Interesting. When you use AI heavily for coding, do you deskill yourself at actual coding?

[getajobmike@ruby.social]

RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116217631691585046

Interesting. When you use AI heavily for coding, do you deskill yourself at actual coding? Would a senior engineer who uses AI for a year or two become reliant on their agents to do the same job?

[thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io]

@getajobmike @tante they become reliant on it in like two weeks

[thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io]

@getajobmike @tante it acts like a cult that pushes sycophantic slaves on you

most people do not have the mental defenses and introspection to resist that

[torynski@mastodon.scot]

@getajobmike I can't find it, but i remember reading a paper some time ago that drivers who use sat navs don't learn the city they are driving in.

I can concur this is also my experience. I used to drive in London with maps a lot and still have a rough idea of areas. Better than of some of the cities I drove later using sat nav...

[eloquence@social.coop]

@getajobmike

Yeah, even Anthropic's own research shows this:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20245

[pikachuexe@vault76.pikaser.net]

@getajobmike@ruby.social

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

— Frank Herbert, Dune

[sstephenson@indieweb.social]

@thomasfuchs @getajobmike @tante re: mental defenses I’ve been wondering recently how many people fall for the trick who’ve never before had to deal with an emotionally manipulative parent/boss/partner/etc

[zrail@hachyderm.io]

@getajobmike Yes, absolutely. I have witnessed several people at work who I respect a lot succumb to this over the past couple months, and the org is full steam ahead on making it happen to the rest of us.

I have a five hour long training in a couple weeks. Next perf cycle is going to have "AI competency" as a core evaluation criteria, to the point where we won't be able to get the top perf rating without demonstrating AI usage in our role.

[phoffer@ruby.social]

@getajobmike witnessing people’s brains turn to mush in realtime at work. It’s scary how fast it’s happening

[onyxraven@hachyderm.io]

@zrail @getajobmike pretty much exactly the same here. New job reqs all have AI competence and experience requirements now too. I’m already seeing a decline in job satisfaction among the team and a mediocritization of quality

[knord@mastodon.social]

@getajobmike In my experience, yes. I've seen super-smart, super-experienced engineers develop a real dependency on AI in just a few months.

[enobacon@urbanists.social]

@getajobmike It's interesting to see it grep in parallel for a dozen likely things in a codebase, like when an error string is constructed from variables and static strings or passed through a couple layers, and you have no stacktrace. But it will also get inverted about what's a diff vs code and point out some non-issue that wastes your time. If you work in a language with a lot of boilerplate like java, I can see it being too handy of a shovel.

[riffraff@mastodon.social]

@TOrynski @getajobmike not learning new things is different from forgetting them tho, and LLM usage can vary a lot in the range from looking at a map to sleeping while the robot drives.
I am convinced coding skills can atrophize but I'm not sure it's a fast process. I haven't driven a bike in a year, but I still know how.