How much of the thinking is involved in asking the right question, versus coming to the correct answer? I don't have a real answer to that but it does seem to be worth considering.

I think I am, but I wouldn't really call it offloading thinking. I would call it trying to offload thinking

as a six-figure salary software engineer haver I find that a lot of colleagues take their cushy jobs for granted.

these are the people who are now first against the wall when the revolution comes.

why would I want to hire you to work the three hours you feel like working per day (per week?) when I can have AI with a deeper knowledge set available 24x7?

Yes, I think we are . And because of super competition, most of us are trying to make AI (agentic) do the work.

the Ken Liu story linked in the article is actually spot on. would recommend giving that a quick read

Yes.

It makes me sad, high-level thinking is the one thing that makes humans unique. That we're willing to let that atrophy while giving our power to mega corporations for the sake of convenience is a sad state of affairs. Like, Altman's idea that intelligence will be a "metered utility" should make people terrified! That's a dystopian future. "I can't climb out of poverty because I don't have money to pay the thinking machine"

I do think there's a potential irony in this though. The people screaming loudest about how if you're not using AI you're going to get "left behind"... are probably going to get left behind. Actual skills developed by real learning, I think, are going to become more rare and valuable, not less.

Personally, I'm hoping my side project turns into a business at some point. I can tell you there's a 0% chance I'd hire a vibe coder to work on it. I just don't need that skillset. I would hire professional fiction writers (it's a tool for them), people with technical expertise I lack, etc. The one skillset I do not care about is AI usage expertise, because it's just not valuable.

Ironically I just caught myself offloading the thinking about this article to the comment section before I read it

You are.

I am still doing as much as I can get away with it by myself. I was used to write tons of code before AI, so I can still pretend I am an eager adopter while still minimizing using it as much as I can.

Do you even get "answers" though?

It's hard to explain, but AI mostly doesn't get the nuance of my thinking right. I'll read a response and right away know it's a non-answer for my purposes. If I get a "hit" then it's often by luck. And so, I use it mostly for anything other than direct answers, such as research, etc. Beyond that, it's not much different than old school Google result. So, no, I don't offload my thinking.

NO SHIIIIIIT SHERLOOOCKKKK