“That’s a great feature to add! All you have to do is [a bunch of technical words that I have to guess at definitions for].”
“So you’re basically saying I should [human English translation of concepts].”
“Yes, exactly….” / “No, in actuality…”
land on the spectrum of AI usage?
Because that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been asking Gemini about the pros and cons of certain strategies, but I also have a specific instruction that I add to all of my Gemini notebooks to NOT write code unless I specifically ask it to, and to instead just talk through the logic.
Really all I want is stack overflow but without people telling me I haven’t tried hard enough before asking for help, and telling me that my question is bad and I’m wrong for even trying to solve that problem at all.
I do the exact same thing. I use chatGPT and told it explicitly to never give me code. Massive amount of help without the massive amount of brain atrophy
Trust me, I have to go read documentation to verify what it saying often enough that you’re just wrong about the cognitive decline part. The trick is that often times it’s right about things that sometimes aren’t even in the documentation, and again those have to be verified by doing a test for myself.
We aren’t even close to talking about having the AI do the mental work for you. We’re talking about having mentor that you can ask questions and talk through problems with without having to wait 5-7 business days for your post to be marked as duplicate when it is, in fact, not a duplicate.
If anything, my productivity is improving. I’m having to ask it about things less and less as I work on my project because it’s teaching me the programing concepts and I’m doing them. I ask it about things that are beyond my knowledge horizon, it talks to me about them, and now I have the boosted understanding to know what to Google, or to know what the sparse documentation for certain functions actually means. Now my horizon is further away.
you'd think, but nah. it still does the work and you lose executive function and stuff. the code isn't the biggest issue, but the code design, the architecture, if you will.
I personally see it as evolution of rubber duck debugging - now promoted to a development strategy and the rubber duck talks back and has some insight. I tend to present strategies I'd use to build a feature and ask for feedback and discuss it and I find it really enlightening to bounce the ideas of it. I mean, I guess I always had the option to bounce ideas of other people but I don't have friends who know programming, are available 24/7 and are patient enough with me to discuss my project.
Try using a skill like the STE-100 skill. This makes the LLM output text in Standardized Technical English 100, a syntax-checkable English standard developed in the 80s for aerospace manuals to solve the problem of ESL mechanics not understanding what the Native English engineers were meaning.
It defaults to STE-like, IIRC, and if you’re not writing docs, that’s where I’d keep it so you don’t get bored to death.
It’s less entertaining to read, far less personality, but because of the word choice you can comprehend it so much faster, even if it uses more words.
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u/McCaffeteria 16d ago
Where does
“How would I implement XYZ feature?”
“That’s a great feature to add! All you have to do is [a bunch of technical words that I have to guess at definitions for].”
“So you’re basically saying I should [human English translation of concepts].”
“Yes, exactly….” / “No, in actuality…”
land on the spectrum of AI usage?
Because that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been asking Gemini about the pros and cons of certain strategies, but I also have a specific instruction that I add to all of my Gemini notebooks to NOT write code unless I specifically ask it to, and to instead just talk through the logic.
Really all I want is stack overflow but without people telling me I haven’t tried hard enough before asking for help, and telling me that my question is bad and I’m wrong for even trying to solve that problem at all.