31–40 of 43 posts
I have been "encouraged" by my company to go full throttle into integration LLMs into our workflow. I have found is has taken much of the enjoyment out of solving problems with code. As others have said, it has made me lazier and I can see myself losing my edge.
Of course, long term misuse by outsourcing your cognitive exercise to a machine has a negative impact.
Just auto complete your way to being completely dumb.
As a learning or exploratory tool it is best thing ever. Just don't use it to tab-tab your way out of actual work.
Perhaps not surprising given what we know about how e.g. satnav usage affects our navigational competence. Feels like outsourcing our reasoning and problem solving would have an analagous effect. "Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation": https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-62877-0
I caught myself at some point feeling like that was happening when going over my own codebase. I stopped being aggressive on AI usage for important stuff, and relegated for side stuff that I just want to get started.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never heard of spelling regressing. I think my spelling ability is mostly correlated to how much I have read. I know how to spell many words I've never used myself.
One thing I notice is that I can't spell out loud anymore. I have to type or write to get the right spelling.
Typing in a hurry or you forgot to add one more s in the word 'necessary'? No worries! Keep typing incorrectly and the phone will take care of the proper spelling of the word for you! And it will do so faster than you figuring out the right spelling for the misspelled word. Many of us have probably regressed in our spelling ability to some degree at this point.
I use AI for coding, but basically as a shortcut to API documentation. It lets me stay focused on my task. It removes a lot of the tedium of coding, so that I can focus on the actual problems.
And for good measure, those stop having value in the future - as they can be referenced from AI as easily as looking up how to convert a date format or center a div.
It's helped me stretch & explore new things that are a touch beyond my technical competence.
...but has also made me more lazy in some ways. e.g. I paste errors I don't immediately recognise into an LLM. Pre LLM I would have looked at the error in more detail first, then tried a couple of things blindly, then googled it.
Not just satnav, but as a kid I could remember at least 20 phone number of close friends and family. My spelling used to be quite good, but now I struggle with words my 9 year old can spell. I think this is the way with any new technology, we just move to the next level of abstraction and hopefully get to build bigger/better things...maybe.