Comment by clutter55561
18 hours ago
AI isn’t creating the problem, it is just showing the problem. Those who did not want to learn before AI did so reluctantly, mixing Google and SO. Now they ask AI. An existing problem found a new solution.
Personally, I really enjoy using AI. I have created my own cascade workflow to stop myself from “asking one more question”. Every session is planned. Claude and Codex can be annoying as hell (for different reasons). Neither is sufficiently smart for me to trust them. I treat them as junior devs who never get tired, know a lot of facts but not necessarily how to build.
I wrote tens of thousands of lines of code before Google and SO.
I also enjoy using AI. It makes it easier to get mundane work done quickly. Junior devs who never get tired is a great analogy. It's a force multiplier and for people with limited time (meetings, people management, planning etc.) they enable doing a lot in limited time. I can relate to more junior people being worried and/or some senior people concerns of quality though. I get a task done, review it, get another task done. I won't let it build something large on auto-pilot.
One thing that should be noted is that life was simpler back then. You could know the syntax of C or Pascal. You knew all the DOS calls or the standard libraries. You knew BIOS and the PC architecture. I still used reference manuals to look up some details I didn't have in my head.
Today software stacks tend to be a lot more complicated.
Funnily enough, I learned to code “depth first” by putting together enough documentation examples and stackoverflow answers to reach a working Android app, long before I learned to code “breadth first” in school.