What to do when AI is quietly making you worse
The article discusses the subtle negative impacts of AI on engineers' skills and understanding. It highlights how reliance on AI can erode deep system knowledge and intuition, particularly for new engineers. The author emphasizes the importance of developing judgment and problem-solving skills that AI cannot replace.
- ▪AI is improving throughput in coding and analysis but may lead to a decline in understanding complex systems.
- ▪New engineers may miss out on developing system intuition due to reduced challenges in problem-solving.
- ▪The article suggests that judgment and problem-solving skills are crucial and cannot be outsourced to AI.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
What to do when AI is quietly making you worse I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, and a recent Root Cause podcast conversation pushed me to finally write it down. In the podcast they talking about something that I suspect a lot of engineers feel but rarely say out loud: you might only need deep system knowledge 1% of the time, but that 1% is often the moment that matters most. And AI is quietly eroding exactly that. This isn’t a “AI bad” post. I’ve been using it heavily - for coding, for analysis, for thinking through hard problems. The throughput gains are real. But throughput and understanding are not the same thing. And I think we are, collectively, choosing throughput in a way that we’ll regret.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Github.
