I'm Done Using AI

tobinfekkes

Solid. Well-stated. I'm arriving at a similar point as well.

ColdStream

A great summary of the issue. It increases productivity but reduces understanding. The flow on from that is a lack of personal engagement and ownership of what is being done. The lack of autonomy can be devastating to a person.

impulser_

It seems like the problem wasn't the AI, but the fact the guy replaced his brain with an AI. Don't do that and you will be just fine.

xyzsparetimexyz

Alright well see youu again next month I guess

zeryx

So, the existential dread bit - sure. That's a real concern and thing, but let's put that aside for a sec. When you did math and long division by hand in highschool did you enjoy it? Did you feel like you lost something when you were allowed to use a graphing calculator on a test? In university I dreaded exams that allowed calculators because I knew how much harder the exam was going to be - that's what genai is today in my experience. Yes we don't need manual calculators as a profession anymore to land rockets, same as we don't need a programmer to necessarily fiddle around with divs or structs - but the exams are harder now. Now we need to spend our time actually considering trade offs and actually doing software engineering. This is harder and maybe not everyone who's had that job title is particularly good at that - but that's the new skill to get good at, and because the world is under constrained making design and implementation decisions will essentially always need to be done by the person building the thing. If you liked the programming bit, I'm sorry - I'm personally happy I don't have to remember regex or how to figure out how to center a div or span again.

throwaway985732

I can't say I feel the same. > Well, it made me lazy. It made me stop caring. It made me a worse programmer. It made me depressed. Because I stopped doing the hard work, I stopped learning, I stopped growing, I stopped being the one making the software. After burning out hard a few years ago and doing this job with literally nothing to show for close to 20 years.I have to say I was already all of those things years ago before AI came along. So the idea of having something do the coding for me is actually refreshing. Code is stupid the whole idea is to write less of it.

Kim_Bruning

> but one night when I was sick, I described all my symptoms and it told me to go to the Emergency Department at the hospital. I had something similar happen, but with a different outcome. One week I noticed I had some mild distortions in one eye I which I thought were a bit funny, one of those things, you know? No pain or anything, but eh, the next sunday morning I was just messing around, and just for the heck of it, I described the funny distortion thing to Claude Opus... which proceeded to flip out and told me to call a doctor Right Now. Clearly Claude was broken, right? And what a weird failure mode! It just kept circling back to telling me to see a doctor "please just call at least!". I deleted the conversation (something I now regret) and resolved to get on with my day. But... you know, small doubt having surfaced, I decided to use the expert system provided by my local doctor's practice; which also told me to call immediately ... and that's how I ended that Sunday morning in the passenger seat of a Porsche racing down the autobahn to a nearby hospital. Long story short: I think Claude gets some credit for preventing me from going partially blind. (and don't mess around with your eyesight.)

8by3

I've got a tangent: I'm done using closed AI. My last role was HoE after a career as an IC, and honestly, using agents is 95% the same as being an HoE or team lead. Steering the ship, ensuring technical excellence, sometimes fixing dumb bugs, sometimes learning new ways of doing things. But the whole AI business, especially the closed sort is going to properly screw us all if we let it. At least with open models there is a chance of all of human knowledge being a general good. Not just making the ultra wealthy and powerful, even more so.

scotty79

tl;dr Psych issue, he got lazy, detached and depressed. He blames AI for it so decided to set it aside. If I were to guess his depression is due to something physical (my belief is that it always is) and all AI did was to allow him to be productive a employee despite deepening depression slash burnout.