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AI is making me dumb
81–90 of 328 posts
Re: AI is making me dumb
#82Well, 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.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#83I 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…
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
Re: AI is making me dumb
#84I 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…
> 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
Can relate but the only thing I do different is I teach AI how to cleanup after herself in followup prompts, sessions and refining AGENTS.md. Static code quality analysis tools are also really good to keep the agent on its toes.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#85also, chatting with AI makes me impatient and delusional.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#86I 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.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#87Is 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…
> 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?
I do think that what people are being paid might get adjusted to whatever is happening.
Firstly off-shores, then now Tech companies have convenient response to lay off people and they genuinely believe that companies can be 5-10x shorter with AI and 90% of code will be written by AI.
They then push it on engineers and some adopt, some don't. It becomes a goodhart's law and people just start spending tokens to look good too and just spearhead using AI because hey 1) the corporate is recommending you to do this and then 2) the points you talked about.
The AI bill blows up (Cloudflare spends 5 million $ per month probably more in AI bills iirc) and with all of these, the company fires people off.
The amount of software engineers laid off all then try to create another AI tool (...using AI) or try to overcompete when the job market is at one of its all time low. Combine this with the overall trillion dollar and more of US stock market which is attached to the AI bubble.
I do think that you are paying a price in all of this, I feel like job insecurity is at an all time high, people are just scared of losing jobs from my understanding within this career. Some are closer to retirement than others but that's about it.
I think that nobody is that happy to be honest, the software engineer is worried about his job, the CEO is worried about being replaced or his product replaced by AI, the AI company is worried about how it would be profitable in first place, the investors are worried if they got into a bubble, the government is worried about all these people and other so distractions (think UFO files for example) and wars are happening and its successfully diverting our attention from real issues.
I don't know but I think that we are all paying a price and I say this as I sometimes feel the most over-empowered by AI, (like young guy in his teens) but I just feel like we lost something more critical along the way. We lost some senses of our humanity and peace as we are embedding this technology and just have people who are only thinking about it 24/7. I have to be honest but I do sometimes feel like I would've fared off okay without the AI thing too and I don't care about my personal gains so much sometimes but I do think that the world would've probably been net positive if AI's plateaued or were never created.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cert is fine according to my browser.
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.
If you have checked your AI would have said is not the cert
Re: AI is making me dumb
#89I 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…
In my experience, Claude only knows how to spew code. Every problem you want it to solve, it translates into "more code" rather than "less code". You have to very closely code review everything it does, otherwise your codebase is going to just grow and grow, and asymptotically approach 100% debt. I code review everything that Claude produces, and I'd estimate about 90-95% of the time, my reaction is WOW it works but…
Of course it writes a lot of code. It gets paid per token. That's guaranteed future income every additional line of technical debt.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#90> 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.
> 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.