I miss thinking hard

I think AI didn't do this. Open source, libraries, cloud, frameworks and agile conspired to do this.

Why solve a problem when you can import library / scale up / use managed kuberneted / etc.

The menu is great and the number of problems needing deep thought seems rare.

There might be deep thought problems on the requirements side of things but less often on the technical side.

The article is interesting. I don't know how I feel about it, though I'm both a user of AI (no choice anymore in the current job environment) and vaguely alarmed by it; I'm in the camp of those who fear for the future of our profession, and I know the counterarguments but I'm not convinced.

A couple of thoughts.

First, I think the hardness of the problems most of us solve is overrated. There is a lot of friction, tuning things, configuring things right, reading logs, etc. But are the problems most of us are solving really that hard? I don't think so, except for those few doing groundbreaking work or sending rockets to space.

Second, even thinking about easier problems is good training for the mind. There's that analogy that the brain is a "muscle", and I think it's accurate. If we always take the easy way out for the easier problems, we don't exercise our brains, and then when harder problems come up what will we do?

(And please, no replies of the kind "when portable calculators were invented...").

I refer to it as "Think for me SaaS", and it should be avoided like the plague. Literally, it will give your brain a disease we haven't even named yet.

It's as if I woke up in a world where half of resturaunts worldwide started changing their name to McDonalds and gaslighting all their customers into thinking McDonalds is better than their "from scratch" menu.

Just dont use these agentic tools, they legitimately are weapons who's target is your brain. You can ship just as fast with autocomplete and decent workflows, and you know it.

Its weird, I dont understand why any self respecting dev would support these companies. They are openly hostile about their plans for the software industry (and many other verticles).

I see it as a weapon being used by a sect of the ruling class to diminsh the value of labor. While im not confident they'll be successful, I'm very disappointed in my peers that are cheering them on in that mission. My peers are obviously being tricked by promises of being able join that class, but that's not what's going to happen.

You're going to lose that thinking muscle and therefor the value of your labor is going to be directly correlated to the quantity and quality of tokens you can afford (or be given, loaned!?)

Be wary!!!

I get it and somehow also agree with the division (thinker/builder) but I feel this is only the representation of a new society where less humans are necessary to think deeply. No offense here, it's just my own unsatisfacted brain trying to adapt to a whole new era.

I am one of those junior software developers who always struggled with starting their own projects. Long story short, I realized that my struggle stems from my lack of training in open-ended problems, where there are many ways to go about solving something, and while some ways are better than others, there's no clear cut answer because the tradeoffs may not be relevant with the end goal.

I realized that when a friend of mine gave me Factorio as a gift last Christmas, and I found myself facing the exact same resistance I'm facing while thinking about working on my personal projects. To be more specific, it's a fear and urge of closing the game and leaving it "for later" the moment I discover that I've either done something wrong or that new requirements have been added that will force me to change the way my factories connect with each other (or even their placement). Example: Tutorial 4 has the players introduced to research and labs, and this feeling appears when I realize that green science requires me to introduce all sorts of spaghetti just to create the mats needed for green science!

So I've done what any AI user would do and opted to use chatGPT to push through the parts where things are either overwhelming, uncertain, too open-ended, or everything in between. The result works, because the LLM has been trained to Factorio guides, and goes as far as suggesting layouts to save myself some headache!

Awesome, no? Except all I've done is outsource the decision of how to go about "the thing" to someone else. And while true, I could've done this even before LLM's by simply watching a youtube video guide, the LLM help doesn't stop there: It can alleviate my indecisiveness and frustration with dealing with open-ended problems for personal projects, can recommend me project structure, can generate a bullet pointed lists to pretend that I work for a company where someone else creates the spec and I just follow it step by step like a good junior software engineer would do.

And yet all I did just postponed the inevitable exercise of a very useful mental habit: To navigate uncertainty, pause and reflect, plan, evaluate a trade-off or 2 here and there. And while there are other places and situations where I can exercise that behavior, the fact remains that my specific use of LLM removed that weight off my shoulders. I became objectively someone who builds his project ideas and makes progress in his Factorio playthrough, but the trade-off is I remain the same person who will duck and run the moment resistance happens, and succumb to the urge of either pushing "the thing" for tomorrow or ask chatGPT for help.

I cannot imagine how someone would claim that removing an exercise from my daily gym visit will not result in weaker muscles. There are so many hidden assumptions in such statements, and an excessive focus of results in "the new era where you should start now or be left behind" where nobody's thinking how this affects the person and how they ultimately function in their daily lives across multiple contexts. It's all about output, output, output.

How far are we from the day where people will say "well, you certainly don't need to plan a project, a factory layout, or even decide, just have chatGPT summarize the trade-offs, read the bullet points, and choose". We're off-loading portion of the research AND portion of the execution, thinking we'll surely be activating the neurosynapses in our brains that retains habits, just like someone who lifts 50% lighter weights at the gym will expect to maintain muscle mass or burn fat.

Guy complains about self vibe coding.. stop doing it then!! Do you really think it's practical? Your job must be really easy if it is.

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Honestly I think the "thinking hard" part is still there, it just shifted. Instead of thinking hard about implementation details, I'm now spending more time thinking about what I actually want to build and why.

The debugging experience also changed - when code doesnt work, you can't just step through the logic you wrote because you didn't write it. You have to understand someone else's (the AI's) logic. That's still thinking hard, just differently.

What I miss more is the satisfaction of solving a tricky problem myself. Sometimes I deliberately don't use AI for stuff just to get that feeling back.

Pre-processed food consumer complains about not cooking anymore. /s

... OK I guess. I mean sorry but if that's revelation to you, that by using a skill less you hone it less, you were clearly NOT thinking hard BEFORE you started using AI. It sure didn't help but the problem didn't start then.

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I feel tired working with AI much faster than I did when I used to code, dunno if it's just that I don't really need to think much at all other than keep in mind the broad plan and have an eye out if a red flag of the wrong direction shows in the transcript, don't even bother reading the code anymore since Opus 4.5 I haven't felt the need to.

Manually coding engaged my brain much more and somehow was less exhausting, kinda feels like getting out of bed and doing something vs lazing around and ending up feel more tired despite having to do less.