alt Hacker NewsThis seems to confirm my feeling when using AI too much. It's easy to get started, but I can feel my brain engaging less with the problem than I'm used to. It can form a barrier to real understanding, and keeps me out of my flow.
I recently worked on something very complex I don't think I would have been able to tackle as quickly without AI; a hierarchical graph layout algorithm based on the Sugiyama framework, using Brandes-Köpf for node positioning. I had no prior experience with it (and I went in clearly underestimating how complex it was), and AI was a tremendous help in getting a basic understanding of the algorithm, its many steps and sub-algorithms, the subtle interactions and unspoken assumptions in it. But letting it write the actual code was a mistake. That's what kept me from understanding the intricacies, from truly engaging with the problem, which led me to keep relying on the AI to fix issues, but at that point the AI clearly also had no real idea what it was doing, and just made things worse.
So instead of letting the AI see the real code, I switched from the Copilot IDE plugin to the standalone Copilot 365 app, where it could explain the principles behind every step, and I would debug and fix the code and develop actual understanding of what was going on. And I finally got back into that coding flow again.
So don't let the AI take over your actual job, but use it as an interactive encyclopedia. That works much better for this kind of complex problem.
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That's a nice anecdote, and I agree with the sentiment - skill development comes from practice. It's tempting to see using AI as free lunch, but it comes with a cost in the form of skill atrophy. I reckon this is even the case when using it as an interactive encyclopedia, where you may lose some skill in searching and aggregating information, but for many people the overall trade off in terms of time and energy savings is worth it; giving them room to do more or other things.
This mirrors my experience exactly. We have to learn how to tame the beast.
> a hierarchical graph layout algorithm based on the Sugiyama framework, using Brandes-Köpf for node positioning.
I am sorry for being direct but you could have just kept it to the first part of that sentence. Everything after that just sounds like pretentious name dropping and adds nothing to your point.
But I fully agree, for complex problems that require insight, LLMs can waste your time with their sycophancy.
Is this a copilot ad?
My "actual job" isn't to write code, but to solve problems.
Writing code has just typically been how I've needed to solve those problems.
That has increasingly shifted to "just" reviewing code and focusing on the architecture and domain models.
I get to spend more time on my actual job.