[flagged]
The author said “god damn” once or twice whereas you just amended your comment to add a sentence containing “shit”. Not sure I understand your logic.
[deleted]
AI is making me dumb
161–170 of 328 posts
Re: AI is making me dumb
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Here's what I do Tell it "Do not change any files yet, just listen." Then we discuss the problem. Then I have it write to a file it's understanding of the change. I review that carefully. Then I let it implement. I approve each change after manually looking at it. I already know what it should be doing. Make smaller changes and check each one carefully before and after.
This is a reasonable approach but has nothing to do with what is being pushed on us from all sides.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#163I 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 think this instinct is intrinsic, and comes from really caring about detail and wanting to fully understand it and own it.
That's what drives it, and I don't really think the extrinsic things about the way you learned (while helpful) have that much bearing on it. It comes from you and you should take credit for it.
I think if you were learning today you'd probably find have the same feeling and do just fine because of it.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#164Has anyone gone back to doing code katas, code craft like exercises by hand? They help keep me grounded. Also I feel like it’s fine to let AI write your code. I felt very much like the OP did. A couple of things help keep my sanity. one is that as developers I think our job has evolved to knowing what decision an AI makes is good and which one is bad, this can be code or design – but there is nowhere a developer(or f…
I use coding agents and LLMs at work where I'm more or less to some degree required to. At home, I write code the old fashioned way. Not katas, etc., necessarily, but I've decided that if we live in a world where code is cheap (or cheaply generated) that I'll hone my Lisp skills. I haven't used a Lisp in a few years and it's brought a lot of the joy of programming back for me, at least at home.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#165I would argue the last 20 years of app development is what made people dumb.
During the "don't make me think" era of software design, if you wanted to make software you got really good at identifying the use case and using design thinking to optimize the paths to goal. You could make a business around a very narrow set of flows. The only thinking a user had to do was pick The App for That. They never had to think about how they want to approach their task, which is a skill in itself.
AI isn't like that. There's a million ways to use it. That's a big part of what makes it cool, but it requires the user to thoughtfully approach their workflows. Not everyone is used to doing that.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#166Earlier 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…
When the chainsaw fails the juniors, they're going to be adding wood chippers and stump grinders. The seniors are going to be out there chipping artisanal wood blocks with a hatchet. You don't need a lot of history to see who you really need to be worried about.
Its not the internet that needs convincing, its the ones writing the checks
Re: AI is making me dumb
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
A higher level of abstraction that doesn't require thinking? Did you mean to write thinking here?
Putting info into a spreadsheet is a higher level of abstraction that doesn't require thinking. There are many concrete representations like that. LLMs don't use them much. This is a lack. Can you point a LLM at a body of code, and tell it "give me a concise UML chart of what this does"? I'm not advocating humans writing UML, but some representation like that may be useful to AIs. Except that they don't really do gra…
I’m not sure you and the parent are talking about the same thing.
I think they were making a joke about us getting dumber that I am confused about the premise of.
You seem to be suggesting we are going to fill spreadsheets (which claude already does pretty well) and that spatial reasoning is an insurmountable problem instead of just something that doesn’t emerge naturally from training on text/code corpi.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#168Earlier 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…
I think this is one of the key takes right now. I too have similar experience. Which way is it going to go? i) “Seniors” also get superseded by even more capable models that can do all of the things which currently require experience. ii) Linguistics become the new higher order abstraction (English is the new high-level programming language) _but_ there are different / orthogonal ways of approaching software developm…
There's also iii) people realize that if the LLM needs that much babysitting, it doesn't actually add value. So they don't use it very much because it is too limited as a tool.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#169I believe your words should be your own. I refuse to let ai strip my words of their idiosyncrasy. I refuse to put my words into a machine that robs them of their humanity. They are mine, they are me. Working with a human editor is an act of love and creation. Working with an AI editor is an act of mediocrity and sacrificed originality.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#170I 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…
The code that LLMs produce is just average IMO. I wouldn’t call myself an authority on clean code but I can tell when code is well structured. I prefer my hand written code over Claude or GPT’s every time.
I once did an experiment where I generated a spec from a project I’d already written, then had an LLM blindly reimplement it from the spec, and compared code. The LLM’s version looked like vomit.