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AI is making me dumb

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Re: AI is making me dumb

#31

Post by steezeburger »

hparadiz wrote: post #23
steezeburger wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 programm…

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.

Yeah I totally agree! I also think people should still be reading as much code as they can. That's always been true imo. It is just hard to keep up with it now because of how much code an LLM can generate for $20/month. I do think we'll move to higher abstractions of course. We won't have to understand code as much as how the systems and components are architected. It would also be nice to use our new efficiency to return to producing truly optimized and fast software.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#32

Post by ryeights »

svnt wrote: post #16
pton_xd wrote: post #6

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.

A higher level of abstraction that doesn't require thinking? Did you mean to write thinking here?

Reads like great satire to me.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#33

Post by hansmayer »

pton_xd wrote: post #6

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.

Ha ha ha... actually in the last 20-30 years most people learnt programming in assembly no for the sake of building programs in assembly - it was tought so you can have a grasp of microprocessor architecture. Instructions, interrupts,registers and all that. It means being fully aware of your environment. Without this knowledge of our environment, not only in our jobs, but also generally in life, what are we? Not more than wild animals surviving on instincts and an occasional burst of conciousness. Well, no thanks - I don't want to be an Eloi.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#34

Post by dogleash »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #15

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…

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?

Re: AI is making me dumb

#35

Post by steezeburger »

chowells wrote: post #30
hparadiz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fastest is usually the wrong metric. But you'd need experience to know that, I suppose...

I think it's just the wrong metric to optimize for _first_. It's not generally a bad metric to keep tabs on though. Make it work, make it right, make it fast? Or something like that.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#36

Post by Aurornis »

> 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.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#37

Post by dabinat »

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.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#38

Post by bogzz »

svnt wrote: post #16
pton_xd wrote: post #6

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.

A higher level of abstraction that doesn't require thinking? Did you mean to write thinking here?

Welcome to Costco. I love you.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#39

Post by AlecSchueler »

steezeburger wrote: post #13
pton_xd wrote: post #6

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.

I've been thinking a lot about the new primitives and paradigms we'll see.

Care to share some of these thoughts?
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