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❓Topics covered:
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#programming #fullstack #ai

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A video essay exploring whether AI coding tools are making developers less skilled. It examines evidence on both sides: AI-written code gets reverted more often, Stack Overflow's most-copied snippet shipped with a known bug, and vibe coding lets people ship without understanding their code. But the counter-argument holds that calculators didn't make people worse at math, Stanford found AI made developers 55% faster with senior devs benefiting most, and modern developers manage far more complexity than before. The conclusion is that AI lowered the entry floor while raising the ceiling — it didn't make programmers dumber, it made it harder to fake competence, since AI now handles boilerplate and what remains is genuine thinking and system design judgment.

Are Programmers Getting Dumber?

<blockquote>
But the counter-argument holds that calculators didn’t make people worse at math.
</blockquote>
Not sure I entirely agree. Whilst it may not explicitly make someone competent at math, terrible at math, it doesn’t exactly help you improve either. Look at the deterioration of grammar; growing up with limited characters in our text messages through-out the noughties has lead to an abysmal grasp of grammar today. That includes myself.
Given enough time, it stands to reason that excessive A.I usage will begin to have an affect on the next generation. Lack of fundamental understanding. Zero knowledge of the newest technologies -why keep up if you can prompt it? Terrible problem solving skills. No clue about clean architecture or design patterns.

Most developers are already dumb, no worries

Calculators did make people worse at mental math though

These models are really unlike anything we’ve had in society before, so its hard to draw a parallel. I think we all owe it to ourselves to honor the fact that the deployment of these tools is still very much an active experiment that we’re running on society, much like Social Media and Smartphones as they were being widely proliferated. The results of that experiment have been…not great. We have a whole generation of individuals with deep attention deficits, and high levels of anxiety. We’re running this experiment again, but this time, its our problem solving and critical thinking skills that were gambling with, and we could end up with a generation that has severe cognitive debt.
I realize that these tools can, and are, being used to empower people and help them grow, but I also know that there’s no free lunch. If you choose to offload your cognitive tasks continuously, even if its rote stuff like boilerplate and refactoring, your mind will suffer the consequences for it. The other risk is the slippery slope: the more you offload, the more you offload. It starts as just offloading the boilerplate, but it can quickly evolve to higher level work. It’s all the same chat interface prompt away…we love easy answers. There’s already plenty of reports of people claiming they feel they’ve lost the ability to think through problems without having an LLM around.
I’ve aligned my relationships with these models as <a href="https://larsfaye.com/articles/everyone-can-delegate-now-to-ai" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">delegator/delegatee</a>, where I am acutely aware about when and how much I leverage their assistance. Just like a bad managers we’ve all likely had at some point in our lives, you can over-delegate to humans to the point where you are essentially useless, and its no different with LLMs. It takes constant vigilance, but there is a balance that can be struck.
I really make a point to ensure its “brain first, AI second” and I have lines in the sand where I will not engage with these tools; I use them for writing, I don’t use them decisions, I don’t use them for working in domains I am unfamiliar with (at least, not without extensive manual research, as well).
If you incorporate some of these best practices and stick to the Four Rs (Rote, Refactor, Research, Reinforcement), they can absolutely enhance your daily activities, but the risk will always be there. You know when you’re thinking less, so if you catch yourself doing that, pull back. I’ll go stretches of days where I barely use them, if not for the reason of just enjoying the process. LLMs have a focus on speed (learn more faster, write more faster, output code faster, ship faster), but going fast isn’t always my goal, and shouldn’t be yours, either!

vibe coding is not a good thing for Dev’s, accept that.