Are AI Assistants Making Us Worse Programmers?

rafaelquintanilha.com

3 points·rafaquintanilha··4 comments

AI has already made art, music, YouTube, the internet as a whole, the written word, customer service interactions, amazon, google, and the environment objectively and irrefutably worse so it doesn't seem like a stretch that it also fucks up programmers.

It's doing a fantastic job of addicting people to social media even more and selling them cheap Chinese garbage though!

Alternative framing: were we already worse programmers, and AI assistants spitting our own collective bugs back at us are helping us by revealing that?

Even if that was the case you can't disregard the possibility of it affecting otherwise good developers negatively.

I guess my thinking is if a parrot bites you, you have an opportunity to learn not to trust both the parrot and yourself… a good developer with a cognitive bias towards using a bad crutch is, eventually (I hope) a better developer with no crutch and awareness of a lot of subtle failure states that other not-as-good-as-we-thought developers have found themselves in.

Really I keep thinking of LLMs as unreliable search engines for local modes (in the arithmetic sense)… we get back the most commonly given answer from the training data, subtly and stochastically shifted, and if it makes us individually worse then it is showing us we were collectively not all that great to begin with.

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