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@ hodlbod
2025-02-13 18:30:49
A post by Eric Hoel which backs up what I've been saying about AI-assisted coding:
https://open.substack.com/pub/erikhoel/p/brain-drain
I was saying last week that I felt like using AI to code made me more distant from the code, making it hard to understand and maintain in the longer term. I called this "legacy code generation". There's also a long-term effect:
> There’s increasing evidence for the detrimental effects of cognitive offloading, like that creativity gets hindered when there’s reliance on AI usage, and that over-reliance on AI is greatest when outputs are difficult to evaluate.
This is balanced by AI helping experts to fit more context into their brains at once, to work at a higher level, which is definitely a super power. I was even wondering the other day whether both versions of programmer might coexist in the long-term — one in-the-weeds, highly productive programmer might complement a high-level prompt engineer.
Also, this sentence makes me feel good about my default position of skepticism:
> For individuals themselves, the main actionable thing to do about brain drain is to internalize a rule-of-thumb the academic literature already shows: Skepticism of AI capabilities—independent of if that skepticism is warranted or not!—makes for healthier AI usage.