Are Devs Becoming Lazy? The Rise of AI and the Decline of Care

This.

Not only can I corroborate this experience already in my workplace, even in my personal projects I can feel the effect.

The most striking example was I was learning a new language (fennel) and wanted to translate some existing code (Lua) as an initial exercise. It got the first few files fine, and I did feel like a double-checked them to make sure I understood, but only when it failed to make a conversion that worked properly did I realize I hadn't been learning really and still had no idea how to fix the code. I just had to write it by hand to really get it in my head and that 1 hand-written file have me more insight than 10 ai translated ones.

O, it looked better, had better design too because the ai just took the style of the existing file and transposed in whereas I was able to rethink the other files using the strengths of the new language instead

I was ready to disagree with this article - most of the first half is a rehashing of a paper about the first release of GitHub Copilot from 2021! - and then I got to the recommendations, and "Always Review AI-Suggested Code" and "Stay Sharp on Core Skills" are both good principles to hold on to when working with this stuff.

> Coding used to be about craftsmanship, precision, and knowing your tools inside and out.

It still is. Assistance from LLM tools helps me know my tools inside out better.

There’s good points in this article, especially for new engineers who may not understand what the AI is writing.

Also, “lazy” in coding often means you’ve automated something and made it efficient. So I don’t view lazy as bad.

Less careful is a concern. Not everyone is great at reviewing code. However we’ll be using AI for code reviews and security audits soon (obviously some are already). I suspect code quality will improve with AI use in many domains.

These subjective posts are moronic and it should be mandatory by any author to state their sources by which they speculate. They are opionated, invalidated and often poorly written thoughts which is never backed up by any evidence at all.

Yes and no. It depends. People are different. Good devs always care because they have totally different values than those who doesn't care. Humans 101. What else is new ?

See I can also write opinionated garbage.

no they're just becoming dumber.

i.e. the age of the average linux kernel maintainer is rising to what now 50s ?

There's too many factors to judge this right but my feeling that a combination of lack of work ethic, depression, media bs has led people to believe that they don't need to be competent in what they're doing because of x reason.

The answer couldn't be farther from the truth. Actually implementing AI requires you to understand and troubleshoot hard problems anywhere on the stack from the emotions of user experience to the scale of electrity.