11 ms·

AI is making me dumb

• ge96 5mo ago
  Use AI to fix that cert
  • bigstrat2003 5mo ago
    The cert is fine according to my browser.
    • ge96 5mo ago
      Fair seems it was my vpn As far as the topic on hand, I work with someone whenever you ask them a question they say "AI says..." I'm not a big fan of that.
      • skeptic_ai 5mo ago
        If you have checked your AI would have said is not the cert
        • ge96 5mo ago
          Possible? AI would have to know I have a VPN active
• voncheese 5mo ago
  Relatable! Or at least making me feel dumb (at times). Things that help me feel smarter are * actually writing more on my own - created a personal blog just to get myself to write more * upleveling my thinking - think more about problems and framing * leverage my experience - guide (or sometimes force) the AI assistant to leverage my experience to avoid problems * learning new things - rather than let AI just replace things I can do, I use AI to help me learn new things/technology faster than I would have pre-AI
  • blain 5mo ago
    > learning new things I wonder lately, doesn't that all new knowledge push out the old knowledge? As in new things replace old things we know. I don't know any studies on this but do we have infinite capacity for knowledge? What about retaining it? I catch myself asking AI wondering about random things that pop into my head, reading it, maybe using that knowledge once and later no longer remembering what it was. Maybe if you use that knowledge in practice from the get go but projects get so complicated sometimes it seems like there is not enough space in my brain for things AI is learning me.
    • voncheese 5mo ago
      New knowledge doesn't necessarily push out old knowledge, and we probably don't have infinite capacity for knowledge. That being said, at least in my experience, the time when new pushes out old is when old is less useful than new. Retaining (again just speaking for myself) requires actually using / applying the knowledge at some point within some timeframe of learning it. Otherwise yeah it fades to the point of disappearing over time.
    • eikenberry 5mo ago
      Knowledge memory doesn't really work that way, it is more like that it is constantly fading unless re-imprinted by use and learning new things is just imprinting new knowledge on top. The new knowledge will form connections with the old knowledge which will help keep some of it from fading, but not all. Another way of looking at what you said is that the practicing the new knowledge takes the place of practicing the old knowledge. So it isn't the knowledge that is replaced, but the learning (imprinting).
• pton_xd 5mo ago
  We'll just move to a higher level of abstraction; thinking will be like efficiently coding in assembly, no longer necessary in today's world.
  • steezeburger 5mo ago
    I've been thinking a lot about the new primitives and paradigms we'll see.
    • AlecSchueler 5mo ago
      Care to share some of these thoughts?
      • simianwords 5mo ago
        1. we will be thinking at the level of systems like services and DB's and forget about inconsequential things like methods, classes, variables 2. we will think of verification loop more - tasks will be chosen that have more ability to be easily verified 3. the concept of the difference between "generation" and "verification" will be more mainstream [1] 4. spec driven development will become more common 5. scenario testing will become mainstream i have few more predictions like these. [1] I wrote a blog post on this explaining why I keep this generation vs verification difference in many parts of life https://simianwords.bearblog.dev/the-generation-vs-verification-delta-explains-why-llms-are-useful/ https://simianwords.bearblog.dev/the-generation-vs-verificat...
        • Imustaskforhelp 5mo ago
          > 2. we will think of verification loop more - tasks will be chosen that have more ability to be easily verified > 4. spec driven development will become more common I do believe both of these, recently someone created an rar open source alternative for all its version using LLM agents because of that specs and in some sense verification/easy debug (or compile time) aspect. On the other hand, I was making a GUI application (a rough scratchpad app) in Odin and there were so many bugs that I had to explain it and even then it was like lottery or just about unpredictable would be the better word as it would fix one thing and break another or just not fix it. At the end of the day for GUI apps, it just doesn't have any way of testing them that greatly perhaps. There are many GUI things which I feel like LLM's are still underwhelming in, especially if you wish to create a GUI in say any niche language. It can do that but the workflow is so bad that it might just not be worth it. i do wonder if GUI development becomes the one thing that AI can't do and their software development jobs are safe. I was just scrolling upwork randomly and I saw tons of flutter & wordpress jobs.
• weezing 5mo ago
  You are doing this to yourself.
• Quarrelsome 5mo ago
  Is it tho? I get paid more these days to write less code. Is it dumb to be paid more/do more, have more oversight and deal less with the minutia? Im still concerned enough about the specifics to show concern about background refresh tokens silently failing in OAuth in a mission critical real-time system. Im not coding it, but im still thinking it. That's the important part, ain't it? Is it dumb or just clever delegation?
  • ge96 5mo ago
    Me personally if I had the money to get out of dev I would just not fun anymore if you HAVE to use AI to code instead of doing it yourself. That's the name of the game, velocity. I like making things myself, I have self-navigating robotics projects I do on my own time, but I'm not gonna use an AI to do it for me, the joy I get is figuring it out myself. I will use AI if I'm stuck on something or need a specific algo written that I've spent enough time on and couldn't figure out.
    • Quarrelsome 5mo ago
      I just query about whether were talking about "dumb" or "fun". Agree with the latter but question the former.
  • malicka 5mo ago
    No, not really. You know what to think about because you were trained to by coding through the problem by hand. If you stop doing that, you stop learning the specifics of whatever problem domain you work with.
    • Quarrelsome 5mo ago
      Sure, that's why we probably shouldn't start with vibe coding. Or otherwise at least learn formal methods to test against assumptions and doubly triply check vibe coded output.
  • croes 5mo ago
    Your thinking is based on your experience with code that’s why you do the thinking and not your customers and managers. You lose some ideas of thinking if AI does all the coding unless you study that code. But that’s still different to creating the code yourself. Same with authors or songwriters. Their brain is used to create stories and songs that‘s why it’s easier for them to come up with ideas. If you are just a reader or listener your brain doesn’t get wired in the same way. AI is a lesser problem for already experienced developers, because they just lose some abilities but new developers will never get those abilities in the first place, which will limit their thinking especially for edge cases that need creativity
• slackfan 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• steezeburger 5mo ago
  I enjoy using and orchestrating agents a lot to build software, but have never really had the desire to replace my writing with LLMs. I don't write a whole whole lot, so maybe I just don't have enough writing to do to make it appealing, but my emails, blog posts, comments, whatever are the last thing I want to automate. Not only because it's less personal, but because I'm so tired of reading AI cruft myself. So much more text in tickets than there needs to be, for example. And how are people forgetting to code by using LLMs? Do they just mean they forgot the syntax of a particular language? Or forgot how to architect features or how the development lifecycle works? I've mostly used LLMs to build more complex things that would have been a lot to manage previously, or to build something completely new and learn how it works. I feel like I've only become a better engineer (and programmer too) because of LLMs.
• Rooster61 5mo ago
  I can't relate that much to this. Every time I use AI to write code, I'm constantly fighting a feeling on the back of my neck that I need to look over everything it has done and supplement/alter it with my own code. That ick feeling counteracts the dopamine hit of having a working app after a few minutes of vibe coding, and I don't think that's going anywhere anytime soon. That said, I have experience. I could absolutely see myself falling into this as a junior or even mid level dev. I'd no doubt not feel that feeling on my neck if it wasn't scarred from code review lashings early in my career by knowledgeable mentors.
  • steezeburger 5mo ago
    Experience is so so valuable right now. We can guide these agents super well, but I do fear for the juniors as you said. I would like to think I'd use the agents to dive deeper and learn faster. It was pretty rough piecing together solutions from Stack Overflow, various irc channels, Reddit, etc. But also, I cheated on my homework in college and didn't really review the answers, so not sure. Though I pursued programming out of interest and not just to complete a degree. Maybe it would have been different. In any case, I'm glad I came into the LLM era with a lot of experience and failures already.
    • hparadiz 5mo ago
      Metrics, profilers, architecture! Use AI to get back to basics! Wanna prove a technique is better? Use AI to make a benchmark! Learn by experimentation! That is my advice to juniors. At the end of the day AI is writing code and there may be 10 different ways to run something. Only one is the fastest in any given use case.
      • chowells 5mo ago
        Fastest is usually the wrong metric. But you'd need experience to know that, I suppose...
        • steezeburger 5mo ago
• andrewstuart2 5mo ago
  I was talking to some friends about this over drinks the other day. I feel it has the same effects as any drug (or behavior) that triggers dopamine. If I can get a dopamine hit for lower effort AI in 10 minutes, and maybe a tiny bit better of a hit doing it myself after a day, why would my brain go for anything but AI? Especially when my DIY muscles are a bit atrophied. And of course the hedonic treadmill (if that's even valid any more, IDK) has reset the baseline so that anything less than the quick gratification feels like nothing. It makes the stuff I used to absolutely love feel like more of a chore compared to just cranking out features with code only an AI can love.
  • dogleash 5mo ago
    I'm curious whenever I hear takes with your perspective. Entering the workforce happens at an age where people have built (some more rudimentary than others) a level of understanding and self control regarding delayed gratification and Type II fun. Did you have the kind of life where you were never really challenged to build that skillset, or is the mental stimulation so strong for you when you use AI that it overcomes executive function?
    • AlecSchueler 5mo ago
      > Did you have the kind of life where you were never really challenged to build that skillset, Do you really think phrasing a question like this will ever induce a productive response?
      • dogleash 5mo ago
        I guess I could have phrased it better, but at some point I'm asking about weak self control vs if the drug is that strong. The life experience thing was meant as laying down a facesaving reason that it's OK to say your willpower sucks. You just weren't forced to cultivate it. Plenty of reasons that can happen in life. I think it's pretty normal to be able to reflect on the difference in life skills between myself and those I see in others. There are things I've struggled with throughout adulthood because through some happenstance I was able to avoid the class of challenge as a child. I didn't learn how to study until my 20s. I didn't have will-power over eating and exercise until my body changed around 30 and I suddenly got fat, then I talked with friends that teased me for being less skilled at something than a teenage version of themselves. What's the saying: someone who's never smoked doesn't have to learn how to quit smoking?
• marknutter 5mo ago
  Ai has been the best learning tool I have every used and it's not even close. I've learned more in the past year than I have in the past 5.
  • Ifkaluva 5mo ago
    Yeah it really depends on how it is used
  • happytoexplain 5mo ago
    There are two kinds of learning: Reading and doing (and you need both). AI has been great for the reading half of learning, but has harmed the doing half of learning due to efficiency demands. We can still "do" in private, but no longer in our day-to-day.
  • a96 5mo ago
    How did you measure your learning?
• comrade1234 5mo ago
  For my current project I'm coding every day in Java, ruby, and JavaScript. I waste a lot of tokens doing what used to be simple google searches for language differences since I mix up things like the null-safe operator ruby vs jscript or what is the continue/break statement in ruby vs java. I think Claude is probably very disappointed in me that the most complicated thing I use it for is refactoring old Java loops to use more modern streams which can be unwritable for a human off the top of your head.
  • d1sxeyes 5mo ago
    It doesn’t help that Google has gone to shit though, and what used to be a simple Google search is now an enshittified embedded experience with an AI anyway.
    • Bolwin 5mo ago
      No one's forcing you to use Google. I've found Kagi to be pretty good
  • krackers 5mo ago
    > which can be unwritable for a human Unfortunate, those types of refactorings are my favorite, since they're tightly scoped, easy to verify correctness, and it's like a little puzzle. Bonus points if you write your own collector or use some more obscure parts of the stdlib.
• behole 5mo ago
  I feel lucky cause I started dumb. Unintentional level-up!
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• Accacin 5mo ago
  I have a nice balance of using AI at work as a C#/TS developer which allows me to get stuff done and working on personal projects at home using AI purely for ideas when I'm stuck or not able to figure something out myself. I personally think it can be a great tool for learning but it's so easy to fall into the trap of getting AI to do everything for you. I've also used it for personal projects like a Chip8 emulator I wrote in C where I'd managed to run a few basic games and ran out of steam. Used AI to help me implement the rest.
• Aurornis 5mo ago
  > With coding, I've been using AI entirely for a year or two. I've been entirely prompting and I haven't written a single line of code. I have mostly forgotten how to code I've been using AI coding tools a lot lately, though I'm always in the loop. I write most of the important code by hand, but I like to send Claude Code or Codex off to try to come up with a solution in parallel to compare. Having reviewed so much of my hand-written code side by side with AI-written alternatives, I am still amazed that anyone admits to letting AI write all of their code. Either you're working on much simpler problems than I am, or you don't really care about anything other than making the tests go green and waiting for bug reports to come back so you can feed them back into the LLM again. Some times the coding tools come back with better ideas than I came up with. Some times my idea is much better. Most often with medium to high complexity problems, if the AI comes up with a working solution it has enough problems that an attentive human reviewer would have rejected it at best. At worst, it creates a mess of spaghetti code with maintenance time bombs ticking away. And that's for one change. I can't imagine what a codebase would look like if you completely deferred to AI tools to do everything. This quote is even weirder because they claim to have been doing this for two years! Two years ago, coding tools were much worse than they are today. Using AI to write all of your code 2 years ago would have been a weird choice. When I read posts like this I don't know what to think. Is this real? Or is it exaggerated for effect? I also roll my eyes a little bit at the idea that not writing code for 1-2 years means you forget how to code. I've been back and forth between 100% management and 100% IC in my career. While there is a warm-up time to get back into coding, you should not completely forget how to code after such a short time. The only reason this person feels like they've forgotten how to code is that they've made a choice not to code for 2 years and, apparently, they don't feel like making any effort to change this. For someone who claims to love writing code, I don't get it. Something doesn't make sense about this writing.
  • Eighth 5mo ago
    When I wrote this I overlooked the fact that I was in management for years before, which is possibly the actual real reason I forgot how to code. I've probably also been avoiding coding by hand. That was a choice. When I went back into IC, I probably didn't feel good enough for the seniority level that I was at and rather than working to improve myself, I used AI. Thanks for your comments. I didn't realise until I read this.
• dabinat 5mo ago
  It doesn’t have to be this way. You can use AI in ways that don’t rot your brain. You can delegate easy tasks to the AI to save time, while saving the harder tasks for yourself. Or you can treat it more as a mentor / tutor and have it explain why it made certain decisions. I find that AI fails at things that are truly creative. I have been thoroughly unimpressed with ideas it has had or things it’s written for me. There’s still a lot of room for human creativity.
  • miltonlost 5mo ago
    > You can delegate easy tasks to the AI to save time, while saving the harder tasks for yourself. This sounds a lot like "You can skip the fundamentals of basketball and just focus on dunking!"
  • asdff 5mo ago
    Well, the "easy" tasks people are delegating are still leading to atrophy. Stuff like having it take over your writing. Now you feel you cannot write without this crutch. I've seen stuff pitched like AI that makes your slide decks for you. That to me is dangerous because creating the slide deck in a coherent way is imo a very valuable way to understand your project and keep on track with the story you are trying to tell about the work. I think a lot of what we think is easy or even boring has a lot of value in building up our understanding.
  • iamcalledrob 5mo ago
    It baffles me a bit that people are working so hard to replace themselves with AI. It's such a high bar for the AI to hit, and takes the creativity away from the human. I have a pet theory that perhaps the optimal way to use AI will be more like an "exoskeleton" that turns you into a super-human programmer. Something that plugs the deficiencies of the human programmer, rather than replacing you entirely.
  • wccrawford 5mo ago
    I wouldn't keep the "hardest" tasks. I'd keep the important ones. It's often the same, but there are differences. And I'd argue that the important ones are the ones that you most want to retain the ability to do yourself anyhow.
• riazrizvi 5mo ago
  It converts ICs into project managers, by default. I've been wrestling with this issue for a year.
  • tombert 5mo ago
    Yeah, I've felt like it has converted my job from "writing software" to "babysitting interns". There are things that I think are very cool; there are lots of projects that I've sort of wanted to do for the last decade that I have pushed off because they're reasonably high effort and I don't want them that much, so being able to have a pretend intern write it for me has been great. On the other hand, I do think that using Claude/Codex to do all the coding at work has become a little soul sucking. Now instead of being paid to do fun software work, a lot of my work still boils down to babysitting interns. When I do get to work on projects that are interesting, it's still fun because I can justify writing TLA+, and using that as a guiding spec for my projects. The problem is that most work really isn't that interesting; a lot of it is glorified SQL queries, or CRUD, or "put thing into Kafka in one place, and take it out in another place". Those jobs can be tedious, but they aren't interesting, and now instead of even getting that, I yell at Codex to do it and I awkwardly sit and wait. I didn't think I'd miss writing stupid CRUD apps, but here we are.
    • riazrizvi 5mo ago
      I'm convinced Claude Code and Codex are not the future. The cap seems to be a 3-500 line file so I just use ChatGPT and/or my own front end to APIs on OpenAI and others including local. Much beyond that it will not do what I want. Too many expert details to get right.
      • tombert 5mo ago
        When it was just ChatGPT, I actually really enjoyed it. I still had to do a lot of the work, but I could use ChatGPT to explain arcane logs and help me diagnose errors. It didn't feel like babysitting interns, it felt more like "smarter google". Codex and Claude have been a bit soul sucking. I feel like I'm doing less of the planning and the like. I acknowledge that most code that makes it into production doesn't have to be amazing, but I would still take some level of pride when I would figure out an interesting optimization, even for a simple CRUD app, and now I am somewhat deprived of that kind of stuff.
• pplonski86 5mo ago
  before I ask AI to write anything, I prepare a plan, I was very positively surprised when noticed Plan mode in Codex recently. It make me feel that maybe others doing the same and that's why they added it. Anyway, I start with plan, then ask AI to do just one step. If coding a new feature, I do one step and check the code, doing git diff, reading changes, or just asking Codex, to show me changes. If writing an article, I ask for only one paragraph. I read paragraph and if it is ok, I accept it, if it doesn't show off my thoughts I work on one paragraph. If doing data analysis with AI, I do one step of analysis and ask AI to display intermediate results so I can see if all is going in good direction and there are no hallucinations, additionally I have follow-up prompts for AI to do results verification. If all looks good, then I continue to the next step. I don't like situation when I ask AI to do all code changes, or all article, or all data analysis in one pass with one prompt. It is simply impossible to check if AI is correct and results are not satisfactory. You can easily see this when asking AI to write a deep article with one prompt - you clearly see that it doesn't reflect your thoughts. Maybe step-by-step is the approach to use AI and not feel dumber.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• Imustaskforhelp 5mo ago
  Firstly I salute the author for saying these things. I mean we know the feeling of criticizing AI and certainly I criticize it a lot too, but when it comes to personal matters or how I am using AI, there are somethings I shy away from saying online and I wonder other people might feel the same way too. So for example, once AI deleted my project, I was able to recover it but I lost version control through series of mistakes and IMO I lost a good version. (I think after abandoning that project and coming back, I was able to accomplish it) Another example which is the one which is biting me the most is that I wanted to create a copy.sh/v86 based thing where you are able to edit the .img files of distros and save them all within the browser. I was able to run v86 custom way but I wasn't able to mount or have a proper way for making it work. And now although I mean this is just an optional project and I just thought hey it would be fun to edit .img files in browser but now it feels like I get disappointed. I think that disappointment is in both say a frustration of thing not working and secondly, just realizing that I might be dropping this idea altogether. Now I must admit that this is a field that I have absolutely no expertise at all in, but still, it feels disappointing to me and I kept thinking about it for sometime now. I wonder how many people just feel that if AI is unable to make their project, to then either get frustrated/disappointed and even a salt of panic. I think its just wrong for how damn much we are relying on LLM's at this point. It feels like the whole economy is just doing what I am doing but with billions of dollars. Another thing that I feel like is that both young and elderly people are really much like the same in vibe-coding. (Yes specs can help but LLM's are still autocorrect on steroids), I feel like we are both forsaking the junior developers and also forsaking the expertise created by senior developers as we replace it with these LLM's
• han1 5mo ago
  related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48139058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48139058
• HeinrichAQS 5mo ago
  Understand you 100% - thats why I force myself to study maths as a "hobby" at a remote university. Its completly useless these days since I will probably never reach a level where I am better than current frontier models - but it sharpens my own mind, just by doing it. I would compare this to the same principle which applies to physical training - its not essentially required these days anymore to be physical active, still its quite helpfull. It would be dumb to not use it - since it is usefull, but its also dumb to see yourself getting dumber and not doing something against it.
  • jiggunjer 5mo ago
    Me too! I got interested in category theory and how to express a logical model of "workflows" as a category. Then ai told me workflows are a monoid and not to bother.
• syl5x 5mo ago
  I feel that few will have the privilege to have the time to write code by hand. And let's actually see what we are actually writing, most of the time for me its nothing novel, nothing fancy its the same old create a backend for X, fix some simple bug and stuff that are trivial for a mid-senior programmer. The harder tasks are mostly (again for us) architectural decision over the code and I am even thinking of how we can develop a system where LLM wouldn't derail on feature implementations. Anyway, what I am trying to say is that you writing code by hand may be okay for now but in the future I believe the shareholders and whoever is on top of you will want you to deliver features/fixing bugs FASTER with the help of LLMs and if you can't deliver that you will under perform. So in the end it's not what we want but what the shareholder wants. Of course if you aren't drained by this you can write code by hand in your free time. I don't want to sounds like a doomer but I believe this will be very much a reality sometime soon.
  • iLoveOncall 5mo ago
    Everyone has the time to write code by hand, because AI doesn't yield real productivity gains.
  • lacedeconstruct 5mo ago
    It was a never a velocity problem though, rapid progress comes mainly from designing better systems and building tight abstractions not by writing using the same primitives faster
    • pmg101 5mo ago
      That certainly used to be the case. Do you think that in 2026 maybe rapid progress can also come from using the same primitives faster? I'm still figuring this out but I'm certainly open to the possibility.
      • operatorius 5mo ago
        Managing cognitive load was cool before managing context window has become the thing. Same techniques for both - the right abstractions, the right app architecture choices and layering.
• kingstnap 5mo ago
  I agree 100% with this article. You need to spend time on coding without agents and writing without AI as practice if nothing else. You should not get complacent in offloading all detail oriented work to agents.
• Bmello11 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• raincole 5mo ago
  > I just caught myself about to copy and paste it into Claude to see what it thinks because I'm worried that it doesn't make sense or it reads funny or there's something missing I unironically believe this is a very good habit. When it comes to writing, instead of starting with AI, finish a chapter by hand first then ask AI to review it strikes the best balance.
  • collinmanderson 5mo ago
    > I just caught myself about to copy and paste it into Claude to see what it thinks because I'm worried that it doesn't make sense or it reads funny or there's something missing. That's the self-doubt that it's feeding on and what I need to fight back. This is where I'm at. I feel like I need AI to review everything.
  • dwaltrip 5mo ago
    You may be right in many cases. But I think the author was commenting on how it felt like a compulsive urge stemming from fear and self-doubt. It’s a good insight about their frame of mind, and I applaud them for resisting the urge. You need to do things the hard way by yourself in order to learn. Reflexively copy + pasting into chatgpt is a good way to become completely dependent on the tool and have your skills atrophy. It reminds me of people who can hardly drive anywhere without GPS, even if they’ve been living in the same place for years.
    • raincole 5mo ago
      Yeah, but in a professional setting, one's work is for someone else to review. We programmers have code review. Even very established authors have editors. I think it's wisdom instead of a weakness to admit your work needs reviews. Of course AI review is the cheaper and sloppier alternative to reviews from human experts, but for a blog post I think AI is the sweetspot. "My works deserve to be reviewed before being posted to the public" is not a bad mentality. It's not imposter syndrome either. It's just consciousness.
• temporallobe 5mo ago
  I only really use GH CoPilot and while it’s really damn good at predicting what I’ll do next, I find it really makes me lazier. It’s like using GPS - it’s much faster, easier, accurate, and reliable than not using it, but I have found I don’t remember routes like I used to, as if that part of my brain just stopped working. If we don’t use a skill, our brains seem to want to almost immediately reclaim those resources for something else.
• zer00eyz 5mo ago
  God damn this nail gun is making me lazy, its like I don't have to swing the hammer any more... Most people, given a nail gun, cant build a house, thats where the skill is... Im not someone whose validation came from the lines of code, but from the resulting working system.
• gogasca 5mo ago
  [dead]
• jasonjei 5mo ago
  I’m not using AI to eliminate thinking but to free me from the rote mundane code writing. AI is perfectly competent at writing code once a prototype is implemented. I do write initial proof of concept crude prototypes (not commented, hardcoded variables, etc), and AI does the productionizing of them. It has really allowed me to command a team of agents instead of keeping track of a bunch of humans of varying work ethic, skill, and ability to maintain high code quality. And often AI is very good at maintaining patterns used in the code base or even keeping them to industry best practices. When using AI you will no longer be writing so much in programming languages—English or whatever language you talk to the LLM will be the main language.
  • hirvi74 5mo ago
    What even is rote, mundane code? How much of this rote, mundane code do you honestly have in any given project?
    • jasonjei 5mo ago
      I don't care to build a ledger or build an ETL system. I don't care to spend my time debugging IaC terraform systems. GPT allowed me to focus on the core functionality of my code instead of investing hours of my time on ancillary support systems that are well understood. Terraform is notoriously difficult even for the most skilled among us. It helped me manage and tune my Cloud Tasks queue for processing from the microservice scraping data into the main app. The cool thing is that I was able to let an agent manage this while I did the human task of steering it to work. Some of this work is novel, yet much of this work includes well-understood software patterns, such as scatter-gather and so on. I absolutely do not enjoy using JavaScript or TypeScript at all. So it was a huge relief when I was able to get AI to help with UI work on Next.js and React Native/Expo. I've gotten it to help with a cross-cloud cross-region setup on Terraform with shared secrets on AWS and GCP with GHA workflows for sandbox, staging, and prod promotion deployments. And I have no background as a DevOps guy. Again, it didn't propose the exact shape of my system design. But chatting with it really allowed me to form the shape. It really is a bicycle for your brain. It helped me look at the tradeoffs of different products (PubSub vs Cloud Tasks, or AWS equivalents).
• intended 5mo ago
  AI use and low confidence are correlated with lower ownership and deferment of critical thinking skills. Based on the MIT and MSFT studies.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• WalterBright 5mo ago
  Well, James, forgive me for being so inquisitive; but during the past few weeks, I’ve wondered whether you might be having some second thoughts about the mission.
  • henry_bone 5mo ago
    Nice. HAL, from "A Space Odyssey", right? From this, can we infer you're not exactly "all in" on coding via LLM Walter? I, for one, am not. I've gone on the record with my thoughts in prior LLM related comment threads. They will make us dumb.
    • WalterBright 5mo ago
      This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error.
      • henry_bone 5mo ago
        Hmm, Thanks HAL. :-)
• hedayet 5mo ago
  also, chatting with AI makes me impatient and delusional.
• epolanski 5mo ago
  I try the compensate for skills atrophy with leetcodes and kata wars, but the plain reality is that real software engineering, the one requiring you to absorb and make a problem intimate is just not there. The work rhythm has ballooned and as every co worker is now pushing work (generally mediocre but acceptable due to strong codebase fundamentals and them being good engineers) it is increasingly becoming a rat race of who delivers more. Companies don't even need to promote AI productivity because engineers being engineers will engineer the minimum effort required to deliver as much output that makes stakeholders happy. I am less and less fond of this work. I'm sure there will be people with different experiences, but I've never worked as much as I did in the last two years, but I'm too burned out. I genuinely feel I've regressed as an engineer and I see the same in my coworkers, some of them contributors to the highest impact OSSs you can think of. Every day, I'm more and more leaning into changing industry. I love code and programming and solving product problems. But the job has changed dramatically. If the pay+comfort ratio wasn't that good I would've done that already. It's hard to give up to 6/7k+ net per month in southern Mediterranean. I'm way better off financially than most US devs making even more, there's no comparison.
• dfxm12 5mo ago
  AI is keeping me on my toes. Many people in my org are experiencing the Dunning-Kruger effect after being armed with AI and are making such new and spectacular messes that I've had no other choice but to ratchet up governance controls. Improving documentation didn't help. The few people who read it complain to me when it is contradicted by AI.
• coldtea 5mo ago
  Most people who say this didn't/can't happen to them, are the worst cases...
• VikRubenfeld 5mo ago
  "That's the self-doubt that it's feeding on and what I need to fight back." Yes -- now let's talk about the correct form of fighting back. It is not "I don't want to feel self-doubt so I will suppress that feeling." It is, "The self-doubt is valuable -- it's pushing me to improve." The AI is never going to be able to say what you really mean. But it may inspire you to push harder to improve your ability to do that.
  • Eighth 5mo ago
    I reckon you're right. The self-doubt is a signal and I can use it a tool.
• deathanatos 5mo ago
  My company has 3 AI on every pull request now. They behave as follows: 1. a general coding AI: Completely broken. Should auto-comment, but never does anymore. Stopped a while back, nobody seems to know why. 2. another general AI: You have to at-chat it. It reacts to the message with <eyes emoji>, but never actually posts a comment? 3. a security bot. Comments, when it thinks there's a problem, in the most obtuse way possible. "SAST findings". But the findings are behind a link, and none of us devs are given access. I could lean on and press the various people shoving AI down my gullet to like … look at this, and the actual lived experience of devs trying to derive productivity from this mess? But IDK what's in it for me, really. Even Claude, when it worked, would comment in the most sociopathic manner possible: an English prose description of the problem, attached to an utterly unrelated line of code. Part of that is probably Github, who does let you attach comments to arbitrary lines of code in a review, only the blesséd lines can have comments. Literally none of our AI can format their complaint with a freaking suggested change (i.e., the Github feature, no, instead I get English prose). Honestly for all I know we failed to pay the bill or something inane, but it would be nice if the AI could format an error message, or something.
  • economistbob 5mo ago
    I ran Qwen 14b distillation of Deepseek locally once and created a console app and recoiled in horror at how powerful those things are. The problem is that humans are not designed for default deny mental processing, and so I am not optimistic about long range effects since the hallucination aspect can never be eliminated. No one is going to check everything for errors. A single error in some spreadsheet formula or code somewhere can have catastrophic consequences for years compared to what could have been. I see the transition from expert systems to language models to be a travesty foisted upon mankind. Pushing efforts to drive such language model outputs into data wrangling and analysis is especially heinous because that affects humans' very lives and ability to thrive or survive, or even face criminal consequences.
• dbvn 5mo ago
  You haven't written a line of code in 2 years and you're confused why its making you feel like you can't code?
• jonstaab 5mo ago
  I have been telling people lately that I feel like I'm losing my mind. And I'm not even someone who has leaned into AI coding that much either; I've just tried to learn the tools since Claude got "good". But my inherent laziness, which was always flattered as something that makes me a good programmer, has made me unable to use the tools with the required discipline. The result is that I have not thought deeply about the software I write for around 3 months. Every additional week that goes by without me doing a refactor or serious feature addition saps my confidence. I know I can still code. But I feel worried that I can't. Today I am refactoring a 4k LOC AI-written rust codebase. I don't know rust, but I will finally learn it today. And I can already tell the end result will be 50% the size and immeasurably more coherent.
  • Eighth 5mo ago
    The lack of refactoring when using AI tools is definitely a concern. I've only ever seen lines of code go up.
• kimjune01 5mo ago
  using AI to red-team your thoughts and assumptions is the fastest way to get smart since the dawn of time
• itissid 5mo ago
  Has anyone gone back to doing code katas, code craft like exercises by hand? They help keep me grounded. Also I feel like it’s fine to let AI write your code. I felt very much like the OP did. A couple of things help keep my sanity. one is that as developers I think our job has evolved to knowing what decision an AI makes is good and which one is bad, this can be code or design – but there is nowhere a developer(or for that matter a knowledge worker) can hide from ai. In this world you will be forced to communicate with them. Partly because as a community we have decided(for better or worst) that AI should bring non trivial amounts of productivity gains to software development. The other one is something I want to validate which is for those of us who are mediocre at coding, it might be a gift because it would free up some time and thus mind space to consider what we are actually good at.
  • scruple 5mo ago
    I use coding agents and LLMs at work where I'm more or less to some degree required to. At home, I write code the old fashioned way. Not katas, etc., necessarily, but I've decided that if we live in a world where code is cheap (or cheaply generated) that I'll hone my Lisp skills. I haven't used a Lisp in a few years and it's brought a lot of the joy of programming back for me, at least at home.
• alasano 5mo ago
  The main thing that was dumbing me down (and burning me out) was having to babysit LLMs on anything except basic tasks if I care about code quality/structure/maintainability. I love coding, it always felt like Legos for adults. Not that Legos aren't also Legos for adults. But there's no fighting the fact that we won't be writing 99% of the code anymore so I take pleasure in crafting the specs and requirements clearly, that's where I put the effort. And then to avoid having to babysit the agents to get them to stick to the plan, I built a super robust external orchestrator that forces multiple review and fix rounds until I get the result I want. I'll be fully open sourcing that soon also https://engine.build https://engine.build
• mariopt 5mo ago
  I feel your pain. Today I'm forcing myself to learn SwiftUI and type each character with my hands, there is a part of me asking "Why are you wasting your time instead of prompting it and getting the UI you want in minutes?". Well, even I use AI I must know the domain I'm operating in to create good products instead of useless slop. Even though I've been coding for 20 years now, I still need to be humble to grown in anything new. I can vibecode full apps but I'm not gonna pretend that my experience isn't playing a massive role in guiding the models. Don't let AI take away your joy for building stuff, it's totally fine not being "productive" and taking your time. Just force yourself to have, at least, 2 AI days off every week.
• gavinh 5mo ago
  When I work with Claude to plan a feature and then review Claude's implementation, I don't understand the feature as well those I developed without AI assistance. I don't recall details of the feature's behavior as well, even days later. I suspect that this is not surprising to anyone who has studied pedagogy. I've been working on applying some exercises during code review (including self-review of my own AI-assisted code) to improve comprehension and recall (https://bridgekeeper.io/ https://bridgekeeper.io/). If this problem resonates with you, I would like to talk.
  • Synthetic7346 5mo ago
    This looks pretty cool, but doesn't it reduce velocity? If CTOs want more code shipped faster, this might slow things down
• thisisthenewme 5mo ago
  As a developer, I kind of feel like this all smells like job security. After using LLMs for a while, I have to admit it's pretty nice, and I like using it. I've been vibecoding a few apps, and it's a good dopamine hit to immediately see your ideas come to life. However, based on my experience, it will bite you if you trust it blindly. Even in my vibecoded projects, it keeps adding "features" without me asking for them. Since they're just pet projects, I don’t really care as long as the end result is what I'm expecting, but I don’t think companies will be as flexible. I also don't think customers would like it if features changed or got added with every new fix or update. So this could go in a bunch of different directions from here, but to summarize the current situation: A lot of companies are heading in this direction. Without proper engineering, AI will easily write more code and potentially change the application unintentionally. We will have fewer junior engineers entering the market because of fear around AI and reduced hiring. AI usage will hit a critical point where it is making massive amounts of changes, and the people "prompting" it might start getting overwhelmed. We will end up with more features that people have to keep in their heads. I don’t think we can trust LLMs 100%, and because of that, developers will still need to know exactly what the application does. Eventually, there will be a lot of bugs, and developers will complain that we need additional human resources. Hiring starts again. I think, right now, the toughest position is for new developers, and the best position is for people already in the market.
  • cub-creature 5mo ago
    While I agree with the general sentiment that decentralized, bespoke solutions will explode, and require some maintenance (which may in-turn result in more hiring), I've seen plenty that still makes me hesitant to fully embrace this idea as likely. I know this is a wall of text, so forgive me while I doom-post my thoughts for a few minutes: For one thing, the efficiency gains are massive. Bigger than any other tool, for any other price. Our company's main product is a web-app. We've been working on a re-write of our main product over the last few years. In one afternoon, I set up a new project with our desired stack, and was able to vibe-code an MVP of our product that we've been working on in a matter of hours. It wasn't perfect, of course, but I prompted feature after feature in bite-size prompts, each one taking between 5-10 minutes to complete. It looked pretty professional, and by any measure it was certainly "good enough." Given a little more time, I could solo ship and maintain what has taken us a few years to build as a small dev team. Unfortunately, this is more like a cheap "full team-replacement" rather than an efficiency-improving tool Then there's the non-technical CEO AI hype-train. Our CEO (and the rest of our directors) have fully embraced the Claude suite of agentic tools. They're all regularly spinning up mockups, apps, and toolchains every single day. I can tell they're addicted to it, and they see the gains first-hand. In fact, while it hasn't happened yet, I wouldn't be surprised if the CEO laid off the majority of the dev team and vibe-coded the entire app himself (along with a few experienced devs). For now, they hold the view that "AI is a multiplier, not a replacer!" and in the same sentence will say "if this allows us to go the next few years without hiring again, that's a win!" I was asked point-blank why we couldn't just vibe-code our whole app. I didn't really have an answer. Yeah, there's the nice thoughts like "we wouldn't know how to maintain our app" -- but Claude would do a decent job in a single dev's hands, or "AI will potentially change the application unintentionally and introduce bugs" -- but proper observability, testing, and further prompting could fix those things in minutes to hours. Frankly, it just doesn't make sense for companies to keep their whole dev team around anymore. No matter how many projects you launch and initiatives you tackle, the backlog will rapidly shrink, while individual dev capacity grows to exorbitant heights. Non-technical CEOs don't care about tech-debt, cognitive debt, poor software design practices, learning to code, keeping devs smart, the joy of problem solving, the art of a good algorithm or architecture; they care about shipping a product that works reasonably well, provides value, is worth paying for, and doing so for the cheapest investment possible. Unfortunately, AI fits THAT bill in nearly every single way. I'm hoping you're right, and that the sheer volume of software being created now will increase demand. I'm worried, though, that it will never be enough to offset the massive capacity gains we get from AI.
• photochemsyn 5mo ago
  Aggressively red-teaming your own work with LLMs is a good habit to get into. Prompts like “I’ve been told me to find the flaws in this argument/presentation/code file/etc.”. Doesn’t save any time, but is pretty educational, as long as you go back and forth a lot. It can fall into a style disagreement loop between two equivalent code blocks as it will try to find something wrong if instructed to do so, which is interesting. If you don’t do this constantly, LLMS can certainly lead you right down the Dunning-Kruger path (though that’s a big oversimplification of a whole collection of psychological features from idee fixe to narcissism to fear of failure/criticism). If you really work at getting the LLM into the proper state it will happily rip your work apart in a rather cruel and indifferent manner, like an unsympathetic corporate gatekeeper who relishes exposing your flaws in a public setting. Debate club is another tactic that’s a bit less harsh, you have the LLM flip back and forth between defense and prosecution of your work. I think this should be the default setting, but it doesn’t encourage engagement, the average customer will think the LLM is a mean jerk if it starts off like that.
• winrid 5mo ago
  I don't feel this way. I have just been tackling more and larger problems, I think? This week one of many things for example is switching a multi-master KV store for tracking views on individual objects to tiered hyperloglogs that periodically merge. I could do this without AI, but it would take me a week instead of a day. I think, if you're not feeling challenged, you're probably just doing the same work but faster. You should try to tackle harder problems, too!
• nancyminusone 5mo ago
  Computers read my code, so I don't mind upsetting their feelings. But why would anyone use AI to write documents or articles? Do you really respect your recipients so little that you can't be bothered to share your own thoughts? I might as well get an AI to call my own mother on mother's day.
  • mjfisher 5mo ago
    I think the specific case of having a long conversation with an agent about what you're trying to achieve and why, and then have it update a README or a skill based on that conversation is a useful thing to do. Captured the context of the conversation without having to essentially write the same thing again.
  • crimsontech 5mo ago
    > Do you really respect your recipients so little that you can't be bothered to share your own thoughts? > I might as well get an AI to call my own mother on mother's day. One of the first copilot adverts I saw had a woman using it to write a speech for her daughters graduation, with speaker prompts instructing the woman to look at her daughter at one point in the speech. Such a personal and important moment in both their lives, I was shocked that they even put it out and thought it was OK. What next? "Too busy negotiating a critical business deal to attend the birth of your first child? Have copilot attend and email you a summary of it later." Found the video: https://youtu.be/ebls5x-gb0s?t=224 https://youtu.be/ebls5x-gb0s?t=224
  • conradludgate 5mo ago
    Hi, I do this at work. It's not a one-shot prompt. I'm chatting with the agent for a while collecting knowledge and forming a substantive set of documentation or references. This takes a lot of time and effort to collect. After this, I just get the agent to refine a doc for humans to read. I'm not very good at writing for humans, and it takes me far too much time that I usually give up and move onto other more important things instead. So it benefits everyone that I have vetted a set of documents in my expertise domain and shared them, even if not written by me they contain my ideas.
• h14h 5mo ago
  I'm worse at producing code by hand, but feel smarter overall. I've learned an insane amount in a very short period of time, and have been engaging in much more challenging problems. Instead of "what's the right syntax for this for loop again?" I'm asking "what's the business critical module in this system and how do I structure the test suite to prove it's working to spec?"
• throw4847285 5mo ago
  We talk a lot about the risks of AI in schools, but those same risks apply in any learning environment. I recently started a new job and I find that AI is making it so much harder for me to onboard. I am adjusting to my role much slower than my peers who are using AI less. I am coding in a language I am unfamiliar with, which makes the lure of vibe coding stronger. I am at least skilled enough to recognize when Claude gives me an answer that either makes no sense or is unnecessarily verbose. But the more time I spend asking Claude to write code, the less I feel like I'm developing the skills that the job requires. Plus, when I submit a PR, I lack the necessary confidence in my own work, which just feels bad. Honestly, another part of this is that I'm asking Claude to search through Slack and docs for answers to questions when I should just ask another person. The AI is feeding my social anxiety, luring me into avoiding human contact that I know will be good for my understanding as well as my general need for social interaction. That all sounds like I am absolving myself of responsibility, but I think it's important to point out how a given technology is especially addictive for a certain type of person, and traps them in a negative behavioral cycle. If I hold off on relying on AI now, I suspect I can grow in my skills to the point that I can delegate tasks to AI that are rote and easy for me to verify their results. It feels challenging, but it's necessary.
  • xiaoyu2006 5mo ago
    It is the worst time for the apprenticeship system (internship). everyone expect you to ship fast and good with ai, but you can barely have the time to pick up any skills during the fast iteration.
  • schnitzelstoat 5mo ago
    I’ve found the LLMs quite useful for summarising a codebase for me to quickly get a grasp on it. It’s one of the real use cases I’ve had other than basically vibe coding
  • godshatter 5mo ago
    I'd suggest going the route of having Claude teach you what you need to know. How do I uppercase this string? What's the best way to tackle this problem? Is there a standard way to do this thing? Then you learn along the way. You don't have to use it as a search engine, just ask it what you need to know in the moment. It will shake it's token chains and give you something that's useful, especially for a beginner in the language. This way you can implement your plan of growing your skills and then starting to delegate to it later. I've been doing this, and it's a nice balance for me. Having Claude code things when you don't know how to evaluate it's code seems like madness to me, but I guess I'm in the minority on this.
• gralab 5mo ago
  We need to separate our emotions from these things. I understand why people don't like AI, or are fearful of it, but we need to have good faith arguments about it. Not this. These articles are just cope.
• projektfu 5mo ago
  It is making me feel less dumb when I use it to get Linux admin things done because 1) it gets it wrong and I have to help it and 2) even though I would have gotten frustrated and given up without AI it shows me that Linux has gotten way out of hand for administration. Wheels have been reinvented and conventions have been changed for no good reason, or because of https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
• economistbob 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  • nancyminusone 5mo ago
    "such profanity" is 3 "god damns" to you?
    • deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
  • DeltaCoast 5mo ago
    The author said “god damn” once or twice whereas you just amended your comment to add a sentence containing “shit”. Not sure I understand your logic.
    • deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
• danesparza 5mo ago
  It's literally changing your brain when you don't use it like you used to. So, yeah. It is.
• otrv 5mo ago
  I find that a good way to battle this is to realize its not either the dev or the AI that should be coding at a given time. People needs to transform their workflow so the codes alongside themselves. I am try to be coding at all times on complex issues while I am offloading a boring, non architecture, boiler plate heavye etc. task to it in the background in a git worktree. I ask it to work in small iterations and commit every step of the way. After my coding session is done I can go back and review it's code.
  • Eighth 5mo ago
    I think you're right and that's probably my mistake. I should be using it as a companion rather than an independent agent. I think enhanced auto complete or function level work is probably appropriate. However what I've been doing is having it build a full application from scratch, to the point where it's impossible to review.
• 0xkvyb 5mo ago
  it’s crazy, we’re at a point where I commit code I haven’t seen, reviewed by another AI, followed up to by another AI and it’s just kind of scary. This thing will explode in our faces sooner or later. Also makes me feel like an imposter rather than an engineer. Maybe that’s actually what I have become.
• madrox 5mo ago
  I would argue the last 20 years of app development is what made people dumb. During the "don't make me think" era of software design, if you wanted to make software you got really good at identifying the use case and using design thinking to optimize the paths to goal. You could make a business around a very narrow set of flows. The only thinking a user had to do was pick The App for That. They never had to think about how they want to approach their task, which is a skill in itself. AI isn't like that. There's a million ways to use it. That's a big part of what makes it cool, but it requires the user to thoughtfully approach their workflows. Not everyone is used to doing that.
• fapi1974 5mo ago
  I believe your words should be your own. I refuse to let ai strip my words of their idiosyncrasy. I refuse to put my words into a machine that robs them of their humanity. They are mine, they are me. Working with a human editor is an act of love and creation. Working with an AI editor is an act of mediocrity and sacrificed originality.
• jkkola 5mo ago
  I'm a data analyst and a bit of a data engineer,which comes with the territory. I maintain some unholy pipelines that I wrote a few years back and they were due for refactoring for a long time. I do the AI-fueled refactoring in the most basic way - paste the code, ask for suggestions, implement the ones that are sensible, ask for clarifications whenever something's new to me. The last part is absolute gold. I've learned so much with the help of AI that I think the more I use it the less I need it, rinse and repeat. I'm at the other spectrum of what the author feels. I feel smarter and more capable with AI, and I'm actually surprised how helpful it is in my workflow. I still write code by hand but I know way more than I would without it. Granted, I'm the "accidental programmer in a team that's completely non technical" and AI is simply a senior I'd never have otherwise. YMMV but I think if you use the tool as a more expressive Google search it can be a great companion. Pure vibe coding is not far from "let's outsource everything", it's just a bit cheaper and more available.
  • seanw444 5mo ago
    > YMMV but I think if you use the tool as a more expressive Google search it can be a great companion. I get the most mileage out of this as well. It's the middle ground option. Everyone's either saying AI is useless, or saying how it's so good that writing code is an obsolete task already. Personally, I'm learning a ton with AI as a research tool, and implementing my code by hand with that knowledge. It also naturally solves the "you can't review 20,000 lines of code a day to even properly understand that it's correct" problem as a side effect too. But I am still building things much faster.
• hirvi74 5mo ago
  Perhaps my ego is preventing me from becoming too addicted to LLMs. It's not that I think the tools are incapable. Rather, LLMs are probably far more capable than me in nearly every programming metric that matters. However, if I were to release a solution that I 'vibe-coded' into the wild, then I would feel quite a bit of shame if someone figured out that I used an LLM to write the entire thing. I know it may come off as a bit silly, but it is a feeling I cannot seem to shake. A feeling that prevents me from wanting to adopting the technology in full force because... Well, I did not truly create the software if AI did all the work. Sure, the software might have been my idea, but that does not bring me much fulfillment. I know programming is just a means to an end, but I feel like I have put in a lot of hard work over the past decade and a half just to barely scratch the surface of mediocrity. I was attracted to this field because I saw a sense of beauty in computer science (and programming). It felt like one of the few remaining options for a creative job that was spared from the cutthroat nature of the a career in the arts. Like the Samurai class during the early industrialization of Japan, maybe it's time for me to lay down my sword too.
• erelong 5mo ago
  Ask AI how to make you smarter and use some discernment on if the suggestions would accomplish the goal or look up human-written articles on how to use AI to enhance intelligence
• esafak 5mo ago
  What a bizarre article. He laments the use of AI and then hopes that it might cause a flood of programmers.
  • Eighth 5mo ago
    Not a flood but a reduction.
• singpolyma3 5mo ago
  I don't understand how one even uses "AI to write". Writing is the act of taking something that's been burning in my head for a time and emitting it for others. The LLM doesn't know what's in my head and therefore cannot write it...
  • switchbak 5mo ago
    I use LLMs all day long, but I don't understand why I would use it to write out my thoughts for me? I'm not the world's best writer by any means, and rather self-critical in general, but even I don't have the compulsion to have an AI rework my thoughts for public consumption. Perhaps for a set of slides or a big README, but not for one-off ideas and communication. In fact, I quite resent when someone sends me some AI generated psuedo-thoughts that are clearly not their own and devoid of the real context.
  • Eighth 5mo ago
    I have a method of using voice transcription to brain dump my thoughts and ask AI to turn it into something organised and sensible.
  • moate 5mo ago
    Some people are stupid and think that they should be given accolades for all their abilities that are just locked away behind their stupidity. They keep telling us AI is the key to this. This is why I don't trust AI. It's being sold to me by rich idiots who can't understand why art is interesting.
• paol_taja 5mo ago
  I definitely double guess everything I do without it. The doubt creeps in fastest on the stuff I used to do without thinking.
• amelius 5mo ago
  > AI is making me dumb We'll have AGI not because AI is getting smarter, but because we are getting dumber.
• mcv 5mo ago
  To me it really depends on how I'm using it. Sometimes it makes me feel smart, I'm solving problems I wouldn't have been able to solve before, and I'm learning a lot. And sometimes it feels like I've outsourced my thinking and I can just feel myself getting dumber and losing control over the project. I think it's vital that you keep strict control, and really try to understand what the AI is doing. And especially when you're doing something really complex, even Claude Opus can get lost or lose track of the context, and you need to be paying attention when that happens.
• pokstad 5mo ago
  Missed opportunity to name article “AI make me dumb dumb”
• DParida08 5mo ago
  The day AI platforms suffer a massive and prolonged outage, it’ll trigger absolute panic and chaos. In many ways we are sacrificing a part of our creativity and independent thinking, but the reality is there’s hardly any alternative now. In a world moving this fast, choosing not to adapt often means getting left behind.
  • moate 5mo ago
    Nah. "the internet" or "the power grid" sure, but "AI" being down for an extended period of time would mostly just cause the stock market to shit the bed and trickle down effects from that, but not any actual loss in productivity. We did a lot of things 3 years ago believe it or not, and we'd just go back to working like that after some adjustments. (To be fair, I literally have "Don't Panic" inked on my arm, so I may just be inclined not to panic...) I work for one of the largest companies on the planet doing work with a budget in the millions (meaning I am a nobody, but also not "nobody") and I don't touch AI personally. There is a group of very rich people who want to get much richer and see humanity as the thing hindering that dream who keep telling us that "if we don't train their new pet how to replace us, we'll be replaced" but I'm going to go ahead and say that AI is a thing, and probably relevant, but like in the way crypto is, not in the way the internet is. Does that make sense? It's a scam for oligarchs. I'm saying AI is a scam for oligarchs and has very limited use cases and we're already starting to bump up against edges. Also a lot of people REALLY hate it, and that headwind didn't exist for things like "the internet" (you just had a large percentage of the population who initially didn't care, this is active animosity).
  • micromacrofoot 5mo ago
    You could say something similar about the internet really, and the worst we get is some AWS or Cloudflare outage, no? People joke about various services being down but it's nothing too ridiculous, and unlikely to impact every provider simultaneously.
  • davebren 5mo ago
    Please stop pushing the "getting left behind" fear. Prompting is not a skill, there is nowhere it's going that it can leave anyone behind. The "skill" of prompting is 100% dependent on one's skill programming, and in a day the skilled programmer will be able to surpass the guy that's been vibecoding for a decade.
• Eighth 5mo ago
  Reflecting on the comments, I did this to myself. I should have titled this "I used AI to make me dumb".
• fstepho 5mo ago
  Slightly different take here. I'm not coding less, I'm just coding the harness instead of the product. Most of my time goes into AGENTS.md, hooks, sub-agents, verification loops to keep the agent from going off. https://openai.com/index/harness-engineering/ https://openai.com/index/harness-engineering/ describes pretty much what I do all day now.
• FrankRay78 5mo ago
  I’m still the same smart person when using AI. What the author probably means is their memory of syntax is fading. Bothered?
• JimmaDaRustla 5mo ago
  It's just exposing the dumb
• daemonk 5mo ago
  I am getting the exact opposite experience. But it is probably because I am in a domain where code/software is a tool, not the product. I find myself learning exponentially faster and more. For example, I am working with spectroscopy hardware currently (raman, nmr) where I got Claude to write code that interfaces with equipment on a hardware level. Instead of me going through data sheets and writing out a bunch of wrapper code, Claude did it for me. I am able to progress much faster by using Claude to discuss various techniques, implement them, and test it out. This loop would have probably taken me 5-10x more time previously. And I am learning so much more about these machines/techniques/data than I would have if I had to expend the mental effort to write menial code just to see a result. I have more than a decade of experience as a developer. I am glad that we are finally moving towards a world where we can utilize code as a tool rather than constantly trying to think how to make it into a product.
  • seanw444 5mo ago
    > I am glad that we are finally moving towards a world where we can utilize code as a tool rather than constantly trying to think how to make it into a product. Maybe that's just you. Code as a tool rather than just a product has always existed.
• squirrelon 5mo ago
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• banq 5mo ago
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• 486sx33 5mo ago
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• barrkel 5mo ago
  > before computer science was a profession, it was physicists and mathematicians and academics who programmed. Professionals. The professionalism has faded away as demand for software developers skyrocketed. This is revisionist nonsense. Programmers used to be cowboys, by and large, outside a handful of critical domains. Systematic use of code review, automated tests, source control and so on are relatively new. What was different is an entire program could fit in one person's head. The stack of abstractions wasn't nearly as deep, necessarily, since you couldn't afford the cost in memory and CPU. That delivered a different kind of intellectual control, a kind that is exceedingly rare nowadays outside hobby projects.
• luxuryballs 5mo ago
  When it comes to writing I only use AI for writing technical documentation or basic page copy, never for anything that is purely writing or for communication like a blog post, or a paper, or an email, or a letter, or a book, or even marketing copy. Basically only use it for anything I wouldn’t otherwise have the time to write but isn’t important to be written by me. I actually can’t fathom using it for writing as a principle, to me it’s just a keyboard extension for code generation, never a replacement for the written word that should be in my voice and fully a stream coming from my mind that I should have full editorial awareness and memory of. Now that I think about it I’m a snob in this regard, I turn my nose up at people that use AI to write things that are purely written, in my mind using it for writing is defeating the purpose of writing!
• Tiinex 5mo ago
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• KevinMS 5mo ago
  Since I've never touched AI except for google search results I feel like I'm in a sci-fi show like Pluribus
• 0xbadcafebee 5mo ago
  It is impossible to be made less smart by not manually writing code. If it were possible, you would be stupider every time you go on vacation. Your brain's neuronal connections do not die from talking to a chat bot. What's actually happened is you took a break from a highly technical skill. Every person on the planet will "forget" some part of that technical skill if they don't use it in a while. But the information is not gone, it's just been de-prioritized for other more pertinent information. The information comes back once you give yourself a refresher. Before AI, it would be months between me writing a full program in one of several languages. I would forget simple things like how to start a function definition. But I did not really forget, because after a quick glance at an existing function, I remembered all the other possible syntax in the function definition. There's no need to panic, your brain is working normally.
  • lmm 5mo ago
    > you would be stupider every time you go on vacation Are you sure people aren't?
    • borski 5mo ago
      They usually come back smarter, actually.
      • deleted 5mo ago
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      • SpaceNoodled 5mo ago
        There's a vast difference between the mental refreshment from a week or two relaxing vs. ceasing all thinking full-time.
  • mpalmer 5mo ago
    > It is impossible to be made less smart by not manually writing code. If it were possible, you would be stupider every time you go on vacation. Your brain's neuronal connections do not die from talking to a chat bot. What if everytime you went on vacation, 80% of your open work items were magically completed? Why would you give yourself a refresher? Not you specifically, of course. This thought experiment is about what we would all do in the aggregate.
• wayeq 5mo ago
  A counterpoint: Working in /plan mode bouncing ideas back and forth with the AI, me catching its wrong assumptions, it filling in knowledge gaps with a clear explanation when needed, is very intellectually stimulating and I think is making me a better engineer. The key for me has been to be socratic with the AI, think through everything it is proposing carefully, and don't get hypnotized by its confidence, perfectly structured arguments, etc.
• OhioMan2943 5mo ago
  This is such an american who reads the atlantic without scuritny and gets manpiulated vibe
• sbinnee 5mo ago
  I've reserved a time span next month to learn TypeScript. I don't intend to rule out AI entirely during that process. My plan is to read a book from cover to cover, and then write code. I am pretty sure I heard of this method from Mitchell Hashimoto on some podcast. I am exited and scared at the same time, because like OP I've spent a lot of time prompt-coding.
• Brian_K_White 5mo ago
  AI is not making anyone dumb. It lacks the volition and agency to do any such thing. People are making themselves dumb by choosing to, and how to, use AI.
• bodegajed 5mo ago
  Can a programmer who has no personal feelings of attachment to slop, make it all the way to production and maintained?
• denizay 5mo ago
  "With coding, I've been using AI entirely for a year or two. I've been entirely prompting and I haven't written a single line of code." I just can't understand this as a programmer. I use AI a lot as well when I program but I still write a lot of the code by myself just because it is easier to write the code I want, specially if I know what I want, than to make AI understand what kind of implementation I'm thinking of.
  • boesboes 5mo ago
    Same here, but i think i understand: if you can code for shit, AI makes you feel on par with people that can actually write code. Like, for some it is easier to explain what they want then writing it out as code. For me, it is not.
• arkaic 5mo ago
  Yesterday I needed to email my landlord about the roof and immediately used chatgpt. This is gonna be it for everything
• Jimidesuu 5mo ago
  I think it's all about the perspective on AI as well, cause in my case, whenever I use AI, I tend to look for more ways of improving what was delivered by AI. Most of the time I just write a draft of the context of what I want to see then feed it to AI and check whether it didn't sound right and tbh, That approach is making me either lazy/efficient cause I use it to my work
• vivzkestrel 5mo ago
  you are suffering from point 4 as mentioned by the OP here https://personalaisafety.com/p/youre-not-getting-smarter-youre-getting https://personalaisafety.com/p/youre-not-getting-smarter-you... "4. When the answer feels done, you stop thinking"
• JoheyDev888 5mo ago
  The GPS analogy in here is exactly right. I still know how to drive, but I genuinely cannot navigate my own city without it anymore. I didn't notice it happening.
• arian_ 5mo ago
  I'm 15 and learned to code with AI from the start. I genuinely don't know if I know how to program or if I just know how to talk to something that does.
  • pona-a 5mo ago
    It's simple to find out. Add Claude /etc/hosts and see how long you persist.
  • a96 5mo ago
    Then you didn't learn to code. Maybe you learned to prompt at most.
• Dban1 5mo ago
  I've heard this before with the Internet
• Dban1 5mo ago
  Chaos is what it is. Chaos often grants immediate power but corrupts and destroys the more it is used.
• ashoeafoot 5mo ago
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• KurSix 5mo ago
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• luodaint 5mo ago
  Those sessions which stayed together had something in common: singularity of concern. 1 session = 1 feature, 1 bug, 1 migration. As soon as you have a session covering several subsystems, the diff becomes too large to read properly, and proper reading is the only thing keeping the mental model up-to-date. Also useful: writing the constraint before the session, not after the failure. "The auth state should be checked on the route level rather than the component" becomes quite clear once you see an agent applying the same rule in three slightly different ways in two files. Writing down the constraint beforehand allows you to detect the violation; rubber-stamping achieves nothing. What really multiplies in value is not prompting but understanding your own system enough to prompt the agent properly.
• d4rkp4ttern 5mo ago
  In the context of coding agents, one thing I find surprisingly useful is this - rather than have the code-agent explain to me what it did and why, I have it quiz me Socratic-style: it presents a scenario or problem, and asks me why a certain idea would not work. It forces me put effort into thinking it through, and even if I answer wrong, it avoids giving away the answer and persists in drilling down with further questions, until I eventually arrive at the answer. This type of effortful thinking likely helps both learning and retention. I find the frontier LLMs very good at this type of quizzing. I made this Socratic Quiz as part of my suite of plugins for Claude-Code or Codex: https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/plugins-detail/workflow/#socratic-quiz https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/plugins-detai...
• deterministic 5mo ago
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