Comment by giwook | Hacker News Reader

Comment by giwook | Hacker News Reader

404 media tends to put out quality articles in my opinion but this one feels a bit like clickbait.

It seems like they're overgeneralizing quite a bit here and focusing on a narrow subset of the population while ignoring the people who are actually thriving with their new AI-enabled dev workflows.

LLMs are not a panacea by any means and they have lots of cons. But I for one would find it difficult to go back to a world where I can't lean on LLMs in my day-to-day.

One very specific example that could not possibly contribute to the brainrot mentioned in this article: AI saves time and reduces the headache of having to pore through pages of documentation (if there even is any) to find how that one method works or what arguments it can take. This alone is immensely helpful and can keep you in a state of flow instead of sending you off on a potentially fruitless side quest that derails your whole train of thought.

It's also taken me quite a bit of time, effort, and experimentation to find the right tools and the right ways to work AI into my workflows which I would bet that the developers mentioned in this article have not explored too deeply if at all.

Claiming AI is rotting your brain because you can't one-shot an entire app or even a single feature is a straw man fallacy.

One of my engineers used ai yesterday to write a thing without having to "pore over the docs". Engineer and ai decided the third party api was "inconsistent" and "nondeterministic" so they wrote a script to hit it over and over and over hoping to "catch" any "missed" entries. Built a whole cache and mini db to track all the seen IDs as it hammers the api. Luckily I was there to point out how strange it would be for the api to work that way, at which point they read the docs and saw they weren't using the pagination cursor it requires.

Thousands of lines and hours of wasted time and this was the lucky path because a DIFFERENT human happened to be in the loop and asked the right question.

This isn't a general claim about what ai does or doesn't do, but it is a real life anecdote about a very well paid professional.

Someone posted a great quote above that you can outsource your thinking but you can't outsource your understanding.

> Engineer and ai decided the third party api was "inconsistent" and "nondeterministic"

Sounds like it was the AI that decided this and the engineer didn't bother questioning it which I'd classify as using AI incorrectly. AI is a smart intern, not a smart engineer.

Strongly agree with you. This was badly using the tools and not gaining understanding because of it.

Although if the take is simply "you're holding it wrong" then it's hard to deny that it's very easy to hold this tool wrong.

Well it’s certainly not “clickbait” since the title clearly tells you what it’s about.

Sure. I meant it feels like it because it's presenting a rather sensationalistic headline that is pretty clearly just focusing on the perspective of one subset of the population instead of trying to accurately portray the nuance.

There's always pros and cons but this article sounds like "it's only cons!".

> But I for one would find it difficult to go back to a world where I can't lean on LLMs in my day-to-day

It is difficult for me to read this and believe your brain isn't rotted

If you've become reliant on it, then your skills have atrophied. Your brain has rotted.

So if I were to continue with your logic, our walking and running skills or level of physical fitness have atrophied because we can drive or take public transit. Should we no longer drive or take public transit anywhere?

To your point, my documentation reading skills have certainly atrophied.

I'm not coding as much so my coding skill has likely atrophied to an extent.

It does take intentional effort to counteract this, which is why I will force myself to write code by hand still. Or why I carefully parse PR diffs and will not approve it unless I can explain what it's doing and why it's doing it that way.

I was careful to explain that there are certain points in my workflow that I leverage AI to great benefit. There are plenty of points that I do not trust it and must be the HITL, generally around exercising judgment or course correcting when the agent has gone off the rails.

I can understand why you would jump to such an assumption though. There is nuance to everything.

> our walking and running skills or level of physical fitness have atrophied because we can drive or take public transit

Yes, obviously.

Have you heard of the obesity crisis?

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and...

Yes, our diets play a big role here too, but our sedentary lifestyles, which includes driving everywhere or taking transit, surely is a factor.

So.. yes?

Yes, and yet they are free to live their life as they wish which is my point.

One can do anything they want so long as they are willing to accept the responsibility of doing so.

Software devs overusing AI then blame it for rotting their brains in your analogy would be people eating too much food and then blaming the food for making them overweight.

It’s pretty funny that you don't see the absurdity here. Yes, our physical fitness has dropped. Mostly from cars, much less from public transit.

> Should we no longer drive or take public transit anywhere

Yes? It’s bad for the environment and living closer to the things you do is better for everyone. But not only that, but this has absolutely nothing to do with being a skilled professional. Is walking or running your job?

Yeah there’s nuance to everything.

Yeah I mean you're right. My point is, will an appreciable percentage of the population do that? Or is convenience king?

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