AI is making me dumb
51–60 of 328 posts
Re: AI is making me dumb
#52Relatable! 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…
> 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. Mayb…
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.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#53Understand 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.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#54I 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 absolu…
Fully agree. I supplement my game development with AI. Anything novel or interesting I want to do, I need to write the code for myself, otherwise I'm in for a world of hurt. But for the drudgery work that is necessary to invest a lot of time in but boring to actually write, I design a clear architecture and ask AI to do the implementation leg-work. And still you have to go back over and make sure it didn't decide to just create something outlandish. A good recent example is Codex trying to recreate from scratch the behaviour already provided by Area2D in a game I'm making with Godot.
If you try and get AI to do anything meaningful, it will be riddled with footguns and bizarre choices. Maybe if you have hundreds of dollars worth of tokens that might not be the case - but for someone who spends $10 a month, it's just not worth the headache.
Besides, for me these are hobby projects and writing code is still fun, I just make AI write the boring parts (good examples: saving and loading, parsing of data files and settings menu functionality) - but I keep it away from anything that needs a humans judgement to create.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#55I 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.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been thinking a lot about the new primitives and paradigms we'll see.
Care to share some of these thoughts?
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-verificat...
Re: AI is making me dumb
#57I 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.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#58For 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…
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.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#59[flagged]
Re: AI is making me dumb
#60Is 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 delegat…
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