AI is making me dumb

ge96

Use AI to fix that cert

voncheese

Relatable! 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 things I can do, I use AI to help me learn new things/technology faster than I would have pre-AI

pton_xd

We'll just move to a higher level of abstraction; thinking will be like efficiently coding in assembly, no longer necessary in today's world.

weezing

You are doing this to yourself.

Quarrelsome

Is it tho? I get paid more these days to write less code. Is it dumb to be paid more/do more, have more oversight and deal less with the minutia? Im still concerned enough about the specifics to show concern about background refresh tokens silently failing in OAuth in a mission critical real-time system. Im not coding it, but im still thinking it. That's the important part, ain't it? Is it dumb or just clever delegation?

slackfan

Skill issue.

steezeburger

I enjoy using and orchestrating agents a lot to build software, but have never really had the desire to replace my writing with LLMs. I don't write a whole whole lot, so maybe I just don't have enough writing to do to make it appealing, but my emails, blog posts, comments, whatever are the last thing I want to automate. Not only because it's less personal, but because I'm so tired of reading AI cruft myself. So much more text in tickets than there needs to be, for example. And how are people forgetting to code by using LLMs? Do they just mean they forgot the syntax of a particular language? Or forgot how to architect features or how the development lifecycle works? I've mostly used LLMs to build more complex things that would have been a lot to manage previously, or to build something completely new and learn how it works. I feel like I've only become a better engineer (and programmer too) because of LLMs.

Rooster61

I 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 absolutely see myself falling into this as a junior or even mid level dev. I'd no doubt not feel that feeling on my neck if it wasn't scarred from code review lashings early in my career by knowledgeable mentors.

andrewstuart2

I was talking to some friends about this over drinks the other day. I feel it has the same effects as any drug (or behavior) that triggers dopamine. If I can get a dopamine hit for lower effort AI in 10 minutes, and maybe a tiny bit better of a hit doing it myself after a day, why would my brain go for anything but AI? Especially when my DIY muscles are a bit atrophied. And of course the hedonic treadmill (if that's even valid any more, IDK) has reset the baseline so that anything less than the quick gratification feels like nothing. It makes the stuff I used to absolutely love feel like more of a chore compared to just cranking out features with code only an AI can love.

marknutter

Ai has been the best learning tool I have every used and it's not even close. I've learned more in the past year than I have in the past 5.

comrade1234

For my current project I'm coding every day in Java, ruby, and JavaScript. I waste a lot of tokens doing what used to be simple google searches for language differences since I mix up things like the null-safe operator ruby vs jscript or what is the continue/break statement in ruby vs java. I think Claude is probably very disappointed in me that the most complicated thing I use it for is refactoring old Java loops to use more modern streams which can be unwritable for a human off the top of your head.

behole

I feel lucky cause I started dumb. Unintentional level-up!

Accacin

I have a nice balance of using AI at work as a C#/TS developer which allows me to get stuff done and working on personal projects at home using AI purely for ideas when I'm stuck or not able to figure something out myself. I personally think it can be a great tool for learning but it's so easy to fall into the trap of getting AI to do everything for you. I've also used it for personal projects like a Chip8 emulator I wrote in C where I'd managed to run a few basic games and ran out of steam. Used AI to help me implement the rest.

Aurornis

> With coding, I've been using AI entirely for a year or two. I've been entirely prompting and I haven't written a single line of code. I have mostly forgotten how to code I've been using AI coding tools a lot lately, though I'm always in the loop. I write most of the important code by hand, but I like to send Claude Code or Codex off to try to come up with a solution in parallel to compare. Having reviewed so much of my hand-written code side by side with AI-written alternatives, I am still amazed that anyone admits to letting AI write all of their code. Either you're working on much simpler problems than I am, or you don't really care about anything other than making the tests go green and waiting for bug reports to come back so you can feed them back into the LLM again. Some times the coding tools come back with better ideas than I came up with. Some times my idea is much better. Most often with medium to high complexity problems, if the AI comes up with a working solution it has enough problems that an attentive human reviewer would have rejected it at best. At worst, it creates a mess of spaghetti code with maintenance time bombs ticking away. And that's for one change. I can't imagine what a codebase would look like if you completely deferred to AI tools to do everything. This quote is even weirder because they claim to have been doing this for two years! Two years ago, coding tools were much worse than they are today. Using AI to write all of your code 2 years ago would have been a weird choice. When I read posts like this I don't know what to think. Is this real? Or is it exaggerated for effect? I also roll my eyes a little bit at the idea that not writing code for 1-2 years means you forget how to code. I've been back and forth between 100% management and 100% IC in my career. While there is a warm-up time to get back into coding, you should not completely forget how to code after such a short time. The only reason this person feels like they've forgotten how to code is that they've made a choice not to code for 2 years and, apparently, they don't feel like making any effort to change this. For someone who claims to love writing code, I don't get it. Something doesn't make sense about this writing.

dabinat

It 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. There’s still a lot of room for human creativity.

riazrizvi

It converts ICs into project managers, by default. I've been wrestling with this issue for a year.

pplonski86

before I ask AI to write anything, I prepare a plan, I was very positively surprised when noticed Plan mode in Codex recently. It make me feel that maybe others doing the same and that's why they added it. Anyway, I start with plan, then ask AI to do just one step. If coding a new feature, I do one step and check the code, doing git diff, reading changes, or just asking Codex, to show me changes. If writing an article, I ask for only one paragraph. I read paragraph and if it is ok, I accept it, if it doesn't show off my thoughts I work on one paragraph. If doing data analysis with AI, I do one step of analysis and ask AI to display intermediate results so I can see if all is going in good direction and there are no hallucinations, additionally I have follow-up prompts for AI to do results verification. If all looks good, then I continue to the next step. I don't like situation when I ask AI to do all code changes, or all article, or all data analysis in one pass with one prompt. It is simply impossible to check if AI is correct and results are not satisfactory. You can easily see this when asking AI to write a deep article with one prompt - you clearly see that it doesn't reflect your thoughts. Maybe step-by-step is the approach to use AI and not feel dumber.

Imustaskforhelp

Firstly I salute the author for saying these things. I mean we know the feeling of criticizing AI and certainly I criticize it a lot too, but when it comes to personal matters or how I am using AI, there are somethings I shy away from saying online and I wonder other people might feel the same way too. So for example, once AI deleted my project, I was able to recover it but I lost version control through series of mistakes and IMO I lost a good version. (I think after abandoning that project and coming back, I was able to accomplish it) Another example which is the one which is biting me the most is that I wanted to create a copy.sh/v86 based thing where you are able to edit the .img files of distros and save them all within the browser. I was able to run v86 custom way but I wasn't able to mount or have a proper way for making it work. And now although I mean this is just an optional project and I just thought hey it would be fun to edit .img files in browser but now it feels like I get disappointed. I think that disappointment is in both say a frustration of thing not working and secondly, just realizing that I might be dropping this idea altogether. Now I must admit that this is a field that I have absolutely no expertise at all in, but still, it feels disappointing to me and I kept thinking about it for sometime now. I wonder how many people just feel that if AI is unable to make their project, to then either get frustrated/disappointed and even a salt of panic. I think its just wrong for how damn much we are relying on LLM's at this point. It feels like the whole economy is just doing what I am doing but with billions of dollars. Another thing that I feel like is that both young and elderly people are really much like the same in vibe-coding. (Yes specs can help but LLM's are still autocorrect on steroids), I feel like we are both forsaking the junior developers and also forsaking the expertise created by senior developers as we replace it with these LLM's

han1

related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48139058

HeinrichAQS

Understand you 100% - thats why I force myself to study maths as a "hobby" at a remote university. Its completly useless these days since I will probably never reach a level where I am better than current frontier models - but it sharpens my own mind, just by doing it. I would compare this to the same principle which applies to physical training - its not essentially required these days anymore to be physical active, still its quite helpfull. It would be dumb to not use it - since it is usefull, but its also dumb to see yourself getting dumber and not doing something against it.