AI is keeping me on my toes. Many people in my org are experiencing the Dunning-Kruger effect after being armed with AI and are making such new and spectacular messes that I've had no other choice but to ratchet up governance controls. Improving documentation didn't help. The few people who read it complain to me when it is contradicted by AI.
AI is making me dumb
91–100 of 328 posts
Re: AI is making me dumb
#92I 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…
Reading and writing are related, but separate activities. One's capability to write code can degrade independently of one's ability to review it.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#93I 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…
> after a few minutes of vibe coding Don't vibe-code, it's a joke someone coined in the moment, that somehow the industry decided shouldn't be a joke, and some people think it's a feasible way of developing stuff, it's not. Find a better way of working together with agent, where you get the review what's important to be reviewed by a human, and "outsource" the rest, and you'll end up with code and a design that works…
I've been thinking of using Kiczales's Systematic Program Design [0]. Write the skeleton. Let the IA fill in the blanks.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#94I 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…
The thing is that you seem to have that luxury to be able to dig more into the problem and scratch that itch.
But the industry is changing around you fast.
If MIT-bred devs were already building crap in faang before, the trend has been getting nothing short of worse across the industry.
Expectations are rising, the field is becoming a rat race of which engineer can output the most mediocre/acceptable/good enough amount of features in the least time as possible.
Let me make this clear: you're in an increasingly rarer bubble where you have a luxury that is disappearing in this industry, plain and simple.
I have the fortune of having stellar devs around me, people that contributed to projects and software you use every day.
They are also outputting magnitude of order more than they ever did, and none of them is getting genuinely better at the craft, but it is what it is.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#95I 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…
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…
A lot of people seem to think if you give the agent a framework and clear plans that it spews "good" code. I doubt it though.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#96I 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…
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…
I haven't used Claude, just Sweep, Copilot and whatever Jetbrains has. But they've definitely deleted code, not just added it. I know, because they have deleted code that I definitely still needed, and I had to reject those changes and start over on the prompt.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#97I 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…
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…
Here's what I do
Tell it "Do not change any files yet, just listen." Then we discuss the problem. Then I have it write to a file it's understanding of the change.
I review that carefully. Then I let it implement. I approve each change after manually looking at it. I already know what it should be doing.
Make smaller changes and check each one carefully before and after.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#98Most people who say this didn't/can't happen to them, are the worst cases...
Re: AI is making me dumb
#99"That's the self-doubt that it's feeding on and what I need to fight back."
Yes -- now let's talk about the correct form of fighting back.
It is not "I don't want to feel self-doubt so I will suppress that feeling."
It is, "The self-doubt is valuable -- it's pushing me to improve."
The AI is never going to be able to say what you really mean. But it may inspire you to push harder to improve your ability to do that.
Re: AI is making me dumb
#100It doesn’t have to be this way. You can use AI in ways that don’t rot your brain. You can delegate easy tasks to the AI to save time, while saving the harder tasks for yourself. Or you can treat it more as a mentor / tutor and have it explain why it made certain decisions. I find that AI fails at things that are truly creative. I have been thoroughly unimpressed with ideas it has had or things it’s written for me. Th…
I wouldn't keep the "hardest" tasks. I'd keep the important ones. It's often the same, but there are differences. And I'd argue that the important ones are the ones that you most want to retain the ability to do yourself anyhow.