alt Hacker NewsI got out of tech about 5 years ago, before AI really took off. I still do a lot of personal projects and now never use AI. I tried it a bit (only free plans) but noticed how much it caused me to no longer be able to think through a solution myself. I thought I was learning a lot from it but for some reason whatever I learned from it didn't stick. So now I'm no longer using it at all. I do realize that this is very specific to my situation of course.
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Difference between taking your own notes and skimming someone else's.
I have found in the last year I "get more done" but I learn less. Whats even worse is if I burn though my token quota I am less likely(and less able) to "switch to manual". LLMs make an ocean of decisions and assumptions very quickly and if you don't slow it down very intentionally (and lose the promise of the AI providers are pitching) you will quickly not have a good idea of how systems work.
I really do not get all of y'all claiming this causes you to "not be able to think".
I worked on six nines active active payments infra that handled billions in daily transaction volume. I've built laser projection systems to play interactive games on skyscrapers. That ability is not atrophying.
I'm able to do 10-20x what I was able to do before AI, and I'm able to work at a breadth, depth, and level of polish that was previously impossible without mastering other diciplines (CSS, design, etc).
With AI, I've built several video games, my own SRS software, my own productivity software, and a business making $5M ARR and growing 70% month on month.
I've now done more hardware projects in the past eight months than I have in the last ten years. I might even start doing physics and bio (I did my undergrad in biochem) if I can find the time.
I'm also back to making movies. I was a major hobbyist filmmaker before the pandemic. I've shot dozens of films. They're extremely logistically complex and take so much time, and I was never capable of working in the high fantasy or sci fi genres I wanted to. Seedance is scratching so many of my itches it isn't even funny. It's like a gift from the gods.
I'm working more now than ever before, and I'm turning those hours of writing pointless glue code or testing new libraries and frameworks into actual productive work. Getting real work done.
2010-2020 felt like tech dystopia to me. Cellphone incrementalism, walled gardens, adtech, crypto, locked down devices. It was a pale shadow of the excitement of the early web. Personal websites, kids making Flash games, the indie web, p2p, people building stuff being 70% of the internet. For the first time in a long time, I feel extremely hopeful about the future and excited to work with tech again.
tl;dr - I can still write in cursive, but it turns out I just don't need to as I write my movie.
I do not get you folks who claim this is bad. This is magical.
There was a well known phenomenon people called ‘tutorial hell’ where when learning to program you could understand all the code from tutorials, but when it came time to actually create your own solutions for stuff you got stuck. I think AI is basically enabling eternal tutorial hell, you never actually need to break out of it anymore.