AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

CorbenDallas

There are plenty of engineers, who simply can't think, AI will not change anything in this regard.

sharts

Meh, there’s plenty that rise in their careers while being mediocre.

sheepscreek

AI is creating problems. This isn’t one of them. Engineers are going to now think at a higher level of abstraction. No one misses coding in assembly.

nickandbro

I think there are engineers that can’t think without AI. But the best think with it. Unfortunately, we are now living in a day and age where simply ignoring AI is no longer an option.

saadn92

Hard disagree. I feel like I'm thinking a lot more now because I have so many parallel projects going on at the same time. AI has allowed me to really, truly create in a way that I've never done before. Yes, my coding skills probably aren't as sharp as they used to be, but my system design skills are at an all time high. Don't blame the tool.

zulux

Yes.... and I can't think without compiled languages. Missed out on assembler. Becoming dependent on a technology is to be expected. I'm pretty sure 95% of us are dependent on packaged meat and don't know how to hunt.

awesome_dude

In answer to the headline - it's not, no more than calculators stopped people from thinking. It's changing the way we think, and reason. Speaking as a BE focused Go developer, I'm now working with a typescript FE, using AI to guide me, but it scares the shit out of me because I don't understand what it's suggesting, forcing me to learn what is being presented and the other options. No different to asking for help on IRC or StackOverflow - for decades people have asked and blindly accepted the answers from those sources, only to later discover that they have bought a footgun. The speed at which AI is able to gather the answers from StackOverflow coupled with its "I know what I am talking about" tone/attitude does fool people at first, just like the over-confident half assed engineers we have always had to deal with. Unlike those human sources, we can forcefully pushback on AI and it will (usually) take the feedback onboard, and bring the actual solution forward. Thus proving the engineer steering it still has to know what they are doing/looking at.

journal

A.I. is creating engineers who can't WORK without it

0xbadcafebee

No, AI is not creating that group of people. They already existed. They were the people who would google for StackOverflow snippets and copy+paste them without even reading the entire snippet, much less understand them. Same people, new tool.

stavros

Skills you don't need, atrophy. Skills you need, don't. It's very simple, and the "you won't have the skills you used to need but don't need any more!" line of reasoning is tired and invalid.

jasonjmcghee

There are plenty of engineers that couldn't work without a modern IDE or in languages without memory management. Or without the ability to use a library from GitHub / their package manager. It doesn't feel THAT much different to me. "Engineer" as a term might drift. There are "web developers" that can only use webflow / wordpress.

joe_the_user

Post title is completely misleading relative to the article. Article title: "A.I. Should Elevate Your Thinking, Not Replace It"

_pdp_

Huberman: Your brain has a region that only grows when you do things you don't want to do ...or as I interpret it your brain grows only when it does things that are difficult. If you remove the difficulty, it will atrophy into a hum of a mindless chit-chat. Engineering the data structures and control flows from scratch is a completely different than asking an LLM to scaffold them for you.

erxam

Here's the question I want to posit and nobody who's against AI has managed to answer satisfactorily: what is it in for me if I were to acquire all those skills? I don't give a shit about this career. I don't give a shit about engineering. I despise every second of it. There's nothing to aim for other than being a drone that does whatever is asked of it. If AI can reduce my mental workload, why wouldn't I want to delegate everything over to it so I can save my faculties for what I truly enjoy? For the art of a worthless craft?

m4rkuskk

Before AI I would spend multiple days mapping out my database tables and queries while now I ask AI to propose multiple different approaches and I pick the best one. But then on the other hand I’m working on 10 features at the same time and have to carefully look through them. But I can see that I’m totally dependent on the AI now. Creating a full plan by yourself feels like a waste of time, since you know the AI can create the same or better plan in a split second. So when Claude is down, I end up not being productive at all.

halamadrid

This is true. Speaking only based on personal experience. My team had started treating AI like a super intelligent being. “AI suggested we do it that way” And we’ve been degrading our systems rapidly for last several weeks. We’ve decided to pause and reflect and change how we use AI on tasks that are not dead simple.

joshcramer

First, it was pencil and paper. Then it was calculators. Then computers! It’s a slippery slope, this technology business.

Unmotivator2677

That why I don't use AI for any personal projects, I like to keep my mind sharp. Unless it's a projects that incorporates AI in some way, but don't use AI to code it. But at work I don't care, I do what I am paid for, if my manager wants me to entirely vibe code using Claude, his choice, I will not be the one paying for technical dept that creates.

chromacity

Aaand it's the second "AI is bad" story on the front page today that's evidently generated by AI.

srcreigh

Is it wise to understand everything that AI does for you? Let’s say a person has 10 units of learning per week. Is the author actually claiming that that person must not deliver any results beyond their 10 units? It makes some sense to have say 20 units of results and prioritize which ones to fully comprehend. I suspect APIs / libraries / languages / platforms will have more churn due to AI. New platform new system need to learn. Once every 5 years might become every year or even more frequent. That would be a sort of inflation of knowledge and skills. It would affect the decision making about how to spend one’s 10 units per week.