Instead of ChatGPTing things in what I work in, I have sought to improve my knowledge a lot in shell scripting, I am reading man pages more diligently (even if I am not dilgent enough) and seek to use documentation first, such as man pages, software documentation, etc. before even going to search for something. I am not perfect, but I feel like most of the problems I have are present in manuals - I am RTFMing myself.
I do this because I wasn't like that in the past and I hate myself for not being more deliberate in reading and discovering things organically through doing things. This is not about joy, (even though it makes me happy) but my obligation to myself and then to my employer to be good at what I do.
Sitting with a chat bot undermines this urge to be a better developer completely. I will probably be argued with, but I have worked with a lot of smarter people, but I realized after many years, (and what the article alludes to), that they have a very strong sense to fight through myriads of almost random problems, but they have the knack at solving those problems intelligently.
I remember specific co-worker that used an even plainer Emacs config than I did to write Java code. I was genuinely curious what his thought process was when trying to remember APIs without anything more special than simple modes for jumping around a codebase. He said "I don't know, I just read the manual first."
Yes! If he can do that, I can do that. After that, a lot with working with computers is about continually pushing through those random problems to their solution. This is an absolutely precious skill. I don't feel the affected yet, but I will be, I expect - lesser quality searches while we have to push our chat bots sub-sub-problems instead of just understanding what we are using. I don't want to and I will continue to hold out, like all the other essentially dumb technologies I am now stuck with (I am looking at my two mobile phones now ...)