AI Is Making Developers Illiterate

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

all right folks I'm getting ready for work you can see the TT is waiting for the spring uh I'm going to go over to Reddit for a topic um this should be the a good kind of video to go make and film uh at my computer so I could show you the article that is referenced but um I'm literally going to be driving a car and that's going to be uh not impossible but that would be extremely unsafe so I'm not I'm not going to try to do anything with an article at the same time but I wanted to talk about it um this was actually on the primagens uh subreddit and uh so someone submitted this and it's AI related I thought it would be interesting to talk through I wanted to to think about some different perspectives here and I wanted to start

this conversation off by saying that one of the like the the things that I really Tred to do uh in in my videos or when I'm talking through things with people is I really try to look at things from different perspectives uh and especially if I feel like I have a strong bias for like one side of the story I try to do my best to make sure that we can at least explore the other side so I'm bringing that up right now because I want you to think about that as I go through this video I'm trying to to challenge you to kind of think about things in different ways I'm not here to like debate like something is you know an absolute truth or not um it's not my intention my intention is to get you to think about things in perhaps different

ways than you are currently just to keep an open mind so the post that was made into Prime's subreddit was uh referencing this blog article that someone wrote and author commented back and was all excited their article got shared which is cool and it's around um like AI is making developers lazy and I think immediately probably you know 99% of people that are watching listening to this were like hell yeah totally agree like AI is screwing us um so let's keep going the uh the sort of way that the Articles written I I only skim through it so um you know I'll be totally uh transparent that like I didn't go do an in-depth analysis that's why I was saying I think this would be a really good one to do at my computer in fact now that I'm saying that out loud again I'll

probably make a followup on my main Channel Dev leader and uh do like a polished uh edited video or I go through the article give some thoughts so this will be kind of a uh a precursor to that this is my on the Fly thinking through this stuff and uh if you're interested I'll have that up on my main Channel Dev leader and then you can you can check that out if you want like a more refined version of this uh kind of brain dump so the author goes on to talk about how um you know how they've been using Ai and basically they become super dependent on it to the point where they were saying like you know I won't even look at a stack Trace anymore like I need AI to go analyze it for me um it's no longer like hey AI

is like this nice thing that can help it's like they they get upset when AI doesn't give them a good answer because they're so reliant on it um they talked about like it taking away some of the joy way of programming because they're relying on AI so much so like that's a big part of the the article just uh how how dependent they become on AI and the the framing in my opinion is not like a is not a positive one if if it's not obvious it's not hey AI has has made my life so much better and so much more productive it's like I it's almost like I don't know if the right word is afraid but like I become so dependent like this isn't good I need to change um this isn't heading in the right direction uh I think I don't think

it was a comment I think it's in the article they said AI is not making us 10x developers it's making us 10x dependent on AI and I thought that was an interesting statement um so we'll maybe kind of revisit that um and then towards the end of the article they're talking about like this action plan that they're coming up with uh and just some different ideas they're proposing to essentially kind of force the them away from from using AI all the time so and you know how you implement it like I'm there's nothing here man stop beeping at me um you know if you carve out a day of the week to not use AI or you stop using AI for particular tasks more frequently so you can practice them um one of the things they pointed out was I'm not going to use AI

for things that like I haven't done before um bunch of different strategies that they were kind of thinking through which I thought was you know interesting I think it's a it's a good reflection because it's like these are the things that AI is is literally doing for me and that's kind of why I wanted to say uh you know their comment was like it's not making us 10x developers it's making us 10x Reliant but you know if you're REI I'm just going to interject with this if you're R it's kind of a thought right if you're relying on AI to do these things is it because it's helping you do them more effectively like I for me I certainly wouldn't be relying on AI or anyone anything to do something for me if it wasn't going to to give me some benefit right and maybe

maybe what they're trying to say is um it's maybe it's not even doing better than they could at some of these things but maybe what's happened is that they're using AI for these things it happens to be faster maybe not better and it's aord in them more time to go do other things which is perhaps what's happening so the difference there is like I'm going to use AI to do this task because AI is better at it versus I'm going to use AI to do this task I might save some time on it maybe it's not better than I am at it but it's you know air quotes like good enough and I can go do other work uh both of those are possibilities I think uh hello it's a green light this is a a day of drivers already the last video I made

I had someone on the highway that almost cut me off just like quite a quite a circus today okay so oh man that's a lot of flavor in that was not was not expecting that so their their article is interesting I think it's a I think it's a good read um I haven't written articles in just under a year now but I like how they tell it it kind of it feels like a story right um which is nice uh versus like a lot of articles I write are very technical and it's like here's a tutorial um it'll put your right to sleep but uh there's some code you can copy and paste so I thought you know it was a good read um but I thought it would be kind of interesting to reflect on so overall sounds like their their claim is like

we're relying too much on Ai and I have a strategy to help um that I'm going to try to help move away and be so reliant on AI um so on the surface I don't think there's anything wrong with that right I think if this person's looking at how they're developing software how AI is fitting in as a tool for them if they don't like what's happening then I think good reflection right like make some adjustments um and kind of see what fits for you especially if you're feeling like um I mean there's a couple things that stood out to me like they're losing enjoyment for programming I thought was an interesting one I think you know uh maybe a little bit more philosophically when it comes to work and stuff when you start losing enjoyment in what you're doing I think that becomes kind

of uh kind of risky not going to get stuck behind that person um so so you know then you start what you start going to work you hate your job you don't like what you're doing it's not interesting and now you got what like 30 40 years of this left I don't think so um so you know if you're starting to lose enjoyment I think that's like a an interesting like kind of trigger to think about um so that was one part and then the other part seemed to be like I'm I'm less personally I'm less concerned about the Reliance on and I want to talk about this more so less concerned about the Reliance on and more about are they finding that they're becoming worse as a developer and I that's a very general statement I'm kind of saying it that way on purpose

but like overall as a developer do they feel like they're becoming worse because they're relying on AI and I wanted to kind of ask that to you as the viewer to think about for yourself right and and it's on purpose because as we talk through this I want you to think through different angles of what this might look like so I realize on the surface when I say that I think some people might be saying well based on what this person was saying yeah like you know they were talking about how their ability to debug like they're relying on AI to look through stag traces they're using AI to refactor things or using AI they're not practicing those skills anymore therefore they are going to be worse they will be worse like that person will be worse because they're not practicing those things which I

think is a totally fair way to look at it and by the way when I ask you that question uh there isn't going to be like a universally right or wrong answer there's not going to be a universal way that you can look at this question I asked it because you will have a different way of interpreting what it means and I want you to be able to think about that so the other way that I look at this though is that if you're relying on these tools and those tools are enabling you to be more effective are you better or worse so the difference here being you as the individual or you with the set of tools and personally I think that that's again you can look at this different ways this is my Vlog so you're going to hear my perspective on these

things um I kind of see it split between those two things primarily one is like if you're using tools to replace things you would be doing you practice them less therefore you as an individual may be getting worse at them because you are not practicing however leveraging the tool and not always especially because I've heard people say they can't use AI effectively for certain tasks that's not here or there necessarily but if you're using Ai and it's not making you more effective like it's maybe like not the right tool if it is making you more effective then the net overall effect would you make an argument that you are more effective as a developer okay so that's how I'm looking at this scenario right now so this is why when I read this kind of stuff and I you know like I said a little

bit earlier I'm not I'm not saying this person's wrong that they want to start reflecting and changing some of their ways of developing I think that's um that's not for me to decide for them right like at all but what I think is really healthy is that they are doing this reflection I think that's super cool hey I'm noticing this about how I develop this is a good gut check like maybe I'm going to try some things out see how this feels I think we should all be doing this kind of stuff not like AI aside right like hey hey um I'm just going to pick another group of people that will probably get pissed off when I say this but hey like I started doing tdd and I actually find that I'm not effective at developing anymore so like I would say maybe you

should go rethink that maybe you need to either go get better at tdd or drop it if it's not working for you or drop it in the scenarios where it's not working effectively for you right but like take this opportunity to refine how you do things how you practice things how you develop um so I think that's all healthy um the thing that I kind of wanted to to focus on though is this Reliance kind of concept there's two parts I want to go over the Reliance part cuz I think that's it's very interesting and um the other thing if I have time I want to get back into is uh is how we learn and I like to me this is a fascinating part I'm not an expert by any means on you know like psychology of learning or anything like that I just

have my own experiences and then I have my experiences uh that I've shared with like trying to help others um be better software developers so I don't have like a scientific or medical background and or biological background and any of this stuff um just as a heads up I'm not trying to pretend like I do on the Reliance part um the reason I said a little earlier I'm not so concerned about this is because um like I I've already seen this happened well before AI I guess and I haven't seen that be a problem in fact I've seen that just enable people to be better developers and get done so to give you some examples like before we had Chad GPT what was everyone using say it with me sack overflow okay so we had this tool we still do we have stack Overflow you

could be going to stack Overflow and searching for your answer and then copying and P and code over and then someone could make an argument oh soon as stack overflows down you can't code anymore you're so reliant on it yeah and when stack overflows up and it's up most of the time I'm killing it I'm doing awesome right like I I'm I'm just giving you an example to to to think about I want to challenge you to think through these things if they feel uncomfortable so that's again why I'm delivering them in a way that might get you kind of being like screw you Nick that doesn't make any sense like think about it think about it with me um it's just a different perspective um IDE right so like I program in C and use net for effectively almost everything I do cuz I

really like the ecosystem I'm very comfortable in it but one of the reasons that I'm so comfortable in it is because the tooling that surrounds it I know a lot of people hate Visual Studio I'm like very at home in visual studio and in fact if you ask me to go program C and not have Visual Studio I would feel like my thumbs are tied together I've been programming for over 20 years and if you said Nick you can't use Visual Studio I need you go build something I would feel like uh like what do I do so I absolutely have an over Reliance on Visual Studio on the Microsoft build tools for for CP and.net 100% I have an over Reliance on this stuff but I wouldn't sit here and then say therefore I'm a bad developer because when I go to develop things

I have those tools now if you ask me to use another language right so if you said Nick I need you to go use Python to do this the first thing that would be in my head is if I have to use another tool like python or other language what are the comparable tools that would make me feel at home right like what's the IDE that people use with python because I'm not going to be programming it notepad right I'm not going to be doing that so what's the tool like I want an IDE I want a debugger I want I want the the tool so I can feel at home same thing if you pick a different language um when we're building brand ghost brand ghost is the SAS that I'm building outside of work for social media content sharing and uh so I

use this for all of my content creation the front end is built with typescript and we use vs code for that so again familiar it's close but there's certain things that aren't set up like uh I don't know why we're using nextjs and there's something to do with like how the debugger in our our setup like isn't quite working so when you go to debug it's like I I can't actually hit break points but I can do like console logging and I'm like oh man like even that feels like I'm I'm being crippled in my development right like it's very much holding me back because every time I want to go debug something I'm like oh I have to go figure out how to go like how I'm going to have to think through this so I have a Reliance on a good debugger so

the reason I'm I'm sharing these with you is because forget AI the argument that we're hearing right now in this example is AI like we're becoming too dependent on AI which is a tool okay I would make the argument already forget AI that we're already too dependent on a lot of tools but at the same time like I'm not panicking about that we have tools that's why we have them that's why like that's why you have a compiler that's a tool you're going to tell me that you're going to go hand assemble your stuff and only real programmers will do that by hand because they don't use tools right like my point is that if we have the tools available I don't really have this fear of overreliance because my entire developer existence has been relying on tools the whole thing it's just the tools

are looking different now so that's one of the challenges that I want to put to you is to think about it that way doesn't mean I'm not telling you you have to agree with me by no means you can absolutely disagree with that stance right that's not my intention is to tell you you must think about things in a different like you have to adopt this perspective I'm just challenging you to try and look at it through that lens that's all and if you're like hey that was kind of neat I don't like it great cool like thank you for at least exploring that because I think it's really important that we at least try but that's the lens that I'm currently using when we talk about overreliance on AI at least in our development workflows okay so that's that's the first part um we

do still have time and I wanted to talk about learning because I think that this is a like I said I'm fascinated by this and I want to put another disclaimer in here I'm fascinated by this because I probably have the same perspective that many of you do on this but I'm desperately trying to challenge myself and think about it a different way because I'm super curious if it's going to unfold this way so give me just a moment because apparently my mouth is dry okay so and I have said this on video before and I'm I'm trying to adjust my stance to have a little bit more of an open mind when it comes to learning and using AI tools or learning in general right for software development you'll hear people saying learn learn fundamentals you need to learn fundamentals the language doesn't matter

the text act doesn't matter learn the fundamentals and it's a great way to have a sweeping statement that is supposed to have a lot of impact but then someone hears it who's very new to software development and they go great what the hell do you mean okay but I agree with the statement I think you learn fundamentals these are Concepts that you can abstract and then again regardless of the language of the text stack if you understand the fundamentals of what you're doing then you can go apply those different languages text stack scenario so conceptually absolutely makes sense to me now one of the challenges with AI is that when people are leveraging it okay so you have new new developers and they can go to chat gbt and say make me a something I need a program that does whatever or they are they

are de composing it they're saying I need a class or a function that can do whatever make that for me and they're getting the answers what's happening is people are saying well then these individuals aren't getting stuck they're not actually learning these things they're just learning how to ask AI for the answer therefore they're not going to be practicing the fundamentals therefore they will be worse programmers and roughly speaking I mean I'm kind of you know blanket statement putting words into everyone's mouths but roughly speaking this is kind of what I'm hearing and I think for the most part I have agreed with this because like How I Learned was you need to be building stuff you need to get stuck you need to be doing all this stuff and if you're just asking someone for the answers in this case AI hey AI give

me the answer what happening is that you're not spending the time getting stuck cuz you have someone you can just turn to I've literally made videos on a very comparable thing when I talk about interns and I say like here's how to ask good questions go get stuck on something try some things so come back and ask that's literally me telling you that to like from my perspective to be a better developer I think you need to get stuck and work through things so I'm just trying to give you another example right that's truly truly has been my stance because that is how I learned that's how I've seen other people learn effectively when you just are given answers it's really difficult for you to kind of uh what's the right way to phrase this like uh not interpret but like I don't know have

those Concepts like really register with you um because you didn't have to think through it you just got the answer so I think a lot of people are kind of taking this perspective that's why AI seems kind of scary for people now there's no um we it's kind of a tangent and I want to come back to the learning part what I'm not trying to do in this conversation here is say that people can't use AI to go build things like to put together whole products and services I've I I want to I want to interview him for my main channel uh but a friend of mine I've talked about him in these Vlogs before would tell you today he's not a programmer but was able to secure a contract building um building a platform for a company and used AI for the entire thing

for the entire thing and it works it's functional looks great and like he would tell you today I'm not a programmer but he had AI essentially build all of the pieces and he glued it together and it works and then he consulted with me to basically get feedback on like high level things right like he's moving in some direction I give him some feedback on that and then he could reprioritize he has done an absolutely amazing job and had zero programming skills before this and would tell you today he doesn't so I'm not saying that AI does not enable people to do that now if you heard what I just said and you're like yeah but I bet his code is like I don't know man it might be but he's working on it like it's currently working and he currently got a contract and

customers are currently happy so it's really hard to argue with the results of it now time will tell how scalable that is can he continue to build on it right we will see but I'm not like abandoning him as he takes that uh you know takes that Journey so he'll have guidance I'm not I'm not concerned for him so the argument is not that AI can't enable others to go build things it's not what we're saying we're talking about the ability to learn so would we say that this individual did he learn by going through this now that he's pieced together a bunch of stuff I would assume I would assume and this is why I want to interview him I assume he's learned a whole bunch but did he learn the fun fundamentals if I asked him like do you know why you're using

a dictionary here versus an array or do you know what algorithm that is that you're using to go Traverse that you have to go you're looking for the smallest element in this collection like did you do you understand what's happening here like why this is efficient or like do you know why it put this thing that's called you know underscore cash here like do you know why that's there I bet you some of these things yes and others no and he's like no I have no idea but it's working right I'm making assumptions here I don't know my point is I would assume that by going through this exercise he learned some things and other things that we might call fundamentals he absolutely did not learn or at least doesn't recognize that he's learned which is interesting because the thing that I want to challenge

us to think about and this is hard for me to say because like I don't I don't believe it but I'm curious okay so again I'm saying this so loud so that when you hear me say it you don't get you're going to be triggered by it because it triggers me but I want you to know like I am not even convinced of this yet but it's a thought experiment that I'm trying to get myself to to think through and that is do the fundamentals actually matter anymore and another way to say that is the fundamentals that we think about today that developers today have been saying you have to learn fundamentals you have to learn fundamentals do those fundamentals just change do they also evolve for the next wave of people that are building things perhaps primarily with AI again the tooling that they'll

be using is completely different than what many of us learned with so I'm very curious and again it's really difficult for me to say does someone actually have to care about some of those details or did we just move an entire level of abstraction away from that and they are truly no longer relevant to understand at the same level of detail that historically we would have said you really got to know that you really got to know that right like again hard hard for me to kind stop man you're too noisy hard for me to kind of get behind that this is just crazy the crappy part is I press the button and it's disabled until I stop again and then this the the parking sensor is back on to keep pressing it but the the point is that I truly wonder if given enough

time we will see and this is the hard part about this right like people have opinions about it we're not going to know we have no idea until we let some time go by and then we reflect on it which is why I'm trying to challenge you to think about this in different ways will we find that as we go forward people are learning how to build software differently and the tooling has become so Advanced they can do so without having to learn the same sets of fundamentals that historically we've learned and they're able to do a more effective job and again if your gut reaction is to to start poking holes at it I'm not disagreeing with you I'm not saying that is my stance I'm saying I'm curious about it because you might say well what happens when the AI puts together stuff

and it doesn't work and then they have to debug it yeah I mean like maybe you asked the AI to debug it for you or what happens when it's spaghetti code and you know it can't be worked on I'm like I don't know the AI has to work on it so like can the AI navigate the spaghetti code the code's not readable yeah does it have to be readable to you because as long as the AI can make sense of it doesn't matter like these are things that I'm I'm genuinely curious about because it feels so uncomfortable to think that they perhaps could rically change I don't like the idea of it right like it makes me uncomfortable but I'm trying to pay attention to this a lot because I spend a lot of time uh not not as much these days like in my

my professional career but like I spend a lot of time outside of work trying to help new software developers and I'm trying to keep an open mind this because as everything's changing around us when I go to help people like hey like what language should I learn how do I get started I want to make sure that if I need to adjust what I'm saying because times are changing that I don't become the person in 15 years that's like oh no like you have to you have to go learn about pointers and someone's like literally what the hell is a pointer and I'm like oh back in my day we had to manage our own memory and then we were blessed with the garbage collector inet and someone's like I literally don't know what you're talking about or care about uh care about what you're

saying like I just need to be able to stitch these things together because that's what software development looks like I want to make sure that I'm staying with it so this is why I'm telling you I'm trying to keep an open mind when I navigate this stuff uh so the overreliance part I think is interesting with respect to how we leverage tools because like I said I've already had an over Reliance my entire Development Career on different tools before Ai and when it comes to learning I'm I'm genuinely curious if that evolves I I can't see the obvious path to what I was saying and I and I don't know if that's because I don't want to see it or it's not yet presenting itself so um I think those are the thoughts I have on that but I I hope I don't know if

you were kind of sticking along through that with me I hope you found it an interesting exercise to like try and challenge yourself to think about things in a different way I'll repeat it because I don't want you to hate me too much um my goal is not to tell you like any of those things are truths right I don't know I have literally no idea but these are some of the things I'm thinking about because I want to try and keep an open mind as data starts to show uh and that way I'm not totally caught off guard so um this topic aside this is the kind of thing that I would recommend you try and do to take on different perspectives and think through them um from an engineering perspective I think that it can absolutely make you a stronger engineer the reason

I say that is because engineering is a lot about analysis okay and you might have a very strong opinion about something say for a design an architecture and you propose it and then you come up against someone else who has a very strong opinion and guess what it's different now what you fight to the death you Pokemon battle to see whose design gets taken um no you're going to have to have a conversation about it and I think what's really fascinating is that we can be in these situations and have differences of opinions and if we take the time to try and understand the other side you might not agree with them still you might say like I still think my Design's better but if you try to put yourself in their position think about what they're doing and try to extract pieces of why

they're doing things a certain way you might uncover gaps in what you're doing they might have said hey I structured it this way because it's going to address latency in these situations and you might go oh like yeah like that was a thing that we talked about that and like that's not addressed in my design but I wonder can I now compensate my design in an elegant way to address that so it's not about when we're trying to do this kind of thing it's not about who has the right perspective that's ultimately what I'm trying to say here it's not like one perspectives ultimately right another one's ultimately wrong there's bits of Truth scattered in all of these things and I think that it's uh like one of the really cool things about engineering is being able to do the analysis and kind of extract

those truths right we can have different opinions we can have different perspectives once we start having data how do we extract those truths and start building systems leveraging that so uh that's why I recommend doing these types of exercises you'll also find from a soft skills perspective because can't not talk about soft skills if you do this kind of thing more regularly you will find that you're having less confrontation with people and less friction um at least from your side they might not do the same thing but at least you're not going to be like oh man like here's Johnny again with his stupid designs like Johnny's always got dumb ideas no you might not agree with Johnny's ideas but if you go look at them and understand his perspective more you might be able to extract more value than just dismissing them so that's

what I got to say about that topic AI fun stuff I'll see you next time