Posted by koshyjohn 15 hours ago
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.
This is… not how humans work? If you have the time and energy to learn ten things, and then spend time babysitting a random number generator to produce evidence of 10 more units of work, you’re paying an opportunity cost compared to someone who spends the time learning an eleventh thing. You can argue who has more short term value to a company… but who is the wiser person after a thirty year career?
Beyond that, if that's all you do, you are basically proving you're replaceable. If you're smart, you'll reallocate intellectual capacity that was freed up by A.I. onto something A.I. can't do today.
Managers simply cannot know all of the details of what their reports write. They have to build abstractions.
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.
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.
"Coding in the Red-Queen Era" https://corecursive.com/red-queen-coding/
shows both groups using AI differently. Hard to continue reading the article that excludes your group entirely.