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AI is making me dumb

jpain.io

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Re: AI is making me dumb

#321

Post by d4rkp4ttern »

In the context of coding agents, one thing I find surprisingly useful is this - rather than have the code-agent explain to me what it did and why, I have it quiz me Socratic-style: it presents a scenario or problem, and asks me why a certain idea would not work. It forces me put effort into thinking it through, and even if I answer wrong, it avoids giving away the answer and persists in drilling down with further questions, until I eventually arrive at the answer. This type of effortful thinking likely helps both learning and retention. I find the frontier LLMs very good at this type of quizzing. I made this Socratic Quiz as part of my suite of plugins for Claude-Code or Codex:

https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/plugins-detai...

Re: AI is making me dumb

#322

Post by Synthetic7346 »

gavinh wrote: post #123

When I work with Claude to plan a feature and then review Claude's implementation, I don't understand the feature as well those I developed without AI assistance. I don't recall details of the feature's behavior as well, even days later. I suspect that this is not surprising to anyone who has studied pedagogy. I've been working on applying some exercises during code review (including self-review of my own AI-assisted…

This looks pretty cool, but doesn't it reduce velocity? If CTOs want more code shipped faster, this might slow things down

Re: AI is making me dumb

#323

Post by cub-creature »

davebren wrote: post #246
cub-creature wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with the general sentiment that decentralized, bespoke solutions will explode, and require some maintenance (which may in-turn result in more hiring), I've seen plenty that still makes me hesitant to fully embrace this idea as likely. I know this is a wall of text, so forgive me while I doom-post my thoughts for a few minutes: For one thing, the efficiency gains are massive. Bigger than any other tool,…

> was able to vibe-code an MVP of our product that we've been working on in a matter of hours. > Given a little more time, I could solo ship and maintain what has taken us a few years to build as a small dev team. Sorry but this just sounds fake. Team spending a "few years" rewriting a web app, Claude doing it in a matter of hours. What the hell were you guys doing the last three years.

Yeah, good question. It's certainly not fake, we've been working on this rebuild for the last few years, but maybe Claude's ability was a bit embellished.

> What the hell were you guys doing the last three years.

I believe some call it "development hell"? We were working hard every single day, yet poor management, dev turnover, and poorly defined scope led to a constantly broken, constantly refactored system. Too many cooks, and no chef. Our small company is full of inexperienced people, including PMs, who had never taken on a project of this size or scope.

To be more clear on Claude's role: I didn't vibe-code the "final product" we've been aiming for in a few hours. I built a limited feature-set MVP, consisting of a front-end, and a new API on our existing back-end. Claude was able to take our existing models, with a few tweaks I described, and build new controllers and a new front-end for a handful of the features we've been working on migrating over to the new system.

Realistically, I gave it the well-defined soft-ball features. I don't know how it would perform given the more complex features, especially when it would need to integrate with its existing work in an extensible way.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#324

Post by a96 »

skydhash wrote: post #279
godshatter wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd suggest going the route of having Claude teach you what you need to know. How do I uppercase this string? What's the best way to tackle this problem? Is there a standard way to do this thing? Then you learn along the way. You don't have to use it as a search engine, just ask it what you need to know in the moment. It will shake it's token chains and give you something that's useful, especially for a beginner in t…

> How do I uppercase this string? What's the best way to tackle this problem? Is there a standard way to do this thing? I strongly believe that it's better to just take a couple week of slow times and read a good book about the technical matter you're dealing with. Having bite sized answers isn't a good way to be proficient.

No, and if you aren't going through mental effort, your brain isn't learning. It's just being briefly entertained by the information. You need practice and association building to actually build knowledge and skill.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#325

Post by a96 »

arian_ wrote: post #300

I'm 15 and learned to code with AI from the start. I genuinely don't know if I know how to program or if I just know how to talk to something that does.

Then you didn't learn to code. Maybe you learned to prompt at most.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#327

Post by JackSlateur »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #254

It is impossible to be made less smart by not manually writing code. If it were possible, you would be stupider every time you go on vacation. Your brain's neuronal connections do not die from talking to a chat bot. What's actually happened is you took a break from a highly technical skill. Every person on the planet will "forget" some part of that technical skill if they don't use it in a while. But the information…

It is impossible to be made less muscular by not doing work out.

Oh wait, you were serious ? Haha.

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