Zwuzelmaus comments on Software Engineers Say They're Losing the Ability to Code Now That AI Does It for Them

[–] Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org 18 points 4 months ago* (6 children)

Software Engineers Say They're Losing the Ability to Code Now That AI Does It for Them

"AI has sucked my brain out of my head. It's all AI's fault"

If I were a bad coder, I would say that too now!

All bad or average brain workers may start to fear for their jobs already.

No, seriously I don't think that it is real, but I think the fear is real.

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[–] gratux@lemmy.blahaj.zone 30 points 4 months ago

There have been multiple studies finding a general decrease in cognitive skills and critical thinking related to AI use. Here is one of them: https://doi.org/10.3390/soc15010006

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[–] Brummbaer@pawb.social 20 points 4 months ago (2 children)

There is an easy cope out to say, these were bad engineers to begin with, but I'm not convinced.

We know that if you don't use an ability and use it daily your brain just reallocates resources to other tasks. So if you have a machine that "outsources" thinking for you, you will be less able to think.

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[–] lacethespace@sh.itjust.works 3 points 4 months ago (1 child)

It's not even about skill atrophy, it's more subtle. You can quickly relearn forgotten skills.

Unlearning a habit, on the other hand, is much harder. If you get into habit of reaching for AI anytime something hard needs to get done it's going to wreck your internal motivation and reward system. meme_historian describes it really well in this thread, I noticed the same thing happening to me.

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[–] Brummbaer@pawb.social 4 points 4 months ago

Thinking about that, it reminds me of addiction. You replace your motivational system with another one, that gives you a faster and easier reward.

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[–] throws_lemy@reddthat.com [S] 14 points 4 months ago

"AI has sucked my brain out of my head. It's all AI's fault"

I mean, just look at what happened to Amazon’s engineers; they were forced to use AI in their daily tasks and maximize their use of AI tokens. That was also the fault of the executives who forced employees to use AI.

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[–] mokey@therock.fraggle-rock.org 2 points 4 months ago

Indeed. It is just devs being lazy. Use your tools, don't abuse them. Same thing happened when IDEs started to be able to autocomplete and do refactorings. If that makes you stop being able to do it yourself it was never a IDE problem, but a user problem.

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