AI is making me dumb

I can't relate that much to this. Every time I use AI to write code, I'm constantly fighting a feeling on the back of my neck that I need to look over everything it has done and supplement/alter it with my own code. That ick feeling counteracts the dopamine hit of having a working app after a few minutes of vibe coding, and I don't think that's going anywhere anytime soon.

That said, I have experience. I could absolutely see myself falling into this as a junior or even mid level dev. I'd no doubt not feel that feeling on my neck if it wasn't scarred from code review lashings early in my career by knowledgeable mentors.

As a developer, I kind of feel like this all smells like job security.

After using LLMs for a while, I have to admit it's pretty nice, and I like using it. I've been vibecoding a few apps, and it's a good dopamine hit to immediately see your ideas come to life. However, based on my experience, it will bite you if you trust it blindly. Even in my vibecoded projects, it keeps adding "features" without me asking for them. Since they're just pet projects, I don’t really care as long as the end result is what I'm expecting, but I don’t think companies will be as flexible. I also don't think customers would like it if features changed or got added with every new fix or update.

So this could go in a bunch of different directions from here, but to summarize the current situation:

    A lot of companies are heading in this direction.
    Without proper engineering, AI will easily write more code and potentially change the application unintentionally.
    We will have fewer junior engineers entering the market because of fear around AI and reduced hiring.
    AI usage will hit a critical point where it is making massive amounts of changes, and the people "prompting" it might start getting overwhelmed.
    We will end up with more features that people have to keep in their heads. I don’t think we can trust LLMs 100%, and because of that, developers will still need to know exactly what the application does.
    Eventually, there will be a lot of bugs, and developers will complain that we need additional human resources.
    Hiring starts again.

I think, right now, the toughest position is for new developers, and the best position is for people already in the market.

I believe your words should be your own. I refuse to let ai strip my words of their idiosyncrasy. I refuse to put my words into a machine that robs them of their humanity. They are mine, they are me. Working with a human editor is an act of love and creation. Working with an AI editor is an act of mediocrity and sacrificed originality.

I’m not using AI to eliminate thinking but to free me from the rote mundane code writing. AI is perfectly competent at writing code once a prototype is implemented.

I do write initial proof of concept crude prototypes (not commented, hardcoded variables, etc), and AI does the productionizing of them. It has really allowed me to command a team of agents instead of keeping track of a bunch of humans of varying work ethic, skill, and ability to maintain high code quality. And often AI is very good at maintaining patterns used in the code base or even keeping them to industry best practices.

When using AI you will no longer be writing so much in programming languages—English or whatever language you talk to the LLM will be the main language.

We talk a lot about the risks of AI in schools, but those same risks apply in any learning environment.

I recently started a new job and I find that AI is making it so much harder for me to onboard. I am adjusting to my role much slower than my peers who are using AI less. I am coding in a language I am unfamiliar with, which makes the lure of vibe coding stronger. I am at least skilled enough to recognize when Claude gives me an answer that either makes no sense or is unnecessarily verbose. But the more time I spend asking Claude to write code, the less I feel like I'm developing the skills that the job requires. Plus, when I submit a PR, I lack the necessary confidence in my own work, which just feels bad.

Honestly, another part of this is that I'm asking Claude to search through Slack and docs for answers to questions when I should just ask another person. The AI is feeding my social anxiety, luring me into avoiding human contact that I know will be good for my understanding as well as my general need for social interaction.

That all sounds like I am absolving myself of responsibility, but I think it's important to point out how a given technology is especially addictive for a certain type of person, and traps them in a negative behavioral cycle. If I hold off on relying on AI now, I suspect I can grow in my skills to the point that I can delegate tasks to AI that are rote and easy for me to verify their results. It feels challenging, but it's necessary.

I feel that few will have the privilege to have the time to write code by hand. And let's actually see what we are actually writing, most of the time for me its nothing novel, nothing fancy its the same old create a backend for X, fix some simple bug and stuff that are trivial for a mid-senior programmer. The harder tasks are mostly (again for us) architectural decision over the code and I am even thinking of how we can develop a system where LLM wouldn't derail on feature implementations. Anyway, what I am trying to say is that you writing code by hand may be okay for now but in the future I believe the shareholders and whoever is on top of you will want you to deliver features/fixing bugs FASTER with the help of LLMs and if you can't deliver that you will under perform. So in the end it's not what we want but what the shareholder wants. Of course if you aren't drained by this you can write code by hand in your free time. I don't want to sounds like a doomer but I believe this will be very much a reality sometime soon.

For my current project I'm coding every day in Java, ruby, and JavaScript. I waste a lot of tokens doing what used to be simple google searches for language differences since I mix up things like the null-safe operator ruby vs jscript or what is the continue/break statement in ruby vs java. I think Claude is probably very disappointed in me that the most complicated thing I use it for is refactoring old Java loops to use more modern streams which can be unwritable for a human off the top of your head.

I find that a good way to battle this is to realize its not either the dev or the AI that should be coding at a given time. People needs to transform their workflow so the codes alongside themselves.

I am try to be coding at all times on complex issues while I am offloading a boring, non architecture, boiler plate heavye etc. task to it in the background in a git worktree.

I ask it to work in small iterations and commit every step of the way. After my coding session is done I can go back and review it's code.

Understand you 100% - thats why I force myself to study maths as a "hobby" at a remote university. Its completly useless these days since I will probably never reach a level where I am better than current frontier models - but it sharpens my own mind, just by doing it. I would compare this to the same principle which applies to physical training - its not essentially required these days anymore to be physical active, still its quite helpfull. It would be dumb to not use it - since it is usefull, but its also dumb to see yourself getting dumber and not doing something against it.

Well, James, forgive me for being so inquisitive; but during the past few weeks, I’ve wondered whether you might be having some second thoughts about the mission.

Has anyone gone back to doing code katas, code craft like exercises by hand? They help keep me grounded.

Also I feel like it’s fine to let AI write your code. I felt very much like the OP did. A couple of things help keep my sanity. one is that as developers I think our job has evolved to knowing what decision an AI makes is good and which one is bad, this can be code or design – but there is nowhere a developer(or for that matter a knowledge worker) can hide from ai. In this world you will be forced to communicate with them. Partly because as a community we have decided(for better or worst) that AI should bring non trivial amounts of productivity gains to software development.

The other one is something I want to validate which is for those of us who are mediocre at coding, it might be a gift because it would free up some time and thus mind space to consider what we are actually good at.

I have been telling people lately that I feel like I'm losing my mind. And I'm not even someone who has leaned into AI coding that much either; I've just tried to learn the tools since Claude got "good". But my inherent laziness, which was always flattered as something that makes me a good programmer, has made me unable to use the tools with the required discipline. The result is that I have not thought deeply about the software I write for around 3 months. Every additional week that goes by without me doing a refactor or serious feature addition saps my confidence. I know I can still code. But I feel worried that I can't. Today I am refactoring a 4k LOC AI-written rust codebase. I don't know rust, but I will finally learn it today. And I can already tell the end result will be 50% the size and immeasurably more coherent.

The main thing that was dumbing me down (and burning me out) was having to babysit LLMs on anything except basic tasks if I care about code quality/structure/maintainability.

I love coding, it always felt like Legos for adults. Not that Legos aren't also Legos for adults.

But there's no fighting the fact that we won't be writing 99% of the code anymore so I take pleasure in crafting the specs and requirements clearly, that's where I put the effort.

And then to avoid having to babysit the agents to get them to stick to the plan, I built a super robust external orchestrator that forces multiple review and fix rounds until I get the result I want.

I'll be fully open sourcing that soon also https://engine.build

I would argue the last 20 years of app development is what made people dumb.

During the "don't make me think" era of software design, if you wanted to make software you got really good at identifying the use case and using design thinking to optimize the paths to goal. You could make a business around a very narrow set of flows. The only thinking a user had to do was pick The App for That. They never had to think about how they want to approach their task, which is a skill in itself.

AI isn't like that. There's a million ways to use it. That's a big part of what makes it cool, but it requires the user to thoughtfully approach their workflows. Not everyone is used to doing that.

When I work with Claude to plan a feature and then review Claude's implementation, I don't understand the feature as well those I developed without AI assistance. I don't recall details of the feature's behavior as well, even days later. I suspect that this is not surprising to anyone who has studied pedagogy. I've been working on applying some exercises during code review (including self-review of my own AI-assisted code) to improve comprehension and recall (https://bridgekeeper.io/). If this problem resonates with you, I would like to talk.

> I just caught myself about to copy and paste it into Claude to see what it thinks because I'm worried that it doesn't make sense or it reads funny or there's something missing

I unironically believe this is a very good habit. When it comes to writing, instead of starting with AI, finish a chapter by hand first then ask AI to review it strikes the best balance.

I'm worse at producing code by hand, but feel smarter overall.

I've learned an insane amount in a very short period of time, and have been engaging in much more challenging problems.

Instead of "what's the right syntax for this for loop again?" I'm asking "what's the business critical module in this system and how do I structure the test suite to prove it's working to spec?"

I don't feel this way. I have just been tackling more and larger problems, I think? This week one of many things for example is switching a multi-master KV store for tracking views on individual objects to tiered hyperloglogs that periodically merge. I could do this without AI, but it would take me a week instead of a day.

I think, if you're not feeling challenged, you're probably just doing the same work but faster. You should try to tackle harder problems, too!

it’s crazy, we’re at a point where I commit code I haven’t seen, reviewed by another AI, followed up to by another AI and it’s just kind of scary.

This thing will explode in our faces sooner or later. Also makes me feel like an imposter rather than an engineer.

Maybe that’s actually what I have become.

It's literally changing your brain when you don't use it like you used to. So, yeah. It is.

Computers read my code, so I don't mind upsetting their feelings.

But why would anyone use AI to write documents or articles? Do you really respect your recipients so little that you can't be bothered to share your own thoughts?

I might as well get an AI to call my own mother on mother's day.

"That's the self-doubt that it's feeding on and what I need to fight back."

Yes -- now let's talk about the correct form of fighting back.

It is not "I don't want to feel self-doubt so I will suppress that feeling."

It is, "The self-doubt is valuable -- it's pushing me to improve."

The AI is never going to be able to say what you really mean. But it may inspire you to push harder to improve your ability to do that.

I only really use GH CoPilot and while it’s really damn good at predicting what I’ll do next, I find it really makes me lazier. It’s like using GPS - it’s much faster, easier, accurate, and reliable than not using it, but I have found I don’t remember routes like I used to, as if that part of my brain just stopped working. If we don’t use a skill, our brains seem to want to almost immediately reclaim those resources for something else.

I have a nice balance of using AI at work as a C#/TS developer which allows me to get stuff done and working on personal projects at home using AI purely for ideas when I'm stuck or not able to figure something out myself.

I personally think it can be a great tool for learning but it's so easy to fall into the trap of getting AI to do everything for you.

I've also used it for personal projects like a Chip8 emulator I wrote in C where I'd managed to run a few basic games and ran out of steam. Used AI to help me implement the rest.

It doesn’t have to be this way. You can use AI in ways that don’t rot your brain. You can delegate easy tasks to the AI to save time, while saving the harder tasks for yourself. Or you can treat it more as a mentor / tutor and have it explain why it made certain decisions.

I find that AI fails at things that are truly creative. I have been thoroughly unimpressed with ideas it has had or things it’s written for me. There’s still a lot of room for human creativity.

Most people who say this didn't/can't happen to them, are the worst cases...

Relatable! Or at least making me feel dumb (at times). Things that help me feel smarter are

* actually writing more on my own - created a personal blog just to get myself to write more

* upleveling my thinking - think more about problems and framing

* leverage my experience - guide (or sometimes force) the AI assistant to leverage my experience to avoid problems

* learning new things - rather than let AI just replace things I can do, I use AI to help me learn new things/technology faster than I would have pre-AI

Is it tho? I get paid more these days to write less code. Is it dumb to be paid more/do more, have more oversight and deal less with the minutia?

Im still concerned enough about the specifics to show concern about background refresh tokens silently failing in OAuth in a mission critical real-time system.

Im not coding it, but im still thinking it. That's the important part, ain't it? Is it dumb or just clever delegation?

We'll just move to a higher level of abstraction; thinking will be like efficiently coding in assembly, no longer necessary in today's world.

It converts ICs into project managers, by default. I've been wrestling with this issue for a year.

It is making me feel less dumb when I use it to get Linux admin things done because 1) it gets it wrong and I have to help it and 2) even though I would have gotten frustrated and given up without AI it shows me that Linux has gotten way out of hand for administration. Wheels have been reinvented and conventions have been changed for no good reason, or because of https://xkcd.com/927/

You haven't written a line of code in 2 years and you're confused why its making you feel like you can't code?

I agree 100% with this article.

You need to spend time on coding without agents and writing without AI as practice if nothing else.

You should not get complacent in offloading all detail oriented work to agents.

I enjoy using and orchestrating agents a lot to build software, but have never really had the desire to replace my writing with LLMs. I don't write a whole whole lot, so maybe I just don't have enough writing to do to make it appealing, but my emails, blog posts, comments, whatever are the last thing I want to automate. Not only because it's less personal, but because I'm so tired of reading AI cruft myself. So much more text in tickets than there needs to be, for example.

And how are people forgetting to code by using LLMs? Do they just mean they forgot the syntax of a particular language? Or forgot how to architect features or how the development lifecycle works?

I've mostly used LLMs to build more complex things that would have been a lot to manage previously, or to build something completely new and learn how it works. I feel like I've only become a better engineer (and programmer too) because of LLMs.

I feel your pain.

Today I'm forcing myself to learn SwiftUI and type each character with my hands, there is a part of me asking "Why are you wasting your time instead of prompting it and getting the UI you want in minutes?". Well, even I use AI I must know the domain I'm operating in to create good products instead of useless slop. Even though I've been coding for 20 years now, I still need to be humble to grown in anything new. I can vibecode full apps but I'm not gonna pretend that my experience isn't playing a massive role in guiding the models.

Don't let AI take away your joy for building stuff, it's totally fine not being "productive" and taking your time. Just force yourself to have, at least, 2 AI days off every week.

We need to separate our emotions from these things. I understand why people don't like AI, or are fearful of it, but we need to have good faith arguments about it. Not this. These articles are just cope.

using AI to red-team your thoughts and assumptions is the fastest way to get smart since the dawn of time

You are doing this to yourself.

related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48139058

> With coding, I've been using AI entirely for a year or two. I've been entirely prompting and I haven't written a single line of code. I have mostly forgotten how to code

I've been using AI coding tools a lot lately, though I'm always in the loop. I write most of the important code by hand, but I like to send Claude Code or Codex off to try to come up with a solution in parallel to compare.

Having reviewed so much of my hand-written code side by side with AI-written alternatives, I am still amazed that anyone admits to letting AI write all of their code. Either you're working on much simpler problems than I am, or you don't really care about anything other than making the tests go green and waiting for bug reports to come back so you can feed them back into the LLM again.

Some times the coding tools come back with better ideas than I came up with. Some times my idea is much better. Most often with medium to high complexity problems, if the AI comes up with a working solution it has enough problems that an attentive human reviewer would have rejected it at best. At worst, it creates a mess of spaghetti code with maintenance time bombs ticking away. And that's for one change. I can't imagine what a codebase would look like if you completely deferred to AI tools to do everything.

This quote is even weirder because they claim to have been doing this for two years! Two years ago, coding tools were much worse than they are today. Using AI to write all of your code 2 years ago would have been a weird choice.

When I read posts like this I don't know what to think. Is this real? Or is it exaggerated for effect?

I also roll my eyes a little bit at the idea that not writing code for 1-2 years means you forget how to code. I've been back and forth between 100% management and 100% IC in my career. While there is a warm-up time to get back into coding, you should not completely forget how to code after such a short time. The only reason this person feels like they've forgotten how to code is that they've made a choice not to code for 2 years and, apparently, they don't feel like making any effort to change this. For someone who claims to love writing code, I don't get it. Something doesn't make sense about this writing.

before I ask AI to write anything, I prepare a plan, I was very positively surprised when noticed Plan mode in Codex recently. It make me feel that maybe others doing the same and that's why they added it. Anyway, I start with plan, then ask AI to do just one step.

If coding a new feature, I do one step and check the code, doing git diff, reading changes, or just asking Codex, to show me changes.

If writing an article, I ask for only one paragraph. I read paragraph and if it is ok, I accept it, if it doesn't show off my thoughts I work on one paragraph.

If doing data analysis with AI, I do one step of analysis and ask AI to display intermediate results so I can see if all is going in good direction and there are no hallucinations, additionally I have follow-up prompts for AI to do results verification. If all looks good, then I continue to the next step.

I don't like situation when I ask AI to do all code changes, or all article, or all data analysis in one pass with one prompt. It is simply impossible to check if AI is correct and results are not satisfactory. You can easily see this when asking AI to write a deep article with one prompt - you clearly see that it doesn't reflect your thoughts.

Maybe step-by-step is the approach to use AI and not feel dumber.

Use AI to fix that cert

I try the compensate for skills atrophy with leetcodes and kata wars, but the plain reality is that real software engineering, the one requiring you to absorb and make a problem intimate is just not there.

The work rhythm has ballooned and as every co worker is now pushing work (generally mediocre but acceptable due to strong codebase fundamentals and them being good engineers) it is increasingly becoming a rat race of who delivers more. Companies don't even need to promote AI productivity because engineers being engineers will engineer the minimum effort required to deliver as much output that makes stakeholders happy.

I am less and less fond of this work.

I'm sure there will be people with different experiences, but I've never worked as much as I did in the last two years, but I'm too burned out. I genuinely feel I've regressed as an engineer and I see the same in my coworkers, some of them contributors to the highest impact OSSs you can think of.

Every day, I'm more and more leaning into changing industry.

I love code and programming and solving product problems. But the job has changed dramatically.

If the pay+comfort ratio wasn't that good I would've done that already.

It's hard to give up to 6/7k+ net per month in southern Mediterranean. I'm way better off financially than most US devs making even more, there's no comparison.

AI use and low confidence are correlated with lower ownership and deferment of critical thinking skills.

Based on the MIT and MSFT studies.

My company has 3 AI on every pull request now. They behave as follows:

1. a general coding AI: Completely broken. Should auto-comment, but never does anymore. Stopped a while back, nobody seems to know why.

2. another general AI: You have to at-chat it. It reacts to the message with <eyes emoji>, but never actually posts a comment?

3. a security bot. Comments, when it thinks there's a problem, in the most obtuse way possible. "SAST findings". But the findings are behind a link, and none of us devs are given access.

I could lean on and press the various people shoving AI down my gullet to like … look at this, and the actual lived experience of devs trying to derive productivity from this mess? But IDK what's in it for me, really.

Even Claude, when it worked, would comment in the most sociopathic manner possible: an English prose description of the problem, attached to an utterly unrelated line of code. Part of that is probably Github, who does let you attach comments to arbitrary lines of code in a review, only the blesséd lines can have comments. Literally none of our AI can format their complaint with a freaking suggested change (i.e., the Github feature, no, instead I get English prose).

Honestly for all I know we failed to pay the bill or something inane, but it would be nice if the AI could format an error message, or something.

God damn this nail gun is making me lazy, its like I don't have to swing the hammer any more...

Most people, given a nail gun, cant build a house, thats where the skill is...

Im not someone whose validation came from the lines of code, but from the resulting working system.

Ai has been the best learning tool I have every used and it's not even close. I've learned more in the past year than I have in the past 5.

I was talking to some friends about this over drinks the other day. I feel it has the same effects as any drug (or behavior) that triggers dopamine. If I can get a dopamine hit for lower effort AI in 10 minutes, and maybe a tiny bit better of a hit doing it myself after a day, why would my brain go for anything but AI? Especially when my DIY muscles are a bit atrophied.

And of course the hedonic treadmill (if that's even valid any more, IDK) has reset the baseline so that anything less than the quick gratification feels like nothing. It makes the stuff I used to absolutely love feel like more of a chore compared to just cranking out features with code only an AI can love.

also, chatting with AI makes me impatient and delusional.

I feel lucky cause I started dumb. Unintentional level-up!

AI is keeping me on my toes. Many people in my org are experiencing the Dunning-Kruger effect after being armed with AI and are making such new and spectacular messes that I've had no other choice but to ratchet up governance controls. Improving documentation didn't help. The few people who read it complain to me when it is contradicted by AI.

Firstly I salute the author for saying these things. I mean we know the feeling of criticizing AI and certainly I criticize it a lot too, but when it comes to personal matters or how I am using AI, there are somethings I shy away from saying online and I wonder other people might feel the same way too.

So for example, once AI deleted my project, I was able to recover it but I lost version control through series of mistakes and IMO I lost a good version. (I think after abandoning that project and coming back, I was able to accomplish it)

Another example which is the one which is biting me the most is that I wanted to create a copy.sh/v86 based thing where you are able to edit the .img files of distros and save them all within the browser. I was able to run v86 custom way but I wasn't able to mount or have a proper way for making it work.

And now although I mean this is just an optional project and I just thought hey it would be fun to edit .img files in browser but now it feels like I get disappointed.

I think that disappointment is in both say a frustration of thing not working and secondly, just realizing that I might be dropping this idea altogether. Now I must admit that this is a field that I have absolutely no expertise at all in, but still, it feels disappointing to me and I kept thinking about it for sometime now.

I wonder how many people just feel that if AI is unable to make their project, to then either get frustrated/disappointed and even a salt of panic. I think its just wrong for how damn much we are relying on LLM's at this point. It feels like the whole economy is just doing what I am doing but with billions of dollars.

Another thing that I feel like is that both young and elderly people are really much like the same in vibe-coding. (Yes specs can help but LLM's are still autocorrect on steroids), I feel like we are both forsaking the junior developers and also forsaking the expertise created by senior developers as we replace it with these LLM's

Aggressively red-teaming your own work with LLMs is a good habit to get into. Prompts like “I’ve been told me to find the flaws in this argument/presentation/code file/etc.”. Doesn’t save any time, but is pretty educational, as long as you go back and forth a lot. It can fall into a style disagreement loop between two equivalent code blocks as it will try to find something wrong if instructed to do so, which is interesting.

If you don’t do this constantly, LLMS can certainly lead you right down the Dunning-Kruger path (though that’s a big oversimplification of a whole collection of psychological features from idee fixe to narcissism to fear of failure/criticism). If you really work at getting the LLM into the proper state it will happily rip your work apart in a rather cruel and indifferent manner, like an unsympathetic corporate gatekeeper who relishes exposing your flaws in a public setting. Debate club is another tactic that’s a bit less harsh, you have the LLM flip back and forth between defense and prosecution of your work.

I think this should be the default setting, but it doesn’t encourage engagement, the average customer will think the LLM is a mean jerk if it starts off like that.

Skill issue.

I do not recall ever reading such profanity in essays in thirty years of blogs. Then along comes Substack and leftists, and now people are writing curse words as if I want to read anything beyond that. Sure, they are free to write, and I am free to consider it lousy compared to what I read in precious years.