I have seen a trend lately in software engineers with self-reported critical-thinking muscle atrophy.
I noticed this in myself a few months ago after I had been asked by my manager to try and incorporate AI into my development workflow. At first I was skeptical of the code that was being produced. I would meticulously read all of it, checking for bugs or inefficiencies (spoiler: there were lots). Eventually though, my laziness kicked in and I started being a little less meticulous with reviewing the things it would spit out. It turned into a game of copy pasting code and errors back and forth until something worked. I wouldn’t even stop to think about a problem before I asked Claude to fix it for me. As soon as I saw an error message I copied it straight back into the chat window and waited for a response. It was less an inability to solve the problems and more a manifestation of the brain’s natural tendency to take shortcuts where possible. My brain had started short circuiting whenever I ran into anything relatively unknown or uncomfortable. It would just immediately pull the escape cord and watch Claude solve the problem.
I genuinely enjoy writing code and crafting software, so when I noticed that I had stopped putting any effort into either of those things I decided to stop using AI to generate code for me. I was sick of mindlessly moving through my day without having to critically think, I had inadvertently robbed myself of the part of my job that I actually enjoy. And the problem was, the AI was doing a worse job than I would have! I was outsourcing my thought to a silly little program that just wants to predict the next token, and all I had to show for it was loss of motivation and lower quality code that I would usually have to come back and fix later anyway.
If I have learned anything from this experience, it would be this: don’t outsource your thoughts. Life isn’t about letting a machine do all of the thinking for you just so you can be left to scroll X (Twitter) all day. The thinking is the part of the work that makes it worth it. Learning new things and honing your skills is what adds meaning to a job. Be present, be human, struggle through the problems that you face. Don’t let your brain take the easy way out. The problem solving skills you learn by actually doing the thing will be all the more useful to you if we really do end up in a world where AI does most of our jobs.
I will caveat this post by saying that I still use AI in my development workflow. I have found that it is much more effective as a faster reference for things like syntax, docs, etc. I do not let it generate whole blocks of code for me anymore though.