Nicholas Carr has a nice book on the dynamic the author is describing [0], i.e. that our skills atrophy the more we rely on automation.
Like a lot of others in the thread, I've also turned off Copilot and have been using chat a lot less during coding sessions.
There are two reasons for this decision, actually. Firstly, as noted above, in the original post and throughout this thread, it's making my already fair-to-middling skills worse.
The more important thing is that coding feels less fun. I think there are two reasons for this:
- Firstly, I'm not doing so much of the thinking for myself, and you know what? I really like thinking.
- Secondly, as a collary to the skill loss, I really enjoy improving. I got back into coding again later in life, and it's been a really fun journey. It's so satisfying feeling an incremental improvement with each project.
Writing code "on my own" again has been a little slower (line by line), but it's been a much more pleasant experience.
Hey! Article author here! I have read Carr's book a few years ago, and I think it has influenced my opinion about AI as well as computers as a whole quite a bit!
Like a lot of others in the thread, I've also turned off Copilot and have been using chat a lot less during coding sessions.
There are two reasons for this decision, actually. Firstly, as noted above, in the original post and throughout this thread, it's making my already fair-to-middling skills worse.
The more important thing is that coding feels less fun. I think there are two reasons for this:
- Firstly, I'm not doing so much of the thinking for myself, and you know what? I really like thinking.
- Secondly, as a collary to the skill loss, I really enjoy improving. I got back into coding again later in life, and it's been a really fun journey. It's so satisfying feeling an incremental improvement with each project.
Writing code "on my own" again has been a little slower (line by line), but it's been a much more pleasant experience.
[^0]: https://www.nicholascarr.com/?page_id=18