I dunno. On the one hand, I keep hearing anecdata, including hackernews comments, friends, and coworkers, suggesting that AI-assisted coding is a literal game changer in terms of productivity, and if you call yourself a professional you'd better damn well lock the fuck in and learn the tools. At the extreme end this takes the form of, you're not a real engineer unless you use AI because real engineering is about using the optimal means to solve problems within time, scale, and budget constraints, and writing code by hand is now objectively suboptimal.
On the other hand, every time the matter is seriously empirically studied, it turns out that overall:
* productivity gains are very modest, if not negative
* there are considerable drawbacks, including most notably the brainrot effect
Furthermore, AI spend is NOT delivering the promised returns to the extent that we are now seeing reversals in the fortunes of AI stocks, up to and including freakin' NVIDIA, as customers cool on what's being offered.
So I'm supposed to be an empiricist about this, and yet I'm supposed to switch on the word of a "cool story bro" about how some guy built an app or added a feature the other day that he totally swears would have taken him weeks otherwise?
I'm like you. I use code as a part of my thought process for how to solve a problem. It's a notation for thought, much like mathematical or musical notation, not just an end product. "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." I've actually come to love documenting what I intend to do as I do it, esp. in the form of literate programming. It's like context engineering the intelligence I've got upstairs. Helps the old ADHD brain stay locked in on what needs to be done and why. Org-mode has been extremely helpful in general for collecting my scatterbrained thoughts. But when I want to experiment or prove out a new technique, I lean on working directly with code an awful lot.
On the other hand, every time the matter is seriously empirically studied, it turns out that overall:
* productivity gains are very modest, if not negative
* there are considerable drawbacks, including most notably the brainrot effect
Furthermore, AI spend is NOT delivering the promised returns to the extent that we are now seeing reversals in the fortunes of AI stocks, up to and including freakin' NVIDIA, as customers cool on what's being offered.
So I'm supposed to be an empiricist about this, and yet I'm supposed to switch on the word of a "cool story bro" about how some guy built an app or added a feature the other day that he totally swears would have taken him weeks otherwise?
I'm like you. I use code as a part of my thought process for how to solve a problem. It's a notation for thought, much like mathematical or musical notation, not just an end product. "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." I've actually come to love documenting what I intend to do as I do it, esp. in the form of literate programming. It's like context engineering the intelligence I've got upstairs. Helps the old ADHD brain stay locked in on what needs to be done and why. Org-mode has been extremely helpful in general for collecting my scatterbrained thoughts. But when I want to experiment or prove out a new technique, I lean on working directly with code an awful lot.