using AI to red-team your thoughts and assumptions is the fastest way to get smart since the dawn of time
AI is making me dumb
111–120 of 328 posts
Re: AI is making me dumb
#112I 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 really enjoy having the AI write the spec then I write the code.
Reviewing code is pain, reviewing requirements and giving feedback feels more productive. I have to confront the full shape of the problem and I usually discover a few cans of worms that make me rethink my approach.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#113I 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 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. 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…
> 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.
This is not a good thing. You should understand what your code does. Writing code nobody can understand is not a flex.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#114We'll just move to a higher level of abstraction; thinking will be like efficiently coding in assembly, no longer necessary in today's world.
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 graphs very well. We may need a specification language intended to be read and written by AIs, readable by humans but seldom written by them. Going directly from natural language specifications to code causes the LLM blithering problem to generate too much code.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#115Earlier 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…
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 of other hacks/shims, just like many human developers :)
Re: AI is making me dumb
#116Has 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 for that matter a knowledge worker) can hide from ai. In this world you will be forced to communicate with them. Partly because as a community we have decided(for better or worst) that AI should bring non trivial amounts of productivity gains to software development.
The other one is something I want to validate which is for those of us who are mediocre at coding, it might be a gift because it would free up some time and thus mind space to consider what we are actually good at.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#117The main thing that was dumbing me down (and burning me out) was having to babysit LLMs on anything except basic tasks if I care about code quality/structure/maintainability.
I love coding, it always felt like Legos for adults. Not that Legos aren't also Legos for adults.
But there's no fighting the fact that we won't be writing 99% of the code anymore so I take pleasure in crafting the specs and requirements clearly, that's where I put the effort.
And then to avoid having to babysit the agents to get them to stick to the plan, I built a super robust external orchestrator that forces multiple review and fix rounds until I get the result I want.
I'll be fully open sourcing that soon also https://engine.build
Re: AI is making me dumb
#118I 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…
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 don't think "cheating" is the right way to frame it.
A junior has managers pushing them to do more, faster. You review the code but do you really understand it the same as if you struggled through it? Do you ever build the muscle memory of what works and what doesn't?
It is the thought process that builds skills. I've seen some projects trying to be deliberate about learning from the agent as it writes to code - but I'm not sure there is a substitute for struggling and learning by doing.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#119I feel your pain.
Today I'm forcing myself to learn SwiftUI and type each character with my hands, there is a part of me asking "Why are you wasting your time instead of prompting it and getting the UI you want in minutes?". Well, even I use AI I must know the domain I'm operating in to create good products instead of useless slop. Even though I've been coding for 20 years now, I still need to be humble to grown in anything new. I can vibecode full apps but I'm not gonna pretend that my experience isn't playing a massive role in guiding the models.
Don't let AI take away your joy for building stuff, it's totally fine not being "productive" and taking your time. Just force yourself to have, at least, 2 AI days off every week.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#120Relatable! Or at least making me feel dumb (at times). Things that help me feel smarter are * actually writing more on my own - created a personal blog just to get myself to write more * upleveling my thinking - think more about problems and framing * leverage my experience - guide (or sometimes force) the AI assistant to leverage my experience to avoid problems * learning new things - rather than let AI just replace…
> learning new things I wonder lately, doesn't that all new knowledge push out the old knowledge? As in new things replace old things we know. I don't know any studies on this but do we have infinite capacity for knowledge? What about retaining it? I catch myself asking AI wondering about random things that pop into my head, reading it, maybe using that knowledge once and later no longer remembering what it was. Mayb…
Knowledge memory doesn't really work that way, it is more like that it is constantly fading unless re-imprinted by use and learning new things is just imprinting new knowledge on top. The new knowledge will form connections with the old knowledge which will help keep some of it from fading, but not all.
Another way of looking at what you said is that the practicing the new knowledge takes the place of practicing the old knowledge. So it isn't the knowledge that is replaced, but the learning (imprinting).