AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

This feels AI written as the post goes on. Either way, I'd like for us to stop fetishizing how we can use AI to make us stronger, better, and more valuable engineers. It's exhausting and doesn't consider other ways to use it. I've only been using it lately for tasks that are a step or two above google. Having it write code for me has just been a slippery, unfulfilling slope.

> If the job were mainly about producing syntactically valid code, then of course A.I. would be on a direct path to replacing large parts of the profession. But that was never the highest-value part of the work. The value was always in judgment.

> The valuable engineer is the one who sees the hidden constraint before it causes an outage. The one who notices that the team is solving the wrong problem. The one who reduces a vague debate into crisp tradeoffs. The one who identifies the missing abstraction. The one who can debug reality, not just read code. The one who can create clarity where everyone else sees noise

How do you think engineers in the second half got there? By writing tons and tons of code to "build those reps" and gain that experience.

The author tries to answer this:

> That process is not optional. It is how engineers acquire and elevate their competency. If early-career engineers use A.I. to remove all struggle from the learning loop, they are hurting their development.

but in a world wherein writing code by hand (the "struggle") is "artisinal" and "outdated", this process being non-optional (which I agree with) is contradictory.

How juniors and fresh grads do that with AI that is designed to give you whatever answer you need in a given moment is unclear to me. I don't see how that's possible, but maybe I'm thinking too myopically.

I was surprised not to see any discussion on whether the author used AI to help write this post. As many people say, writing is thinking.

I started getting that "I'm reading another AI-written blog post" feeling around 1/3 of the way through, but I don't consider myself super calibrated on this.

Pangram seems pretty confident it's AI (https://www.pangram.com/history/e9f6eb77-86f9-46d0-a6c1-e57c...). But I know these tools aren't perfect. I'd love to hear from the author what their process was in writing this piece!

Related question (I'm trying to work this out for myself):

If you believe using AI to write an email or blog post for you isn't okay, but using AI to write code for you is... what's the difference?

Right now my instinct is something like:

- Code can be verifiably correct (especially w/ good tests) so it's less of a purely-creative act than writing.

- But always, always double-check the tests!

- I still wouldn't submit a PR where I can't vouch for every line of code.

- AI-written documentation and specs are mostly still bad and should be looked down upon. But mostly because the quality, at least today, is poor. (Lots of duplication, lack of a clear understanding of the reader's intent and needs, no thoughtful curation, etc.)

- Be psychologically ready to update these priors as models change.

I'd love to hear from anyone who's thought more about this.

The eloquence with which this point gets (repeatedly) made is continuing to improve each next time I read it. However, I still feel like we haven't nailed it. That is, we are not yet at the "aphorism" stage of the discourse (e.g. "the medium is the message", "you ship your org chart", "9 mothers can't make a baby in a month"), in which the most pointed version of this critique packs a punch in just a few words that resonate with the majority of people. That kind of epistemological chiseling takes years, if not decades. And AI certainly won't do it for us, because we don't know how to RL meaning-making.

Edit: 9 babies → 9 mothers

The way I use AI now feels more exhausting than the programming I did for the last 20 years. I pose a problem, then evaluate proposals, then pick the one I think is the "right one"(tm), then see the AI propose a bunch of weird shit, then call it out, refine the proposal until it feels just about right (this is the exhausting part), then let it code the proposal. The coding will then run for 1-5 hours and produce something that would have taken me at least 2 or 3 weeks (in that quality).

After 5 hours or so of doing this planning, I'm EXHAUSTED. I never was exhausted in this manner from programming alone. Am I learning something new? Feels like management. :)

The scary thing is I have seen high level directors and executives say “I asked ChatGPT and it agreed with me” as a way to try to settle a debate. People seem all too willing to delegate even matters of judgement to AI.

On the other hand I have been in debates where someone asks ChatGPT to draft a list of possible approaches and pros and cons - and after reading through the list we were all in alignment on the best approach.

The latter I think is a constructive use of AI to elevate thinking, while the former has me thinking it may be time for a career change.

If one actually understands LLM AIs, not the technological aspect but the literary embodiment they become, using them is an elevation of one's thinking. Few to none have the foundational education to see them in their manifested extreme intellectualized nature.

There are plenty of engineers that couldn't work without a modern IDE or in languages without memory management.

Or without the ability to use a library from GitHub / their package manager.

It doesn't feel THAT much different to me.

"Engineer" as a term might drift. There are "web developers" that can only use webflow / wordpress.

I think AI can generally be utilized in two ways:

1) you use it to help write code that you still “own” and fully understand.

2) you use it as an abstraction layer to write and maintain the code for you. The code becomes a compile target in a sense. You would feel like it’s someone else’s code if you were asked to make changes without AI.

I think 2) is fine for things like prototypes, examples, references. Things that are short lived. Where the quality of the code or your understanding of it doesn’t matter.

I think people get into trouble when they fool themselves and others by using 2) for work that requires 1). Because it’s quicker and easier. But it’s a lie. They’re mortgaging the codebase. And I think the atrophy sets in when people do this.

Use AI like you would use any other tool: to work for you. There are all sorts of things you can probably do manually that just go a bit faster or more efficient with AI. It's not that different to using an electrical drill vs. a manually operated one. You end up with holes in both cases. But one achieves that a bit faster and neater.

Nobody is going to pay you for your artisanally crafted CSS code or whatever you were coding manually until last year. If you can do it faster/better than the AI, good for you. But it's not a contest and possibly your days of maintaining that lead might be numbered.

In the end, as long as the UI is styled alright, nobody will care that you pieced it together manually for hours and hours. More importantly, people are not going to pay you more for it than they'll pay the next guy getting a similar result in an hour of prompting AIs. They'll want you to move faster and do more.

That's what better tools do, they just cause people to expect more, better, and faster. And their expectations expand until they match the limitations of the new tools.

People seem to have this mental block where somehow the amount of stuff we ship is going to be a constant in the universe and we'll all be out of work and descend in despair. That's something that in the history of our species inventing tools has never really happened. I don't see any reason why AI would change that. Sure, there's a lot more we can do now. And it's a lot cheaper now. So we can now have a bit more of our proverbial cake and eat it. People will push this as far as they can and will want more and more of the good stuff.

And they'll need help getting all that stuff built. One way is a painful process of slowly prompting things together. Most people lack the skills to do that, don't know what to ask for and are in any case busy doing other things. That job, building stuff using tools, is still a job that needs doing. I'm quite busy currently doing that.

the article frames this as a choice between two groups. i think the more interesting question is structural. judgment used to get built through a natural feedback loop: ship, break, trace, fix, understand. AI doesn't just remove drudgery, it compresses or removes that loop entirely. a junior who never ships broken code in production never gets burned and never builds the instinct that catches the next fire the answer isn't "use AI less." it's that deliberate practice has to happen somewhere else now, by design, not by accident

Is anyone tired of being told what AI is supposed to mean for the individual? As a software guy it's supposed to mean I am now a team lead of sorts. However all the people I see crowing about this never sought to become team leads in their career, nor did I.

Yet now suddenly everyone is supposed to want to become a team lead of sorts (ie. the agents becoming your team). I don't want to do that, I treat an AI agent as a pair in a pair programming unit. Nothing more, nothing less. If someone wants to treat it differently, good on them, but they have no place telling what works for thee works for me.

Why did this obviously AI wirrten article get so heavily upvoted? Looking through the comments, it feels like nobody has noticed

There are plenty of engineers, who simply can't think, AI will not change anything in this regard.

This is true. Speaking only based on personal experience. My team had started treating AI like a super intelligent being.

“AI suggested we do it that way”

And we’ve been degrading our systems rapidly for last several weeks. We’ve decided to pause and reflect and change how we use AI on tasks that are not dead simple.

What about the third group who mostly don't use ai for programming because the results don't seem to be worth it, like to understand their system, and can craft a more compact, succinct, and well organized system by themselves which they enjoy maintaining? If most of your system is boilerplate that can be generated by Claude, then maybe you're doing it wrong? I'd rather read a short story written by a great writer than a trilogy of novels by AI

No, AI is not creating that group of people. They already existed. They were the people who would google for StackOverflow snippets and copy+paste them without even reading the entire snippet, much less understand them. Same people, new tool.

agree on the code side. for decisions i'd push it a bit further though. the trap isn't really that the model does your thinking for you, it's that it agrees with the thinking you already brought to it. you can't verify a decision the way you verify code, there's no test that fails when "this answer is wrong because you wanted to hear it." so even if you don't outsource the thinking, you can walk away with a plausible-sounding agreement that feels like understanding. that's the failure mode that worries me more. replacement is honestly the easier one to spot.

People are lazy. AI will replace thinking for many people. Augmentation always leads to atrophy.

That why I don't use AI for any personal projects, I like to keep my mind sharp. Unless it's a projects that incorporates AI in some way, but don't use AI to code it. But at work I don't care, I do what I am paid for, if my manager wants me to entirely vibe code using Claude, his choice, I will not be the one paying for technical dept that creates.

The 'Socrates worried about writing' analogy is usually deployed to dismiss concerns, but it misses an asymmetry which is writing preserved thought, it didn't generate it on demand. The real question is whether AI is closer to a pencil or a ghostwriter.

For junior engineers the distinction matters most. The reps are not just about getting the right answer, they are about building the intuition for when the answer is wrong. That's the hardest thing to transfer between people, and the thing AI is currently worst at self-verifying.

No one uses it this way, despite what people say. They hit any sort of wall and then ask the robot. Thought ends.

Just as the advent of palm-sized organizers reduced our ability to recall dozens and sometimes even 100s of phone numbers of friends etc, AI will reduce our ability to perform a range of functions.

I think the evidence for this is quite clear. Humans are NOT going to expend any energy - even mental energy, to think about something if they don't have to.

AI isn’t creating the problem, it is just showing the problem. Those who did not want to learn before AI did so reluctantly, mixing Google and SO. Now they ask AI. An existing problem found a new solution.

Personally, I really enjoy using AI. I have created my own cascade workflow to stop myself from “asking one more question”. Every session is planned. Claude and Codex can be annoying as hell (for different reasons). Neither is sufficiently smart for me to trust them. I treat them as junior devs who never get tired, know a lot of facts but not necessarily how to build.

People who let AI do their thinking at any level never valued it in the first place. "Use it or lose it", as they say. The count of studies backing this up continue to rise and yet so do the articles saying LLM use in software development is fine because our value is in our thinking.

Easier said than done. once you are given a lazy way to do things faster and easier and mostly better, it's hard to go back. this is by design. there is no turning point. this addiction is as strong as drugs I feel.

I am rebuilding numba. It is very hard for me to imagine doing it by hand. I tried it a couple of years ago but it was excruitiangly painful. It was slow and messy. So many small things that gets stacked on top of each other over years of abstraction.

I am doing it again using LLM. Legitimately, things that would have taken weeks is now done overnight. I still have to look at the code, at the generated C output, still have control over the architecture to make it easy for me and the LLM to work with in the future, etc

Is this replacing my thinking? I am not sure. I suppose I would have learnt a lot more about compilers/transpilers had I preserver through it for months with manual writes and rewrites but I would solely be working on this. Instead, I also had some time to write a custom NFS server support for a custom filesystem in Golang.

Why are certain parts of the text highlighted in yellow? This is very distracting.

Before AI I would spend multiple days mapping out my database tables and queries while now I ask AI to propose multiple different approaches and I pick the best one. But then on the other hand I’m working on 10 features at the same time and have to carefully look through them. But I can see that I’m totally dependent on the AI now. Creating a full plan by yourself feels like a waste of time, since you know the AI can create the same or better plan in a split second. So when Claude is down, I end up not being productive at all.

The post's recommendations and analogies kind of go against two shortcut approaches that have helped a lot of people in the pre-AI real world:

1) perfect is the enemy of good

2) fake it till you make it

The analogies imagine difficult scenarios where the habit of taking shortcuts doesn't help. But most people most of the time don't run into those scenarios at all.

AI is creating problems. This isn’t one of them. Engineers are going to now think at a higher level of abstraction. No one misses coding in assembly.

I've told everyone I hire that "I hired you for your mind so always use it." Push back on requirements, question my decisions, think about your approaches.

I can''t imagine telling them now to stop—use the Ersatz Intelligence instead of Actual Intelligence.

Hard disagree. I feel like I'm thinking a lot more now because I have so many parallel projects going on at the same time. AI has allowed me to really, truly create in a way that I've never done before. Yes, my coding skills probably aren't as sharp as they used to be, but my system design skills are at an all time high. Don't blame the tool.

Caught myself in this one. The dependency creeps in faster than I'd noticed and the laziness becomes the justification. Reviewing what comes out of the machine is the part I keep skipping. Useful read, thanks.

I think the great advantage of AI in software is that it enables you to create code faster. I think that the great disadvantage is that it tempts you to create code incredibly faster.

> There is No Shortcut to Judgment

> This is the part that some people may not want to hear --

> There is no generated explanation that transfers mastery into your brain without you doing the work. > There is no way to outsource reasoning for long enough that you still end up strong at reasoning.

This is in relation to early-career engineers, but I wonder why people think this won't apply to mid- and late-career engineers. Are they not also constantly learning things on the job? Are they not thus shortcutting their own understanding of what they are learning day-to-day?

This is so spot on and I’ve been harping on this for about two years based on my own professional experiences. The surprising thing, though, is that upper management is ostensibly cool with incompetent people using AI to produce things that are clearly not accurate and have no idea whether it is or not. I believe this is because upper management themselves believe AI is much more accurate in its current form than it is. It’s not clear what if anything will change this but I believe many organizations are rotting from within because they no longer have stringent requirements.

Mechanical exoskeletons should amplify your strength, not atrophy it.

If the brain is like a muscle, it won't work.

I feel like these articles are just a reasurance for people who don't want to accept that AI will automate their jobs. It becomes easier to focus on a lesser group of AI users and feel superior than to confront the reality of things.

Is it wise to understand everything that AI does for you?

Let’s say a person has 10 units of learning per week. Is the author actually claiming that that person must not deliver any results beyond their 10 units?

It makes some sense to have say 20 units of results and prioritize which ones to fully comprehend.

I suspect APIs / libraries / languages / platforms will have more churn due to AI. New platform new system need to learn. Once every 5 years might become every year or even more frequent. That would be a sort of inflation of knowledge and skills. It would affect the decision making about how to spend one’s 10 units per week.

> To be very frank if professional with 10 year experience they know the flow and logic to code if they use the AI they can make the code and improve they way they code but if new bee is coding he doesn't what the flow or logic he simply copy paste AI won't allow those people to think.

> split people into two nebulous groups

shows both groups using AI differently. Hard to continue reading the article that excludes your group entirely.

A.I. is creating engineers who can't WORK without it

Very apt headline, IMHO.

I have been an ardent opponent of AI since it came up a few years back. I refuse to vibe code and I refuse to let AI think for me. I won't be an AI controller.

However, two days ago I found a nice, personal use case for AI: Advanced writing checks (grammar checks, mostly, and some rewordings) in Word using a rather expensive app.

I write a lot of US English, despite it not being my native language, and AI is now helping me to write much better than I did before. Also, I discovered that I am much worse at writing Danish than I was believing. In fact, I think I am better at writing US English than at Danish, that's a bit surprising as I am a Dane.

No AI was used during the writing of this entry, but I dearly love the writing tool already! I have heard similar stories from friends who say that AI is very good at summarizing long documents and stuff like that.

So, I personally think that AI CAN elevate one's thinking. I am learning more about Danish and US English grammar every day, now, than I did during a decade before. Writing is suddenly so fun because it involves growing my skills.

This is a huge concern and I fully agree with the post. Even though one might think I am not fully giving into AI, this was always the case etc. It still affects YOU and everyone else. 1. Software, often, isn't built in vacuum. Lots of companies are shoving AI down throats like it or not. Most Bigtech is heavily using metrics to get to 100% AI generated code. Reviewing is a nightmare. 2. New entrants (new grads etc) are largely AI first and are losing out on the safety and reliability aspects that are enforced automatically when you learn coding without AI.

IMO, teams need to agree on a set of principles on AI usage, concrete examples of where and how to use it. Perhaps its much more useful in parts of your system that's faster evolving and doesn't have too much core logic like testing frameworks etc

Simply discarding it as 'yet another tool' is part of the problem.

CoRecursive had a really good episode about this last August:

"Coding in the Red-Queen Era" https://corecursive.com/red-queen-coding/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47916430 Check this out on LLMS security.

Wrote a similar take on it here:https://thefriendlyghost.nl/chinese-room-ai/

"What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking-there's the real danger" - Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune

what if it seems ai has literally replaced your thinking? Is there a way to unreplace it? im talking literally.

On the point of avoiding the struggle of learning, I think it's easy to swing too far the other direction and go back to not using modern development tools. I think it is doing a new learner a disservice by saying something like "don't use GDB/REPL/AI tool to learn, since you'll never learn the fundamentals". I think all of these tools allow for learning, if that's how the learner engages with them. So I hope that AI becomes integrated in the learning process, as far as it accelerates and doesn't replace understanding.

> Going back to the analogies: This is like copying answers through university and then showing up to a job that requires independent thought.

That's exactly what is happening now. I wouldn't even call it an analogy, I'd call it an example of where AI is already having a baleful effect. FWIW I don't disagree with the article's thesis or the examples: yes, absolutely, if used well AI can elevate engineers in exactly this way and it behooves us engineers to use it in that way. We can also say that the deliberate design of the AI systems we are constantly being exhorted to use inclines them towards work-slop and abdicated thinking.

This is why I feel like its fine that AI stay as inaccurate as it is.

I learn so much arguing with it.

I don’t get why we shouldn’t outsource our thinking to the AI. As it becomes more capable, eventually it will be more competent than the average engineer. At that point companies should be _requiring_ the AI to make the larger decisions. By the end of this year AI might be better than all but the very best engineers. Then what?

It’s weird I have basically a free private tutor in any subject and I use it a lot.

Yet nothing has actually changed.

Theory of Bounded Rationality and its implications is something they should teach everyone.

For couple of last weeks, I use AI to speedup my thinking process. Instead of think about something to come up to conclusion, I let AI brainstorm for me and then select. Not for everything, but I found it faster with AI. Having taste on select the ai output is important though.

I’ve never been busier and more challenged than I am now.

Employees should elevate your thinking not replace it.

Yes.... and I can't think without compiled languages. Missed out on assembler.

Becoming dependent on a technology is to be expected. I'm pretty sure 95% of us are dependent on packaged meat and don't know how to hunt.

Meh, there’s plenty that rise in their careers while being mediocre.

My director expects me to get things done at an accelerated rate. I don't have the time to read code and gain in depth understanding of issues he wants me to fix which requires me to understand multiple repos I have never touched.

I have no choice but let claude explore them for me and return me its summarized understanding. As next step, only claude can apply the required cross repo fixes, not me.

I just don't have the time. Meanwhile my skills as classical programmer atrophy, while my experience with and trust in claude go up...

I think there are engineers that can’t think without AI. But the best think with it. Unfortunately, we are now living in a day and age where simply ignoring AI is no longer an option.

Absolutely. When used correctly, it can become a tool for pulling our minds out of the gutter of pedantic pocket lint and distracting ephemera and keep it in a space where it is intellectually rewarding and fruitful. It can help you grasp a code base more quickly. It can help you debug things more effectively. But that's up to how you use it.

If all you do is point your LLM at your Jira tickets, then you are failing to be an engineer. I mean, if that's all you are doing, then who needs you? One of the most important things to learn is what the right questions to ask are and what the right decisions to make are when guiding the LLM, as well as the ability to judge the output it produces.

I am using AI at work. And it definitely makes me (say) 10% more effective.

However my #1 productivity tool is still a custom code generator I have been using for years. It routinely generates 90+% of the code needed to write a typical biz web application, leaving just the business logic.

No AI. Just straightforward high-level-spec-to-server-client-DB code that is 100% trusted and proven in battle.

For me the widespread fear over this is evidence that it’s different from syntax highlighting and stuff

We are in a transition phase where you need systems and coding skill but you can't be sufficiently productive without AI.

For all we know, we're in the early stages of making traditional (software) engineering obsolete. As in, we don't know if the role of software engineer as we know it today will still exist in 10-15-20 years.

I mean, right now we're at the stage where any user can get AI to make you software to solve very specific things - almost no technical knowledge needed.

My prediction is that first will software engineers be rendered obsolete. After that, small businesses will disappear, as users can simply get those products/services directly via AI.

First, it was pencil and paper. Then it was calculators. Then computers! It’s a slippery slope, this technology business.

What if the use of AI makes them dumber though?

I hope it's not reductionist, but this kind of thinking always feels like cope in the face of The Bitter Lesson.

Huberman: Your brain has a region that only grows when you do things you don't want to do

...or as I interpret it your brain grows only when it does things that are difficult.

If you remove the difficulty, it will atrophy into a hum of a mindless chit-chat.

Engineering the data structures and control flows from scratch is a completely different than asking an LLM to scaffold them for you.

Aaand it's the second "AI is bad" story on the front page today that's evidently generated by AI.

It doesn't elevate thinking no matter how you use it. It is a lookup tool at best.

For the new prompt engineers I suggest the following title:

  MCSE => Microsoft Certified Slop Engineer

95% of the population is educated to think inside of the box and just rely on repetition/memorization. There’s not a lot of thinking happening in this world outside of a very small group of people. AI is not going to change that reality at least not until we educate our children for the AI age.

I think many of us have interviewed people with 10+ YoE, and resumes that seem impressive, and then seen them fail to do much of anything in evaluations. I expect this problem to get significantly worse. There will be a class of people tucked into organizations where they can get away with sitting in meetings and YOLOing AI code for years.

Convenience is king. We became fat and unhealthy because high calorie foods are cheap and easy. We will become stupid because AI will do our thinking for us. There’s no way around it. Only a small percentage of the population are capable of perpetual self control. The old world forced you to be healthy, there was no other choice. Now there are like 15 things you have to have self control to do the hard work at even though you can get the same results the easy way. Working out, dieting, “proper” social interaction, sleep timing, child rearing, social meetups, career networking etc. The list is never ending and none of it is organic like it used to be.

Post title is completely misleading relative to the article. Article title: "A.I. Should Elevate Your Thinking, Not Replace It"

Skills you don't need, atrophy. Skills you need, don't. It's very simple, and the "you won't have the skills you used to need but don't need any more!" line of reasoning is tired and invalid.

Here's the question I want to posit and nobody who's against AI has managed to answer satisfactorily: what is it in for me if I were to acquire all those skills?

I don't give a shit about this career. I don't give a shit about engineering. I despise every second of it. There's nothing to aim for other than being a drone that does whatever is asked of it.

If AI can reduce my mental workload, why wouldn't I want to delegate everything over to it so I can save my faculties for what I truly enjoy? For the art of a worthless craft?

Bellissimo

Structure engineer can't either any more build bridge or tower without CAD or FDM

In answer to the headline - it's not, no more than calculators stopped people from thinking.

It's changing the way we think, and reason.

Speaking as a BE focused Go developer, I'm now working with a typescript FE, using AI to guide me, but it scares the shit out of me because I don't understand what it's suggesting, forcing me to learn what is being presented and the other options.

No different to asking for help on IRC or StackOverflow - for decades people have asked and blindly accepted the answers from those sources, only to later discover that they have bought a footgun.

The speed at which AI is able to gather the answers from StackOverflow coupled with its "I know what I am talking about" tone/attitude does fool people at first, just like the over-confident half assed engineers we have always had to deal with.

Unlike those human sources, we can forcefully pushback on AI and it will (usually) take the feedback onboard, and bring the actual solution forward.

Thus proving the engineer steering it still has to know what they are doing/looking at.

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‘AI’ is my newest litmus test for whether who I’m engaging with should be taken seriously or not.

‘AI’ doesn’t exist, and LLMs have vanishingly narrow legitimate justifiable use cases. Any output from one is intrinsically, explosively, imprecise, and can’t be trusted to be build upon without specialist treatment. I’m yet to identify any application of a LLM which can rationally be mistaken for intelligence.

Anyone who persists in referring to LLMs as ‘AI’ is either betraying they don’t understand what they’re talking about, or they’re invested too deeply in an active grift.

Calculators and computers are creating engineers that can't think without them either. There are many problems with AI, but from my point of view, the title has not thought things through.