AI is making me dumb

You can also tell it to periodically summarize the "lessons learned" from the recent session(s)

On the flip side, I'm working on stuff FAR more challenging than I would ever be able to do on my own.

My brain is melting because I can barely keep up with learning how to figure out if I'm even doing what I'm trying to do.

AI might be making me a worse coder, but I don't care. If it hasn't "solved" coding now, I'm pretty confident it will long before my career is over. I don't have a job because I can write code - that's a small part of it. I have a job because I can get things to work. Anyone can code things that don't work (especially AI).

AI is certainly making me a far better overall engineer. Instead of spending my time trying to make the compiler happy (or fixing dynamic type errors at runtime), I can spend my time trying to solve substantially harder problems that I would never even dare try without an entire team to back me up (i.e. never).

Coding - imo - is VERY low on the totem pole of engineering skills.

I don't care if the function is pretty. I care if the system is upholding invariants and performing as expected, and there's adequate testing in place to PROVE to me that it ACTUALLY works.

High performance concurrent code has always blurred the line between sorcery and arcana... Go didn't really solve that. Rust/Tokio didn't. Zig didn't. C certainly hasn't.

It might be easier to prove to yourself, if you're the one doing all the writing, but at the end of the day, code is rarely just for you...

You probably should have the same level of proof whether you wrote it yourself and just trust yourself bro, or whether a Chinese Room wrote if for you.

I feel like I'm living in a Brave New World, and - at least for the time being - I'm enjoying it, even if it feels like I'm sprinting as fast as I can and still unable to keep up.

1. a general coding AI: Completely broken. Should auto-comment, but never does anymore. Stopped a while back, nobody seems to know why.

2. another general AI: You have to at-chat it. It reacts to the message with , but never actually posts a comment?

3. a security bot. Comments, when it thinks there's a problem, in the most obtuse way possible. "SAST findings". But the findings are behind a link, and none of us devs are given access.

I could lean on and press the various people shoving AI down my gullet to like … look at this, and the actual lived experience of devs trying to derive productivity from this mess? But IDK what's in it for me, really.

Even Claude, when it worked, would comment in the most sociopathic manner possible: an English prose description of the problem, attached to an utterly unrelated line of code. Part of that is probably Github, who does let you attach comments to arbitrary lines of code in a review, only the blesséd lines can have comments. Literally none of our AI can format their complaint with a freaking suggested change (i.e., the Github feature, no, instead I get English prose).

Honestly for all I know we failed to pay the bill or something inane, but it would be nice if the AI could format an error message, or something.

I think it's pretty normal to be able to reflect on the difference in life skills between myself and those I see in others. There are things I've struggled with throughout adulthood because through some happenstance I was able to avoid the class of challenge as a child.

I didn't learn how to study until my 20s. I didn't have will-power over eating and exercise until my body changed around 30 and I suddenly got fat, then I talked with friends that teased me for being less skilled at something than a teenage version of themselves.

What's the saying: someone who's never smoked doesn't have to learn how to quit smoking?