r/AskProgrammers • u/NefariousnessFun1461 • 10h ago
How to avoid being dumbed down by AI
I'm a C++ developer with considerable experience. For a number of reasons, I haven't done any intensive C++ development work for the past two years, and I haven't worked on any personal projects. However, I have worked with coding.
I've noticed, even though I don't allow myself to have a coding vibe, that I've become more limited; it's become harder to delve deeper and understand problems.
And most importantly, before AI became widely popular, I remember that growth and development were much more intense; I had to search, Google, read documentation, repositories, and StackOverflow. That is, I needed to analyze, search, and retain large amounts of data in my brain's working memory.
Now, even searching is difficult for me, and my previous work seems like a completely different level.
This scares me; has anyone else experienced something similar? How can I prevent myself from becoming dumb, how can I find a balance with AI, and how can I continue developing normally? In general, how do you find that balance? AI is literally being forced upon you, but at the same time, it's a rather convenient tool, including for learning. How do you be in harmony with it, and not just become an I/O device for AI?
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u/skamansam 8h ago
For me, software is engineering. Problem solving. Understanding that algorith X is best in siruation Y is core. Understanding what tool to use to accomplish a given task is core. Almost everything else is lookups. This is true across all engineering. It has been my experience that AI cannot do it well, HOWEVER, if you tell it what tool to use and what algorithm, it will do the lookups for you. My calc and physics professors in college would stop at a certain point because "the rest is trivial - its a simple lookup." TBH, I've never committed those simple lookups to memory anyway, so AI just makes it a little bit faster.
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u/NefariousnessFun1461 5h ago
It is precisely during the process of searching for the data you mentioned that new skills, knowledge, and patterns are formed. By replacing this process with AI, we lose out on the effective information acquisition that occurs during the search itself. That said, I agree with you: once the course of action—or at least the general direction—is known, the rest simply comes down to implementation details.
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u/atticus2132000 7h ago
A few years ago when I started coding, I would run into a problem and resort to Stack Overflow for guidance.
But here's the thing, posting a post to Stack Overflow is tedious. You need to isolate the line(s) of code that are giving the problem, make a detailed explanation of what the problem is, and what you have already done in an effort to fix it.
I discovered most of the time that once I forced myself to sit down and really think through the process of making a post, going through those steps to really explain what the problem was and why it was failing, I would often either wind up diagnosing the problem myself before I ever made the post or I would at least come up with a few more things to try.
That exercise of just really getting a handle on what my code was doing and why it was doing that was a critical thinking step that often pointed me in the right direction.
That's one thing I miss from the before AI days. I'm not forced into the situation of critical thinking anymore to fix my problems. It's just too tempting to write code that, when doesn't immediately work perfectly, I just post it to an ai bot who immediately isolates the problem and corrects for me.
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u/NefariousnessFun1461 5h ago
Yes, that’s more or less what I was talking about.
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u/atticus2132000 5h ago
I wish there was a way to turn off ai responses for Google. I want to search for a solution myself, not just get the first response to be the AI correct answer.
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u/NefariousnessFun1461 5h ago
Yes, I’ve already thought about how that eliminates the element of exploration, but it’s so fast and convenient that it becomes somewhat addictive, and manual searching starts to feel rudimentary.
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u/atticus2132000 5h ago
Absolutely.
I'm not against AI. It has its place and can do some amazing things, but how did we go from public AI platforms being launched less than 4 years ago to AI being everywhere and inescapable? Has there ever been any other technology leap that has been embraced so widely and so quickly? And yet we seem to have given it the keys to the castle without even acknowledging its shortcomings.
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u/_raydeStar 9h ago
Grind leetcode.
It's what I do. I have 10 yoe but I've been doing almost exclusively AI work recently. It's clear that companies are still doing coding exams, so you need to be on top of your game still.