alt Hacker NewsI've pretty clearly seen the critical thinking ability of coworkers who depend on AI too much sharply decline over the past year. Instead of taking 30 seconds to break down the problem and work through assumptions, they immediately copy/paste into an LLM and spit back what it tells them.
This has lead to their abilities stalling while their output seemingly goes up. But when you look at the quality of their output, and their ability to get projects over the last 10% or make adjustments to an already completed project without breaking things, it's pretty horrendous.
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I think lack of critical thinking is the root cause, not a symptom. I think pretty much everyone uses LLMs these days, but you can tell who sees the output and considers it "done" vs who uses LLM output as an input to their own process.
As someone who vibe codes at times (and is a professional programmer), I'm curious how yall go about resisting this? Just avoid LLMs entirely and do everything by hand? Very rigorously go over any LLM-generated code before committing?
It certainly is hard when I'm say writing unit tests to avoid the temptation to throw it into Cursor and prompt until it works.
My observations align with this pretty closely. I have a number of colleagues who I wager are largely using LLM-s, both by changes in coding style and how much they suddenly add comments, and I can't help but feel a noticeable drop in the quality of the output. Issues that should clearly have no business making it to code review are now regularly left for others to catch, it often feels like they don't even look at their own diffs. What to make of it, I'm not entirely sure. I do think there are ways LLM-s can help us work in better ways, but they can also lead to considerably worse outcomes.