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AI is making me dumb

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131–140 of 328 posts

Re: AI is making me dumb

#131

Post by collingreen »

Rooster61 wrote: post #11

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 absolu…

Learning from code review lashings is amazing in its effectiveness and minimal blast radius! I'm glad you were able to take that in the easy way.

Scar tissue from production going down and staying down is probably powering those code reviews and I think will be teaching this wave of vibe projects a few hard lessons. I've had to learn a few things the hard way like this and it's as effective as it is painful.

I'm very pro ai-generated-software in the right context. I think being able to vibe out software as needed is awesome and could finally unlock the potential of our computer and data dominated world. I also think we haven't yet learned as a culture where this new thing is different from traditional software and misunderstanding that is where a lot of the pain will be felt.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#132

Post by winrid »

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!

Re: AI is making me dumb

#133

Post by svachalek »

Rooster61 wrote: post #11

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 absolu…

I'm a very senior dev (32 years exp) but I've got the process nailed down tight enough with .md documents, skills, review agents, etc, that I don't typically have that feeling or any need to do anything extra.

I don't think this makes me dumb though, I've just moved up stack. Rather than caring about assembly language or source code, I'm focused on requirements, architectural decisions, engineering process, and ever more automation.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#134

Post by nancyminusone »

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.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#135

Post by h14h »

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?"

Re: AI is making me dumb

#136

Post by bonesss »

embedding-shape wrote: post #115
tailscaler2026 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it writes a lot of code. It gets paid per token. That's guaranteed future income every additional line of technical debt.

Then local models shouldn't suffer from the same problems, but they do. They just aren't trained in the direction of "less code == better long-term maintainability" I'd say, rather than some grand "increased-token-usage" conspiracy. You can certainly steer them a bit to reduce the issue parent talks about, but they still go into that direction whenever they can, adding stuff on top of stuff, piling hacks/shim on top…

Training data is the masses of code from everyone.

Restrict that data to just the best of the best, the tersest of the tersest, and we’d see better output. I don’t think people are sharing that kinda stuff (Jane Street’s gems stay locked up), and even if they did my presumption is that it’d be too narrow and demanding for general audiences.

Big hopes for the long future, damned to some degree of mediocrity in the near term mass product.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#137

Post by guelo »

svachalek wrote: post #133
Rooster61 wrote: post #11

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 absolu…

I'm a very senior dev (32 years exp) but I've got the process nailed down tight enough with .md documents, skills, review agents, etc, that I don't typically have that feeling or any need to do anything extra. I don't think this makes me dumb though, I've just moved up stack. Rather than caring about assembly language or source code, I'm focused on requirements, architectural decisions, engineering process, and ever…

Every engineer to manager has the same thought but after a few years they can barely code.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#138

Post by throw4847285 »

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.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#139

Post by embedding-shape »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #121
embedding-shape wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, whenever you're 99% sure you'll throw away the code afterwards.

Internal/personal tooling, marketing automations, etc. tend to afford it without needing to throw it out after. These are also cases where you can simply rewrite later without having to address a mountain of debt. If you do this work for a wage and are nearly fully alienated from the value of your labor, I understand the distaste for applying it in any circumstance. You'll care more for your personal experience of th…

I care about building programs that work, do their thing well and are easy to change today and in the future :) I'm not sure where you're extrapolating the rest from, vibe-coding simply isn't for long-lasting software, you need to actually be involved then. Don't get me wrong, most of the code I "produce" today is written by LLMs/agents, but almost none of it is "vibe-coded".

Personal tooling especially, since you want to be able to just do small changes over long periods of time, it's important it makes sense when you come back to it, even if you forgotten all about it since your last change.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#140

Post by mjfisher »

nancyminusone wrote: post #134

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.

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.
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