91–100 of 225 posts
I find it interesting when people say, “I need time away from the AI to think.” I use AI for development but I would not say I’ve offloaded my thinking to AI. AI is great for pushing text but I haven’t found its system design skills to be that good. To me the design has always felt like the thinking though.
Which reminds me of when we were admonished to continue using assembly, lest our "real" skills atrophy from too much cushy C development.
Which reminds me of when we were admonished to keep our scope and probe skills sharp, and read and understand the schematics of whatever computer we were on, lest we forget how to diagnose faults in its components.
Which reminds me of when we were admonished to practice calculating in our heads and keeping slide rule skills sharp, lest they atrophy to a calculator.
You don't need to "keep practicing" in order to maintain your understanding.
The best engineers know how our systems work down to more levels, but for average developers producing average software with average impact, average output is acceptable.
At the very least, I do encourage people who are working on personal projects for explicitly learning and studying purposes to purposefully not use AI. Of course, if the purpose of the project is to learn AI, then that rule is allowed to be broken. Anecdotal example but I know plenty of students (Including my own brother) who graduated recently who did it almost entirely with AI (unfortunately at the request of their…
I've been doing this on my latest personal project. What I've realised I missed the most is feeling in the zone or in a "flow" state as some call it. It really feels amazing. Coding agents take that away from you. I really think we need some coding agent implementation which takes less agency away from programmers and helps people be in the flow even more. For my project I use Gemini/Google's AI mode to great effect.…
If your plan is to offload a task to AI, do you really need to dedicate your attention to it?
This is as silly as saying you shouldn’t drive your car on Friday’s and walk to work instead. Why only Friday? What does “doing things the old way” one day a week prove or benefit when you spend 90% of your time working with AI? Tech people who have their entire identities wrapped up in being smart or the best engineer in the room have suddenly learned that intelligence is now a commodity and a cheap one at that.
At the very least, I do encourage people who are working on personal projects for explicitly learning and studying purposes to purposefully not use AI. Of course, if the purpose of the project is to learn AI, then that rule is allowed to be broken. Anecdotal example but I know plenty of students (Including my own brother) who graduated recently who did it almost entirely with AI (unfortunately at the request of their…
Another caveat is this was a graduate course, so I would expect more maturity and integrity on average than an undergrad course. But anecdotally I thought it was an interesting result.
[0] https://exploiting.systems/posts/2026-05-17-learning-focused...
I’m not going to go that far (you do you), but reading the source code seems like a great way to remain in touch with the implementation. On my hobby project, I do a lot of reading code, asking the AI pointed questions about how things work, and asking it to clean up messes.
So you’re left with the least interesting tasks? Not trying to be too snarky, or too much of a luddite, but that would be a killer for me, motivationally.
I'm having a great time building personal web apps with exactly the features I want, and I also enjoy refactoring the source code to get closer to how I would ideally write it. I can use a coding agent to do both. What's not to like?
I stopped editing source code by hand as a self-imposed limitation to see how far I could go by prodding AI to do things my way, and it turns out it's pretty far, so I'm sticking with it.
Which isn't to say that writing code by hand can't be fun, too, under the right circumstances.
It also helps that I’m retired and this is hobby programming. If you’re being forced into it by circumstances at work, that wouldn’t be nearly as fun.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really do not get all of y'all claiming this causes you to "not be able to think". I worked on six nines active active payments infra that handled billions in daily transaction volume. I've built laser projection systems to play interactive games on skyscrapers. That ability is not atrophying. I'm able to do 10-20x what I was able to do before AI, and I'm able to work at a breadth, depth, and level of polish that w…
It sounds like you're experiencing a manic episode.
I post stuff I make on reddit and the teenagers (or grown men?) say things like, "your mother should have used a coat hanger if she knew you'd use AI". And it's almost a daily occurrence on social media.
I'm having a great time, and you don't have to join the club. Do whatever you want with your life. But stop talking to us like this.
I get that what I posted here is a critical refutation and not simply a neutral art or tech post about AI to a friendly audience. It invites critique and that's fine. But all the same, why do people go out of their way to frame it like this? To dunk on positive things and experiences people are having?
Reminds me of when we were admonished to use a "real" compiled language rather than an interpreted, GC'd one, lest we lose our ability to reason about the system, cache, and memory. Which reminds me of when we were admonished to continue using assembly, lest our "real" skills atrophy from too much cushy C development. Which reminds me of when we were admonished to keep our scope and probe skills sharp, and read and u…