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Comment by xvector

2 days ago

That's why I still use an abacus.

The abacus skills are safely obsolete, the skills of general thinking and creativity must not become that. This couldn't be more specious.

Meme thinking like this, repeating something you've heard as reflex without regard to whether it fits a situation, is the exact kind of unoriginality we can't allow to become the default mode of thinking.

  • I find the AI can make me more creative. I don't have to waste mental energy on boilerplate or straightforward stuff that would take me typing through some event processing loop etc. I can extract out and reuse components easier and focus on big picture design. Or build more bespoke admin tools that I wouldn't have wanted to waste time building some JS stuff before.

  • I am not the one being unoriginal here. You are thinking that AI will obsolete critical thinking, so there's no point developing with it.

    However, in your moral crusade against using AI you are missing the big picture. No one is making you code with AI. But there are many things that you can only build if you use AI as a component.

    The ability to plug a human-like decisionmaker into anything, anywhere massively expands what we can build. There are applications and use cases that you cannot even conceptualize without having the ability to plug AI in. This does not impacting critical thinking whatsoever.

    Be original. Put your engineer hat on and think on what this new tool lets you build, that you couldn't beforehand.