much a constant. I remember people using Visual Basic. Exact same thing. The problem isn't the tools but the people using them. There's a learning curve and most people are still behind that curve.
• brobdingnagians 5mo ago
  What about the third group who mostly don't use ai for programming because the results don't seem to be worth it, like to understand their system, and can craft a more compact, succinct, and well organized system by themselves which they enjoy maintaining? If most of your system is boilerplate that can be generated by Claude, then maybe you're doing it wrong? I'd rather read a short story written by a great writer than a trilogy of novels by AI
• NeOchenHorosho 5mo ago
  Why did this obviously AI wirrten article get so heavily upvoted? Looking through the comments, it feels like nobody has noticed
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• freetime2 5mo ago
  The scary thing is I have seen high level directors and executives say “I asked ChatGPT and it agreed with me” as a way to try to settle a debate. People seem all too willing to delegate even matters of judgement to AI. On the other hand I have been in debates where someone asks ChatGPT to draft a list of possible approaches and pros and cons - and after reading through the list we were all in alignment on the best approach. The latter I think is a constructive use of AI to elevate thinking, while the former has me thinking it may be time for a career change.
  • sesm 5mo ago
    To make an exhaustive list of possible options you need to find key questions that divide solution space. This requires logic, which LLMs lack.
    • falcor84 5mo ago
      > This requires logic, which LLMs lack. What? I've heard many takes on what AI lacks, but never this one. We had ChatGPT being able to solve an Erdős problem on its own yesterday [0]; how could you explain that if it cannot do logic? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47903126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47903126
      • sesm 5mo ago
        LLM didn't solve an Erdos problem, it generated a text that a human looked at, cleaned up, corrected and used as base for a solution. WRT logic, there a multiple occasions of LLMs answering incorrectly to trivial logic puzzles. Of course, with each occasion becoming public they are added to training data and overfitted on, but if you embed them in a more subtle way LLMs will fail again.
        • freetime2 5mo ago
          From the article about the Erdos problem: > “This one is a bit different because people did look at it, and the humans that looked at it just collectively made a slight wrong turn at move one,” says Terence Tao, a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has become a prominent scorekeeper for AI’s push into his field. “What’s beginning to emerge is that the problem was maybe easier than expected, and it was like there was some kind of mental block.” > “There was kind of a standard sequence of moves that everyone who worked on the problem previously started by doing,” Tao says. The LLM took an entirely different route, using a formula that was well known in related parts of math, but which no one had thought to apply to this type of question. > “The raw output of ChatGPT’s proof was actually quite poor. So it required an expert to kind of sift through and actually understand what it was trying to say,” Lichtman says. But now he and Tao have shortened the proof so that it better distills the LLM’s key insight. > More importantly, they already see other potential applications of the AI’s cognitive leap. “We have discovered a new way to think about large numbers and their anatomy,” Tao says. “It’s a nice achievement. I think the jury is still out on the long-term significance.” You can debate whether the LLM used logic or not. I don't think you can debate that the LLM has in this case elevated human thinking, by leading us to a solution that had eluded world-class mathematicians for 60 years. And a new way to think "about large numbers and their anatomy". And if it works for Terrence Tao and Erdos problems, then I'm certainly not above using AI to help brainstorm solutions for my little app at work.
• gjuggler 5mo ago
  I was surprised not to see any discussion on whether the author used AI to help write this post. As many people say, writing is thinking. I started getting that "I'm reading another AI-written blog post" feeling around 1/3 of the way through, but I don't consider myself super calibrated on this. Pangram seems pretty confident it's AI (https://www.pangram.com/history/e9f6eb77-86f9-46d0-a6c1-e57ce418c6d7 https://www.pangram.com/history/e9f6eb77-86f9-46d0-a6c1-e57c...). But I know these tools aren't perfect. I'd love to hear from the author what their process was in writing this piece! Related question (I'm trying to work this out for myself): If you believe using AI to write an email or blog post for you isn't okay, but using AI to write code for you is... what's the difference? Right now my instinct is something like: - Code can be verifiably correct (especially w/ good tests) so it's less of a purely-creative act than writing. - But always, always double-check the tests! - I still wouldn't submit a PR where I can't vouch for every line of code. - AI-written documentation and specs are mostly still bad and should be looked down upon. But mostly because the quality, at least today, is poor. (Lots of duplication, lack of a clear understanding of the reader's intent and needs, no thoughtful curation, etc.) - Be psychologically ready to update these priors as models change. I'd love to hear from anyone who's thought more about this.
  • gombosg 5mo ago
    Right at the top: "That distinction matters more than people think." That's basically telltale AI :) Also the entire framing around "judgment" and "taste" is what LLMs love to parrot about the topic. There are fair arguments in the post but I totally agree that "writing is thinking" and also holding myself to "if you didn't bother to write it, why would I bother to read it"?
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    • regular_trash 5mo ago
      One of the many things that has been strange to me is how often people will label written thoughts as AI slop when the "signs" are just normal phrases. Sure, that's a tired expression, and I 100% agree we should be critical of writing that seems to embolden pointless trite expressions. But people have written in that way for years before LLMs. I find it very interesting that we only now have more widespread discourse around the quality of prose and rhetoric now that LLMs have become ubiquitous.
• poszlem 5mo ago
  "What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking-there's the real danger" - Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune
• haspok 5mo ago
  Why are certain parts of the text highlighted in yellow? This is very distracting.
• regintelapi 5mo ago
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• nikhil_0077 5mo ago
  agree on the code side. for decisions i'd push it a bit further though. the trap isn't really that the model does your thinking for you, it's that it agrees with the thinking you already brought to it. you can't verify a decision the way you verify code, there's no test that fails when "this answer is wrong because you wanted to hear it." so even if you don't outsource the thinking, you can walk away with a plausible-sounding agreement that feels like understanding. that's the failure mode that worries me more. replacement is honestly the easier one to spot.
  • danish00111 5mo ago
    the agreement problem is the one that worries me more too. you can catch replacement, it's visible. you can't catch a model that confidently validates your existing blind spots back at you the deeper version of this: the reps that build judgment used to happen naturally in production. you shipped something wrong, it broke, you learned. that feedback loop is now compressed or gone entirely. the question isn't really "is AI replacing your thinking" it's "where are the reps happening now." if the answer is nowhere, the judgment debt is accumulating invisibly and the AI agreement problem you're describing is exactly how it stays invisible
• texttopdfnet 5mo ago
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• erdaniels 5mo ago
  This feels AI written as the post goes on. Either way, I'd like for us to stop fetishizing how we can use AI to make us stronger, better, and more valuable engineers. It's exhausting and doesn't consider other ways to use it. I've only been using it lately for tasks that are a step or two above google. Having it write code for me has just been a slippery, unfulfilling slope.
  • zozbot234 5mo ago
    Apparently the write code part works a bit better in languages like Rust and perhaps Swift where the compiler is unforgiving in rejecting outright nonsense and the AI can iterate on any errors it gets. Of course logically flawed code is always possible so this does not replace human review. But code in these languages is also a bit more compact and hopefully easier to understand for a human.
    • harambae 5mo ago
      On the flip side, how much training data exists for coding in Swift? Especially when a new version seems to come out every 6 months.
  • pydry 5mo ago
    I wish people would stop pretending that agentic coding and elevated thinking arent mutually exclusive. Theres way too much money on this hype train now though to point out the emperor isnt wearing any clothes and way too many people who always did think that "boilerplate spew" (the one thing AI really does well) is a valid form of programming rather than a shortcut to tech debt.
    • iewj 5mo ago
      All this stuff is proving to me one thing: we don’t need to get better at producing stuff faster. We need to get better at producing the right stuff. Right stuff meaning getting better at project selection. I guarantee a firm that is really good at project selection with hand written code will annihilate a firm that is full of agentic engineers. And frankly I hope the outcome is that all those who went all in on agentic coding go out of business because they got beaten by disciplined and visionary leaders who understand this subtle and nuanced point.
• danish00111 5mo ago
  the article frames this as a choice between two groups. i think the more interesting question is structural. judgment used to get built through a natural feedback loop: ship, break, trace, fix, understand. AI doesn't just remove drudgery, it compresses or removes that loop entirely. a junior who never ships broken code in production never gets burned and never builds the instinct that catches the next fire the answer isn't "use AI less." it's that deliberate practice has to happen somewhere else now, by design, not by accident
  • BlueHotDog2 5mo ago
    i understand what you're trying to say, but a junior will ship broken code to prod.. even with agents. he might keep delegating to agents to fix it, but that cycle will produce more brittleness(like the folks at claude code folks keep discovering). but eventually the organization will push back and ask why it's so brittle and costs more(time/money/people)
• bsenftner 5mo ago
  If one actually understands LLM AIs, not the technological aspect but the literary embodiment they become, using them is an elevation of one's thinking. Few to none have the foundational education to see them in their manifested extreme intellectualized nature.
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• throw4847285 5mo ago
  This is what happens when the people building your society's advanced technology have no theory of mind. Too much science fiction, not enough human interaction. The Social Network is looking more and more prophetic. When your only ambition is success for its own sake, driven by insecurities you can never name, you're going to make things that don't actually serve other people, or only do as an unfortunate side effect of you making money and gaining power.
  • Matticus_Rex 5mo ago
    Hmm? There are a number of top AI people who make this exact point, though, and are trying to drive things toward elevating thinking. There's more that can be done, but quite a bit is a user mindset issue that's just going to have to shake out over time.
    • throw4847285 5mo ago
      You are right that there are a large number of top AI people who are very concerned with the ramifications of AI. I would say there are two core issues. The first is that these people have often been indistinguishable from the ambitious and power hungry people I was decrying. Sam Altman was able to blend in for a long time by copying the rhetoric of AI safety types. When there is this much money to be made and power to be amassed, it's not hard to pretend to care. The second is that I have often been disappointed by what the AI safety folks are concerned about. There has been a huge amount of talk about existential risk and not nearly as much about, say, the impact on children if education is outsourced to AI. The obsession with science fiction led to some very out there scenarios that may or may not still happen, but have nothing to do with the very real impacts of AI on people's lives right now. I believe that even the well intentioned have been too detached from humanity as a whole.
  • sayYayToLife 5mo ago
    Do you live in the US? Because there is a military reason for chasing success for success sake. The US doesnt really have a choice here. We live in a unipolar(or bipolar world) and the US must be number 1, or the international system breaks down and we can expect incredible amounts of war. (Its generally agreed that historically multipolar worlds are the worst to live in). If you don't live in the US and you are taking advantage of the US security umbrella, sure, you can deny AI and enjoy a curated lifestyle. But living in the US means we must deal with this.
• nikhilpareek13 5mo ago
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• plutoh28 5mo ago
  Hey if anyone’s hiring juniors in hard roles where I can actually learn and don’t have to meet AI usage quotas, shoot me an email. davidvoronof@gmail.com
  • craftwerk 5mo ago
    My AI recruiter will reach out
• ori_b 5mo ago
  > and spend more time on the parts of the job that actually matter i.e. framing problems, making tradeoffs, spotting risks, creating clarity, and producing original insight. What makes you think AI won't do those parts of the job? Either AI stops improving, or it will replace thinking.
  • Lerc 5mo ago
    It can already do some part of that. Eventually it will be able to all of it. If it does it on it's own, it might be a good idea, but it won't be your good idea. This is not an issue of ownership or attribution, but one of content. Your ideas come from your experiences. An AI may eventually be able to make any tool fit for the task you had in mind. It can't on it's own, give you the tool that you want because you just thought of it. AI may one day spray the world with new ideas, That won't stop humans from having ideas themselves. Like chess programs, being better than any human can make you choose to give up chess, or it might help you become a better chess player. You won't become better than the chess program, but you also probably won't become better than the best human chess players. Nobody should stop doing something because someone or something can do it better.
    • ori_b 5mo ago
      Chess is boring; it's been solved. I'm not really looking forward to a future where the only thing I get to do is play with toys while waiting for the AI to refill the cat food bowl.
      • Lerc 5mo ago
        It's really hard to tell sarcastic irony from legitimately held opinion these days. Boring is, and has always been, the mind of the beholder.
        • ori_b 5mo ago
          I genuinely find chess pretty uninteresting. I kill some time with it occasionally, I guess, but like gaming in general, I could never get into it, not when there are puzzles with unknown answers out there.
• momentmaker 5mo ago
  I feel like this can be summed into 3 words: Discernment is Key.
• manoDev 5mo ago
  "Social media should bring people together instead of being used to set them apart." "Economy should improve allocation of resources universally, instead of allowing a handful to hold what many are lacking." And so on... Society has advanced in technology but didn't progress the same way in philosophy.
  • renegade-otter 5mo ago
    "Our technology is meant to bring people together - so they can fight about a gold-drenched ballroom they will never set foot in, and hate each other".
  • tombert 5mo ago
    I'm no fan of social media and I'm not even a big fan of capitalism, but isn't this kind of reductive? You can always point out bad things and try and extrapolate that outward. We live in a time with an extremely low murder rate (historically speaking), a very high literacy rate, the ability to keep in touch with family members across the world extremely cheaply, eradication or near-eradication of lots of diseases. If I were to extrapolate that outward then I could do the same kind of logic to talk about how great everything is. I guess I just find this kind of doomerism to be extremely tempting but ultimately just reductive.
    • manoDev 5mo ago
      Humanity's doom would be failing to recognize how amazing advancements in one area don't necessarily translate to another – not the opposite.
  • lauren_knows 5mo ago
    We're still human, and have human tendencies. I feel like the tools are out there for us to be great, but they certainly gently push us toward being degenerates :/
    • manoDev 5mo ago
      That's why philosophy (in the original sense of "striving for wisdom") is important. We're thinking animals after all, and can be more than dumb consumers, victims of our instincts.
• NoSalt 5mo ago
  Personally, I see AI as "nothing more" than the computer aboard the Enterprise. A vast storehouse of information, and the ability to quickly access such information, and form a workable solution from that information. However, not the end-all be-all that so many people see it as. Just like Geordi says, using your gut is just as important, if not more so, that having access to the "correct answer".
  • brcmthrowaway 5mo ago
    The managerial class doesn't think that way.
• randusername 5mo ago
  In strength training circles there's question of "what are you lifting for?" For many people the root answer is insecurity. There's nothing inherently wrong with this (you would do a lot worse as an outlet) but you ought to be honest about what lengths you're willing to go to in achieving the appearance of strength since your goal isn't strength itself. Poor form, injury from cutting corners, steroids; these are all temptations that the guy hefting concrete buckets alone in his garage won't face. I think the programmers that write code for the joy of creation and problem-solving won't have much trouble holding onto their expertise. The ones that were never that way, or that had it burned out of them, are the ones in danger.
  • gwbas1c 5mo ago
    Another comment in this thread points out that the people having trouble are the ones that previously used to copy & paste stack overflow without understanding it.
• sk0w 5mo ago
  *you're /s
• AtNightWeCode 5mo ago
  You know from the start that a text is just garbage when it divide things into two made up nonsense groups.
• maxothex 5mo ago
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• sayYayToLife 5mo ago
  Do we know if the author has used Claude Opus with OpenClaw or Code? This is basically how I talked in January and its obsolete now. I got a feeling these types of programmers are going extinct and their only value is going to be in the transition years. I really can't imagine even security critical defense work being run old school in 10 years.
• jojwong 5mo ago
  AI isnt coming to help instead replace human brain? Many of non-programmer become "vibe coder" and start to get income, that is one of beauty of AI !
• bitwize 5mo ago
  This is one of those happy little lies we tell ourselves, you know, like Agile is to help us collaborate better. No, your company adopted Agile so that upper management has near-real-time feedback in how teams are doing, who are the top performers and who are the stragglers. When it comes to AI, the entire value proposition is that it is a substitute for human thought. Your thought is now no longer as valuable, and it is also no longer the bottleneck. That's the reality. "Oh it's just here to remove the drudgery and let us focus on what's really important." When it comes to many forms of knowledge work, including programming, the "drudgery" is the important bit. Doing the long, slow work of integrating systems is how you gain intimate knowledge of the shapes of those systems. "Oh, you just have to think at a higher level of abstraction now." Since "higher levels of abstraction" are all about removing details, in the end this means less information to be manipulated, hence less thinking that you are responsible for. Make no mistake, we programmers are coal miners, and the world is going solar punk. Have a nice day.
• wabstractions 5mo ago
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• game_the0ry 5mo ago
  The way I look at AI -- it increases my IQ by one standard deviation.
• d4ng 5mo ago
  Previously everyone was running. Now everyone is on a bicycle. The power each person expends remains approximately the same. The people still running are left behind. The first person to get home after work from running is now the first person to get home after work from cycling.
• gwbas1c 5mo ago
  This is the approach that I'm taking: If it's easier to explain in words, I have AI do it. If I can't explain how to do it, I do it myself.
• itsuckslol 5mo ago
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• deterministic 5mo ago
  One of the best reads on AI I have read so far. Bravo!
• kostarelo 5mo ago
  In "Thinking—Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender" [1], a third level of the human thinking process was introduced where argues that besides internal intuition (level 1) and deliberation (level 2), there's a third one which is external and is the well-known to everyone, AI. Humans now can choose to either completely surrender to that external intelligence, called cognitive surrender or choose to just offload tasks and use it alongside their own reasoning. It's up to us how to use it. I've recently joined a new company and I had to explore their massive codebase. Even my manager suggested that I should use an agent to help me with the onboarding but I went straight to the code and whenever I had a new task, I would explore the code to understand what is happening and then instruct the agent to do any tasks I thought should be done. There are moments when I completely hand off to the agent without looking any diffs, but my main focus is understanding first and then handing off. 1: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/399711077_Thinking-Fast_Slow_and_Artificial_How_AI_is_Reshaping_Human_Reasoning_and_the_Rise_of_Cognitive_Surrender https://www.researchgate.net/publication/399711077_Thinking-...
• letsrift 5mo ago
  Thanks for this post, resonates deeply. So in the end what’s one thinking skill one should actively practice because of AI, and how to train it in practice?
• atlasagentsuite 5mo ago
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