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?

@getajobmike I think you do. Even if actual coding skills didn’t dissipate that fast you develop dependence on AI for job quite fast. The main factor is rapid accumulation of cognitive debt. Amount of code produced is larger than you can keep track of so you have to use AI to explain that code and make changes to it. AI is also not concerned with doing minimal changes, it often will rewrite huge portions of existing code which also leads to cognitive debt: what little you understood about the code quickly becomes irrelevant.

Another issue is you expose yourself to huge amounts of plausible but not very good code. This influence your perception of what “normal” code looks like and it’s not in a good way.

If you’ve been in the industry for a decade or two you’ll probably be able to do things the old way for the rest of your life but it’s hard, much harder, and not everyone wants to put up with it.

@tante

@pointlessone @getajobmike @tante also if you work on a large codebase everyone is filling with mediocre/generated code, the incentive to read, learn and improve it for yourself and others collapses. I am ready to spend an hour chiseling the perfect naming and abstraction layering for my peer humans, for their bots? not by far. This incentive poisoning will prove to be catastrofic.
@oinak @pointlessone @getajobmike @tante All true. On the “incentive” front, I also find myself severely demotivated to spend time reviewing AI generated code. Bad news all around.