I’m Done Using AI. “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.”
Advertise here with Carbon Ads
This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
Comments 9
thread
latest
popular
I have a hard time relating to things like this. My programming skills have improved more dramatically in the past 18 months than at any time in the past 20 years. I learn, interrogate, digest, expand, extrapolate more than ever before. I understand codebases much better, not less.
Steven Johnson has a good bit in the opening of this new Atlantic video about the whole cognitive offloading idea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmtv78xVf0M
Cognitive uploading is right.
I feel like I understand more things at a surface level, and fewer things at a deep level. The pathways from shallow to deep understanding are precisely what Claude's output intercepts.
Take your example of understanding codebases. I can understand a codebase much faster in the era of Claude. However, I am not building the skill set I would need to tear apart a codebase, and that skill set provides depth of understanding.
All that means is that you’re not able to take enough time to understand everything, especially given the likely much larger amount of code.
But the same could be said for moving from Assembler to Rust or Swift.
Claude & Co can be great tools for dissecting and understanding code.
I think there are (at least) two actually noble reasons people get into code. Some people more want to make amazing things and see their ideas emerge into daylight. Some people more enjoy the act of writing the code to solve discrete problems, more of a creative flow state. It's not a total binary. But people in the former category tend to be thriving lately under AI and people in the latter category are losing something.
I find myself in the latter and it's kind of a bummer. I can go off and write code for personal projects but, man, I used to come to work and do what I love all day.
This is a really great way of putting it, thank you!
I coded in Objective C, Java and Swift and it paid my bills for 20+ years. So I understand how it feels to have something you invested so much into suddenly become commoditized.
But after spending the past year using AI to code daily, I've made peace with it. I'm a maker of software, not a writer of code. Turns out I enjoy seeing other people using my software more than writing code.
This is such a big identity and paradigm shift — but I think when so much of the industry is largely removed from end users (internal or external), these kinds of payoffs are also missing. The sub-unit ticket model has already made so many folks into cogs there isn’t much joy left but in the writing and making
I've always thought they were 2 kinds of coders. Those who code because they like the intricacies of coding, language design, object or functional, etc.
And those who code to solve a problem.
The 1st kind will probably find this change a lot harder to adapt to, but I think it just means they have to find jobs where that's needed.
The 2nd kind I've found have loved this change, because it lets them solve problems faster, and in domains that they weren't as familiar with before.
Realistically though, most of the coding out there is the 2nd kind, most people aren't doing anything that revolutionary, we're all just building widgets for different domains.
IMHO this is the mentality of many software engineers who refuse to use AI.
Sometimes it's a valid; speed for the sake of speed isn't worth it. But doing things purposefully inefficiently in a way that reduces team collaboration is more harmful to an organization.
I've been trying to work with my developer for a year, but they're writing thousands of lines of code in Vim
If you feel like this comment goes against the grain of the community guidelines or is otherwise inappropriate, please let me know and I will take a look at it.
In order to comment or fave, you need to be a kottke.org member. Check out your membership options.
Note: If you are a member and tried to log in, it didn't work, and now you're stuck in a neverending login loop of death, try disabling any ad blockers or extensions. Or try logging out and then back in. Still having trouble? Email me!