alt Hacker NewsWe talk a lot about the risks of AI in schools, but those same risks apply in any learning environment.
I recently started a new job and I find that AI is making it so much harder for me to onboard. I am adjusting to my role much slower than my peers who are using AI less. I am coding in a language I am unfamiliar with, which makes the lure of vibe coding stronger. I am at least skilled enough to recognize when Claude gives me an answer that either makes no sense or is unnecessarily verbose. But the more time I spend asking Claude to write code, the less I feel like I'm developing the skills that the job requires. Plus, when I submit a PR, I lack the necessary confidence in my own work, which just feels bad.
Honestly, another part of this is that I'm asking Claude to search through Slack and docs for answers to questions when I should just ask another person. The AI is feeding my social anxiety, luring me into avoiding human contact that I know will be good for my understanding as well as my general need for social interaction.
That all sounds like I am absolving myself of responsibility, but I think it's important to point out how a given technology is especially addictive for a certain type of person, and traps them in a negative behavioral cycle. If I hold off on relying on AI now, I suspect I can grow in my skills to the point that I can delegate tasks to AI that are rote and easy for me to verify their results. It feels challenging, but it's necessary.
Replies
It is the worst time for the apprenticeship system (internship). everyone expect you to ship fast and good with ai, but you can barely have the time to pick up any skills during the fast iteration.
I’ve found the LLMs quite useful for summarising a codebase for me to quickly get a grasp on it.
It’s one of the real use cases I’ve had other than basically vibe coding
I'd suggest going the route of having Claude teach you what you need to know. How do I uppercase this string? What's the best way to tackle this problem? Is there a standard way to do this thing? Then you learn along the way. You don't have to use it as a search engine, just ask it what you need to know in the moment. It will shake it's token chains and give you something that's useful, especially for a beginner in the language. This way you can implement your plan of growing your skills and then starting to delegate to it later.
I've been doing this, and it's a nice balance for me. Having Claude code things when you don't know how to evaluate it's code seems like madness to me, but I guess I'm in the minority on this.