The use of LLMs for constructive activities (writing, coding, etc.) rapidly produces a profound dependence.
Try turning it off for a day or two, you're hobbled, incapacitated. Anecdotally, ThePrimeagen describes forgetting how to write a for/range loop in Go after using CoPilot for a while (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQNyYx2fZXw). Funny stuff.
Competition in the workplace forces us down this road to being utterly dependent. Human intellect atrophies through disuse.
In the arts, we see something different. People don't seem to like AI-generated content. For example, I monitor a random sample of recent pornography (random 4-second slideshow from all over the Internet, some scary stuff, see https://rnsaffn.com/zg3/) and AI-generated porn is still very niche, comparable in frequency to small fetishes like elder or latex or rope porn. I expected it to be more popular, but generally humans prefer something else.
As Tim Cook recently said, (paraphrased) once you start using Apple Intelligence to think and work, it's hard to stop.
Those skills that you no longer use will be lost. This is the profitable new addiction, and programmers like us are the first group of people to become hooked.
The response among programmers honestly feels very bimodal. There seems to be the camp that just loves LLMs and have turned to Copilot for everything. Personally, I used it to mock unit tests and that's all I really trust it with. Once I get to a problem I can't easily solve it's something obscure enough that there isn't a lot of web traffic for it and Copilot falls over too, so I find myself rarely using it. Sometimes it's helpful as an intellisense, but a lot of the time it's too slow even for that.
Its value as a text generator or, god help us, a search engine, has also run thin for me. I don't ever use it. I still prefer my google searches and going directly to sites.
I actually don't think it is. I know some high performers who are absolutely in love with Copilot, so it's not just the poor devs. I honestly don't know what the difference is. Maybe it's workflow?
> ThePrimeagen describes forgetting how to write a for/range loop in Go after using CoPilot for a while
For me it's normal to temporarily forget the exact syntax of things like loops in languages that I don't use for a while. For example, it's been six months since I wrote python code, I'm sure I'll get lots of basic syntax wrong for a day or two when I next start a python project.
I haven't written anything in C/C++ for several years. I'm sure I've forgotten nearly everything and would need to read a basic book before starting a new project. But, the key thing is that I'd just need to skim the book. All the knowledge is there, it's just latent and needs to be refreshed.
I don't think AI has changed anything here. I bet if this person had moved into a role as a project lead where they were spending all of their time reviewing code of people competent enough to get all the basic syntax right, then they might temporarily forget the exact syntax of a for loop as well. They'd not think much of it, just take the 5 seconds required to refresh their memory and move on, because that is how human memory works. But because AI is a new technology, and therefore scary, when AI is the reason we haven't thought about something for a while and then naturally can't immediately recall it, we get alarmed. But this is just the way human memory works, and has always worked.
Sure, if you're using a powerful tool that allows you to completely change your way of working, then abruptly stop using it, it'll take a while to get your old way of working back. That's normal. There's many potentially scary things about AI and the way it will effect society but I don't think this is one of them.
If you keep a curated cheat sheet / reference sheet for any language you use, it's way faster to reference that than to construct a prompt every time and wait for the bot to answer.
> The use of LLMs for constructive activities (writing, coding, etc.) rapidly produces a profound dependence.
> Try turning it off for a day or two, you're hobbled, incapacitated.
Hobbled? Maybe. Incapacitated? No.
Anecdotally, I use Copilot auto-complete and I can still code without it, although some parts (boilerplate) may be a lot more tedious. But other parts (not boilerplate) I barely notice.
I know this because Copilot in IntelliJ has a bug where it signs out, and sometimes I write code for a while (~15 minutes?) without it before I notice.
I will confess that when I have Claude generate all the code, it leaves me incapacitated, because I don’t form a mental model. Also, I don’t think Claude uses enough abstraction, and I know it struggles with uncommon foot-guns, so having it generate a large codebase would probably create something inflexible and with particularly annoying bugs. It can definitely write tests and probably also small black-box modules, but until Claude can write a large project on it's own, I don't think anyone can correctly trust it to write the core components of one.
Maybe by using Copilot, I’m being a bit too comfortable with boilerplate, so I’m not abstracting as much, and creating more annoying bugs, vs. without it. But if there’s a different I’m skeptical it’s a large one.
Try turning it off for a day or two, you're hobbled, incapacitated. Anecdotally, ThePrimeagen describes forgetting how to write a for/range loop in Go after using CoPilot for a while (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQNyYx2fZXw). Funny stuff.
Competition in the workplace forces us down this road to being utterly dependent. Human intellect atrophies through disuse.
In the arts, we see something different. People don't seem to like AI-generated content. For example, I monitor a random sample of recent pornography (random 4-second slideshow from all over the Internet, some scary stuff, see https://rnsaffn.com/zg3/) and AI-generated porn is still very niche, comparable in frequency to small fetishes like elder or latex or rope porn. I expected it to be more popular, but generally humans prefer something else.
As Tim Cook recently said, (paraphrased) once you start using Apple Intelligence to think and work, it's hard to stop.
Those skills that you no longer use will be lost. This is the profitable new addiction, and programmers like us are the first group of people to become hooked.