Choosing learning over autopilot

Summary

I use ai coding tools a lot. I love them. I’m all-in on ai tools. They unlock doors that let me do things that I cannot do with my human hands alone. But they also scare me. As I see it, they offer me two paths: ✨ The glittering vision ✨ The glittering vision is they let me build systems in the way that the version of me who is a better engineer would build them. Experimentation, iteration and communication have become cheaper. This enables me to learn by doing at a speed that was prohibitive before. I can make better decisions about what and how to build because I can try out a version and learn where some of the sharp edges are in practice instead of guessing. I can also quickly loop in others for feedback and context. All of this leads to building a better version of the system than I would have otherwise. ☠️ The cursed vision ☠️ The cursed vision is I am lazy, and I build systems of ai slop that I do not understand. There’s a lot of ink spilled about perils and pains of ai slop, especially working on a team that has to maintain the resulting code. What scares me most is an existential fear that I won’t learn anything if I work in the “lazy” way. There is no substitute for experiential learning, and it accumulates over time. There are things that are very hard for me to do today, and I will feel sad if all of those things feel equally hard in a year, two years, five years. I am motivated by an emotional response to problems I find interesting, and I like problems that have to do with computers. I am afraid of drowning that desire by substituting engaging a problem with semi-conscious drifting on autopilot. And part of why this is scary to me is that even if my goal is to be principled, to learn, to engage, to satisfy my curiosity with understanding, it is really easy for me to coast with an llm and not notice. There are times when I am tired and I am distracted and I have a thing that I need to get done at work. I just want it done, because then I have another th...