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AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

koshyjohn.com

451–460 of 656 posts

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#451

This feels AI written as the post goes on. Either way, I'd like for us to stop fetishizing how we can use AI to make us stronger, better, and more valuable engineers. It's exhausting and doesn't consider other ways to use it. I've only been using it lately for tasks that are a step or two above google. Having it write code for me has just been a slippery, unfulfilling slope.

I wish people would stop pretending that agentic coding and elevated thinking arent mutually exclusive.

Theres way too much money on this hype train now though to point out the emperor isnt wearing any clothes and way too many people who always did think that "boilerplate spew" (the one thing AI really does well) is a valid form of programming rather than a shortcut to tech debt.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#452
post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This requires logic, which LLMs lack. What? I've heard many takes on what AI lacks, but never this one. We had ChatGPT being able to solve an Erdős problem on its own yesterday [0]; how could you explain that if it cannot do logic? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47903126

LLM didn't solve an Erdos problem, it generated a text that a human looked at, cleaned up, corrected and used as base for a solution. WRT logic, there a multiple occasions of LLMs answering incorrectly to trivial logic puzzles. Of course, with each occasion becoming public they are added to training data and overfitted on, but if you embed them in a more subtle way LLMs will fail again.

> WRT logic, there a multiple occasions of LLMs answering incorrectly to trivial logic puzzles.

There are multiple occasions of me answering incorrectly to trivial logic puzzles. Is that enough for you to deduce that I am "lack" logic?

Humans make mistakes all the time, and indeed we say "To err is human"; why should we expect AI not to?

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#453
post #386
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software engineers graduates I've met are usually much worse at programming than computer science graduates.

I'm gonna strongly +1 on this. Most of the "Software Engineering" curricula I've seen is catered towards "getting a job as a programmer", and is mostly focused on languages, frameworks and outdated processes. As an engineer in another discipline, there's no engineering there. I would rank like this: Computer Science > Self Taught > Software Engineering.

I might go as far as saying that SE is dogmatic. And the dogma is usually very outdated. Not necessarily useless, though.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#454

I was surprised not to see any discussion on whether the author used AI to help write this post. As many people say, writing is thinking. I started getting that "I'm reading another AI-written blog post" feeling around 1/3 of the way through, but I don't consider myself super calibrated on this. Pangram seems pretty confident it's AI ( https://www.pangram.com/history/e9f6eb77-86f9-46d0-a6c1-e57c... ). But I know thes…

Great question! I had A.I. critique what I wrote and wherever it gave me suggestions like “this sentence runs too long”, “this can be more punchy”, etc., I considered what it would tell me and chose to change direction if I thought it was warranted. But, notably, I typed out what I thought in my head to counter specific criticisms if I thought them valid instead of taking the LLM’s direct suggestion. I’d then ask it to critique my revision. I stopped when I read and re-read the final drafts end to end a couple of times and was reasonably happy with the flow myself. All the core ideas, the analogies, the choice of structure, etc. are authentically my thoughts and my message. The thing A.I. reined in the most was my tendency to have run-on sentences in early drafts. The concepts percolated in my head for weeks before I decided to blog about it - writing it end to end, and revising it over and over took about 3 hours.

The one thing I can tell you is that pangram is confidently wrong in this instance. And I now worry about how many may have relied on such assessments blindly in consequential places (school essays?). Which ties back to the thesis of my piece - where do you rely on AI and where do you rely on your own intelligence.

On a lighter note, decades ago, in middle school, we had an exercise to summarize a book we read. My school’s librarian wrote ambiguously “write this in your own words”. I asked her what she had meant by that. She had thought I’d copied it from somewhere even though it was all my own words. I went on to become the school topper in my final year for English (and one spot shy of being the school topper for Computer Science).

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#455
post #432

Use AI like you would use any other tool: to work for you. There are all sorts of things you can probably do manually that just go a bit faster or more efficient with AI. It's not that different to using an electrical drill vs. a manually operated one. You end up with holes in both cases. But one achieves that a bit faster and neater. Nobody is going to pay you for your artisanally crafted CSS code or whatever you we…

good luck with ignoring what's under the hood. One day you will experience how it does translate to the things people pay for.

Some people are mastering the use of skills and guard rails. I have a few decades of experience to lean on, which seems to help. My guard rails tend to capture what I appreciate in software. AI tools seems to be pretty much a shit in, shit out kind of thing. If I want better output, I put some work in it. Mostly all you need to do is ask for better and be able to articulate what better means for you. Of course that requires understanding what that is. It's early days for a lot of people. Even some of the more experienced prompters have only a few months to at best a year of experience developing software that way. Early last year was when Claude Code first appeared. And mostly the tools didn't really get usable on non trivial code bases until later in the year.

Anyway, there are a lot of people producing mediocre software (with or without AI). That's pretty much a constant. I remember people using Visual Basic. Exact same thing. The problem isn't the tools but the people using them. There's a learning curve and most people are still behind that curve.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#456
post #303

> If the job were mainly about producing syntactically valid code, then of course A.I. would be on a direct path to replacing large parts of the profession. But that was never the highest-value part of the work. The value was always in judgment. > The valuable engineer is the one who sees the hidden constraint before it causes an outage. The one who notices that the team is solving the wrong problem. The one who redu…

> How do you think engineers in the second half got there? By writing tons and tons of code to "build those reps" and gain that experience. It's not by writing syntax that you get there. It's by creating software and gaining the experience of seeing it go wrong. "Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement." AI just shortens the cycle without needing to type out syntax, so you get even m…

> It's not by writing syntax that you get there.

Writing syntax is still an important part of the experience. It is valuable because it requires you to spend time immersed in the nuts and bolts that hold software together. I'd compare it to cooking, if you have an assistant or a machine do everything and you never actually touch a knife or stir a pot, you'll lose your touch. But there is also something valuable about covering more ground and the additional experience that brings.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#457

agree on the code side. for decisions i'd push it a bit further though. the trap isn't really that the model does your thinking for you, it's that it agrees with the thinking you already brought to it. you can't verify a decision the way you verify code, there's no test that fails when "this answer is wrong because you wanted to hear it." so even if you don't outsource the thinking, you can walk away with a plausible…

the agreement problem is the one that worries me more too. you can catch replacement, it's visible. you can't catch a model that confidently validates your existing blind spots back at you the deeper version of this: the reps that build judgment used to happen naturally in production. you shipped something wrong, it broke, you learned. that feedback loop is now compressed or gone entirely. the question isn't really "is AI replacing your thinking" it's "where are the reps happening now." if the answer is nowhere, the judgment debt is accumulating invisibly and the AI agreement problem you're describing is exactly how it stays invisible

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#458
the article frames this as a choice between two groups. i think the more interesting question is structural. judgment used to get built through a natural feedback loop: ship, break, trace, fix, understand. AI doesn't just remove drudgery, it compresses or removes that loop entirely. a junior who never ships broken code in production never gets burned and never builds the instinct that catches the next fire the answer isn't "use AI less." it's that deliberate practice has to happen somewhere else now, by design, not by accident

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#459

I was surprised not to see any discussion on whether the author used AI to help write this post. As many people say, writing is thinking. I started getting that "I'm reading another AI-written blog post" feeling around 1/3 of the way through, but I don't consider myself super calibrated on this. Pangram seems pretty confident it's AI ( https://www.pangram.com/history/e9f6eb77-86f9-46d0-a6c1-e57c... ). But I know thes…

Great question! I had A.I. critique what I wrote and wherever it gave me suggestions like “this sentence runs too long”, “this can be more punchy”, etc., I considered what it would tell me and chose to change direction if I thought it was warranted. But, notably, I typed out what I thought in my head to counter specific criticisms if I thought them valid instead of taking the LLM’s direct suggestion. I’d then ask it…

Thanks for sharing your process! It's helpful and refreshing to hear from someone about how they engage with AI when writing, and where / when the detection tools may fail.

(We obviously live in a more nuanced world than most social media interactions might make you think :P)

> On a lighter note, decades ago, in middle school, we had an exercise to summarize a book we read.

My first experience with plagiarism was in first grade, when we were told to write a book report about a subject during our library time. I diligently took my book on the musk ox and copied three pages word-for-word into my notebook as my report. I can't remember when or how we learned this wasn't "right", but I still think back on that and laugh.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#460

the article frames this as a choice between two groups. i think the more interesting question is structural. judgment used to get built through a natural feedback loop: ship, break, trace, fix, understand. AI doesn't just remove drudgery, it compresses or removes that loop entirely. a junior who never ships broken code in production never gets burned and never builds the instinct that catches the next fire the answer…

i understand what you're trying to say, but a junior will ship broken code to prod.. even with agents. he might keep delegating to agents to fix it, but that cycle will produce more brittleness(like the folks at claude code folks keep discovering). but eventually the organization will push back and ask why it's so brittle and costs more(time/money/people)
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