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Software Engineers Say They're Losing the Ability to Code Now That AI Does It for Them (futurism.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[โ€“] 72 points 5 months ago (7 children)

I notice getting lazier. Even adding a. gitignore file I ask Claude now. It takes longer than typing it myself and costs more probably. But I don't have to do anything but wait a few seconds.

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  • [โ€“] 38 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    The thing that scares me (and why I've stopped using it): my brain automatically reaches for the shortcut whenever I would have to do deep thinking/planning.

    I have ADD, so getting my brain to focus and work on a task is not an easy feat to begin with. Now I've found myself multiple times a day unable to will myself to think about a problem but rather deferred to Claude. It's seriously fucked up.

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  • [โ€“] 14 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    That's not even diminished coding ability, that's diminished thinking ability.

    And herein lies the reason AI is being pushed at all costs.

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  • [โ€“] 52 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    If I was paying for it, hell naw. But if my employer not only is willing to pay for it, but considers it a performance metric? I'm going to use it for fucking everything. These are the incentives they give me, I'm going to follow the incentives. Talking to Claude is what they pay me for, apparently.

    But like the article says, if I don't continue practicing on my own code in my unpaid off-work hours, I imagine I'd be regressing in my skills too. I do that because I enjoy it as a hobby, but if I didn't, I could see myself and probably a lot of other people getting rugpulled by this.

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  • [โ€“] 26 points 5 months ago*

    I'm not using it for the incentive. I'm using it to avoid punishment. The company I work for made it mandatory to use it daily. So I'm tokenmaxxing bullshit tasks so I can focus on interesting ones, but yeah I already feel it's making me lazy because I sometimes can't be bothered to read a log anymore. We are truly fucked.

    This company is working on terrible assumptions. They spent years hunting for the best engineers in the country (or so they pretend to anyway) and suddenly decided that

    • we are average at best and it is better and faster than most of us (it's not)
    • software engineers don't like to write code anyway (we do, at least when the challenge is interesting)
    • it will forever be more affordable than properly qualified engineers (oh boy it won't)
    • a PM with Claude is as qualified as us to bring features to production (talk about tech stack suicide)
    • etc.

    They either have drunk the propaganda koolaid and betting everything on this lie, or are so arrogant they think we can succeed where the largest AI investors in the world utterly failed (see GitHub that can't even get 3 nines of availability since the switched to full-ai-code).

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