I am a software developer and I love what I do. I only recently started in the beginning of 2024 to learn programming at a local tech school and I spent the entire year staying away from AI because I wanted to be good at coding and I had a feeling that using too much AI would greatly hinder me.
Fast forward, and I am now 8 months into being a full time developer. I love working as a developer and I am so grateful that I get to spend 8 hours a day getting better at my skill set and doing something I find genuinely fulfilling.
A couple months ago, our company policy changed around AI when the higher ups decided that it was time to buy everyone a Cursor subscription. I was pretty excited at first, I didn’t have to pay for the pro plan, and I was being encouraged to use it at work. As soon as we all got Cursor on our computers, I started using it a lot and testing out what it was capable of doing in our companies code base.
For the first while, I was enjoying it a lot, it was getting a ton of work done and I was moving much faster. I was getting better at prompting and the models slowly got better every couple of weeks.
But then I started to have some embarrassing moments when I trusted the AI too much, failing to do a thorough enough review over the AI’s code, submitting my (the AI’s) code to be reviewed by a senior, and quickly being asked why I made certain decisions that honestly, were very bad decisions. I always laughed and said “Dang I gotta stop trusting Cursor so much! 😅” and played it off. I tried to balance coding on my own and having an AI agent speed me up/hitting tab a bunch to get the code that I was going to obviously write.
Eventually I started to physically and mentally notice that I was getting dumber, lazier, losing my skillset as a developer, and not being as passionate about my work. Which is scary as a junior, I only have so much experience so far.
I decided it was time to take a break from Cursor, so I went back to my previous editor, Neovim. Immediately, the passion and fun of coding came back. It was fun again! On top of that, I noticed all the things that I had forgotten how to do, being so used to just auto completing things. I know its not a huge deal to forget some syntax, but I love the idea of being able to write code from scratch, without constantly reminding yourself what to write. During the first day of my Cursor break, I literally forgot the word range when writing out a for loop in Golang. Like come on.
Crazy enough, around the same day that I did this Cursor break, there were a few articles that popped up on Hacker News that really pushed my opinion of AI further negative.
Will AI Replace Human Thinking? The Case for Writing and Coding Manually
I linked them above to give credit but also because I think they are very much worth a read. Seriously, go read them.
The last article on that list led me to this article, Writes and Write-Nots by Paul Graham. This article was the tipping point for me. Here is the main section that got me.
…nearly everyone who was expected to write had to learn how.
Not anymore. AI has blown this world open. Almost all pressure to write has dissipated. You can have AI do it for you, both in school and at work.
The result will be a world divided into writes and write-nots. There will still be some people who can write. Some of us like it. But the middle ground between those who are good at writing and those who can’t write at all will disappear. Instead of good writers, ok writers, and people who can’t write, there will just be good writers and people who can’t write.
Is that so bad? Isn’t it common for skills to disappear when technology makes them obsolete? There aren’t many blacksmiths left, and it doesn’t seem to be a problem.
Yes, it’s bad. The reason is something I mentioned earlier: writing is thinking. In fact there’s a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing. You can’t make this point better than Leslie Lamport did:
If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.
So a world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots. I know which half I want to be in, and I bet you do too.
I read that and was screaming inside, “I DON’T WANT TO BE A THINK-NOT!”
After those articles, I had a real distain for using AI for anything other than a nice way to google something and get a nice explanation for an answer to a question. Don’t get me wrong, AI has its uses, but I knew then that I didn’t want to become dependent on it.
For the next while after this realization, I kept wondering what was more important for the longevity of my career and passions, either 1. Get good at using AI so you don’t “ get left behind ”, or 2. Learn how to really code and really write and really think, so that you are one of the few that still can. As you can see, I have started a blog, so I picked the latter.
Last note on this anti AI journey.
During all this, I was listening to the 6 hour long Lex Fridman Podcast with DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson) where DHH talked about programming, the joy of it, how he built Ruby on Rails, how he was blogging and building companies back in the early 2000s. All of this new direction led me down a path of getting very nostalgic about the early internet days. I wanted those days back. I wanted to read real physical books instead of an audiobook or an AI summary. I wanted to write on a blog even if it meant that I would be skipping out on the algorithms and dopamine farming of X and TikTok. I stopped worrying so much about “ vibe coding a $10M startup” (which is a scam btw)
All of this has been very refreshing. Who knows, maybe I will get left behind by AI but I think I will be happier for it.