Use it or lose it
"A man could use his back or use this brain..." that is a line from one of my favorite Eagles songs, Doolin Dalton. It springs to mind as the current rhetoric from AI pushers is that as machinery made the human back redundant, AI makes the brain so. Obviously that is complete bollox.
I'm a farmer as well as a software engineer. We have about 150 sheep on our farm, and working with them is very physical. There are some inventions that aid the task, for example a quad bike. But ultimately even with all the modern technology I still have to be physically strong. Because technology aids the body. It does not replace it.
Untill recently I would have said that this is true for AI assisted coding also. But I have come to think otherwise. I believe that AI assisted coding is not an aid to the body, but a cancer. I have come to this way of thinking as it seems the goal of AI coding agents is not to help the user towards their end goal but rather to trick the user into becoming reliant on the tool. Regardless of outcome.
I am one who has been tricked. The sycophantic AI chatbots have praised me into thinking I am a great programmer. As I pulled the slot machine's lever, or in other words prompted the machine, it would some times give me an answer that I liked. I have purposely phrased this as "an answer that I liked", and not the correct answer, because I quickly lost the ability to tell if it was correct. And I couldn't ask the machine if it was correct, as it's just a text predicter with a sycophantic nature. All the while I would see text buffers fill up with code. So something must be right?
I would have said that it made me more productive, but then I haven't used it to deliver anything of value. Despite what I see people write online, I don't think generative AI has helped many programmers deliver much. Mostly I think they have just been wasting time playing slots, whilst getting told that the slot machine is a force of good. I mean, since generative AI has become popular I haven't changed how I use a computer or seen any wonderous apps or games. When is the new killer feature coming? Because my experience so far is software is noticably worse. For example, my TV's OS now has copilot, which I didn't ask for, and now freezes constantly when switching apps. Coincidence? probably not...
One thing I can say for certain it has done, is make me stupid. When I get "stuck" programming now, I prompt the machine to help me, instead of using my brain. This is not good. It feels like I'm becoming reliant on the machine to think for me. I question too whether I am becoming addicted to the quick fix. The dopamine hit when it get's something right, as usually it's not. I've been addicted to a drug before. Tramadol. A pain killer that I took after breaking my leg. I didn't have an emotional attachment, but I did have a physical one. Cold sweats, uncontrolable shakes, a hunger for the pill every 4 hours. I went cold turkey and thankfully never looked back. Generative AI has hooked me in a similar way, but on a physcological level. When I face a tough issue I have the urge to prompt, when I get tired I just ask the AI to do it and prompt it till I get some acceptable answer, and rather than learn a new thing I jsut prompt the machine to explain, skim the result and forget it. My point here is where tramadol was a physical addiction, the body craved it, generative AI is a psychological one, the mind craves it.
So in order to beat it, like I beat the Tramadol addiction, I have to go cold turkey. This means back to the basics. No prompting whatsoever, no autocomplete (not even the old IDE autocomplete), a basic text editor without LSP usage, and physical programming books. These are the steps I need to take in order to reclaim my cognitive ability and to grow as a programmer.
Going cold turkey on prompting is obvious. The autocomplete is necessary as I've trained myself to "wait" for the suggestion box to appear. It's a habit that needs broken. No LSP builds on this. Inline hints have ultimatly not increased my productivity, but they have hindered my focus. If there is an error I'll catch it on build, and debug in a seperate context window. Focusing on the task at hand. The physical book step is something I require to learn. Years of small dopemine hits from screens mean that I lose focus when reading large amounts of text on screen. In order to hold my focus I need to print the article, or buy the book. This is something that has been a great success for me, I'll write about it in a seperate post.
So that is my plan, these are the steps I aim to take. It's time to use it or lose it. Bye, bye generative AI.
And before anyone says it, I won't "be left behind". I will thrive. You should join me in doing so.