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.

This is one of those happy little lies we tell ourselves, you know, like Agile is to help us collaborate better. No, your company adopted Agile so that upper management has near-real-time feedback in how teams are doing, who are the top performers and who are the stragglers.

When it comes to AI, the entire value proposition is that it is a substitute for human thought. Your thought is now no longer as valuable, and it is also no longer the bottleneck. That's the reality.

"Oh it's just here to remove the drudgery and let us focus on what's really important." When it comes to many forms of knowledge work, including programming, the "drudgery" is the important bit. Doing the long, slow work of integrating systems is how you gain intimate knowledge of the shapes of those systems. "Oh, you just have to think at a higher level of abstraction now." Since "higher levels of abstraction" are all about removing details, in the end this means less information to be manipulated, hence less thinking that you are responsible for.

Make no mistake, we programmers are coal miners, and the world is going solar punk. Have a nice day.

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