In your particular case it sounds like you’re rapidly loosing your developer skills, and enjoy that now you have to put less effort and think less.
Same with LLMs. I am better with it, because I know how to solve things without the help of it. I understand the problem space and the limitations. Also I understand how hype works and why they think they need it (investors money).
In other words, no, just using google maps or ChatGPT does not make me dumb. Only using it and blindly trusting it would.
Pretty much like muscles decay when we stop using them.
But if you were to be literally chained to a bike, and could not move in any other way than surely you would "forget"/atrophy in specific ways that you wouldn't be able to walk without relearning/practicing.
Take my personal experience for whatever it is worth, but my knees do not lie.
I believe the same holds true for cognitive tasks. If you enjoy going through weird build file errors, or it feels like it helps you understand the build system better, by all means, go ahead!
I just don't like the idea of somehow branding it as a moral failing to outsource these things to an LLM.
>> Pretty much like muscles decay when we stop using them.
> Sure, but sticking with that analogy, bicycles haven’t caused the muscles of people that used to go for walks and runs to atrophy either ...
This is an invalid continuation of the analogy, as bicycling involves the same muscles used for walking. A better analogy to describe the effect of no longer using learned skills could be:
Asking Amazon's Alexa to play videos of people
bicycling the Tour de France[0] and then walking
from the couch to the your car every workday
does not equate to being able to participate in
the Tour de France[0], even if years ago you
once did.
Then the citation served its purpose.
You're welcome.
A similar phenomena occurs when people see or hear information and whether they record it in writing or not. The act of writing the percepts, in and of itself, assists in short-term to long-term memory transference.
Applying all of this to LLMs has felt similar.
Consultancy A submit work, Consultancy B reviews/tests. As A increases the use of AI, B will have to match with more staff or more AI. More staff for B, mean higher costs, at slower pace. More AI for B, means higher burden of proof, an A vs B race condition is likely.
Ultimately clients will suffer from AI fatigue and inadvertently incur more costs at later stage (post-delivery).
It’s the same story with UI/UX. Previously, I’d often have to skip little UI niceties because they take time and aren’t that important. Now even relatively minor user flows can be very well polished because there isn’t much cost to doing so.
Well your perfectionism needs to be pointed towards this line. If you get truly large numbers of users this will either slow down token checking directly or your process for removing ancient expired tokens (I'm assuming there is such a process...) much slower and more problematic.
Just the other day I was complaining that no one knows how to use a slide rule anymore...
Also C++ is producing bytecode that's hot garbage. It's like no one understands assembly anymore...
Even simple tools are often misused (like hammering a screw). Sometimes they are extremely useful in right hands though. I think we'll discover that the actual writing of code isn't as meaningful as thinking about code.
Imagine telling someone with a typewriter that they’d be unable to write if they don’t write by hand all the time lol. I write by hand maybe a few times a year - usually writing a birthday card or something - but I haven’t forgotten.
That stuff kills my motivation to solve actual problems like nothing else. Being able to send off an agent to e.g. fix some build script bug so that I can get to the actual problem is amazing even with only a 50% success rate.
I feel like the past few decades of framework churn has shown that we're really never going to agree on what this means
Otherwise, I’ll continue using what works for me now.