Comment by andai
2 days ago
Recently after a month of heavily AI assisted programming, I spent a few days programming manually.
The most striking thing to me was how frustrating it was.
"Oh my god, I've melted my brain" I thought. But I persisted in my frustration -- basically continuous frustration, for seven hours straight -- and was able to complete the task.
Then I remembered, actually, it was always like that. If I had attempted this task in 2019 (or a similar task, in terms of difficulty and novelty), it would have been the same thing. In fact I have many memories of such experiences. It is only that these days I am not used to enduring the discomfort of frustration for so long, without reaching for the "magically fix everything (probably)" button.
If I had to guess, I'd say that is the main "skill" being lost. There's a quote like that, I think.
Genius ... means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all. —Thomas Carlyle
Yeah I accept it , because most of the new gen are actually trained to be ,copy and paste and that is where the actual capability of the critical thinking is lost and I would accept your words being a new dev, because it feels cool after using ai for our work to complete and then after it completes and If I just come back and see ,what I have really did is,it feels like am I really unproductive? Actually no,but it is a bit like yes, because when we are good at driving the car and then help with the auto pilot is so good ,but when we don't actually know ,how to drive the car and then it feels like ,we are in the control of the autopilot disguised as the automation,what most people won't admit and I wanted to say that,we must actually have some knowledge on what we are trying to produce because, without any prior knowledge on what we are trying to do,we are just using the autopilot not our brain for the brainstorming ideas,even though we can get and we can take the help of the ai to convert that ideas to execution, atleast we must learn what we have been going through
'If I had to guess, I'd say that is the main "skill" being lost'(to endure frustration).
I think this might be true for you, but for less experienced and new developers, well, they actually won't get to that stage because their 'learning' is basically prompting and they have nothing to forget nor remember. And that might be bigger issue.