Comment by evilduck

1 year ago

If your position is to find fault then that’s what you will accomplish.

I'm speaking from experience and observation of the past two years of LLM assistants of various kinds that outsourcing code production will atrophy your skills generally and will threaten your contextual understanding of a codebase specifically over the long term.

If that's a risk you're willing to take for the sake of productivity, that can be a reasonable tradeoff depending on your project and career goals.

  • It'll atrophy whose skills?

    I'm using it to increase my own.

    • Your coding skills. If you're a new programmer, I can't emphasize this enough: Typing is good for you. Coding without crutches is necessary at this point in your career and will only become more necessary as you progress in your career. I'm a 25 year veteran professional and there's a reason I insist on writing my own code and not outsourcing that to AI.

      Using AI as a rubber duck and conversation partner is great, I strongly suggest that. But you need to do the grunt work otherwise what you're doing will not lodge itself in long term memory.

      It's like strength training by planning out macros, exercises, schedules and routines but then letting a robot lift those heavy ass weights, to paraphrase Ronnie Coleman.

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