I lost my ability to learn anything new because of AI and I need your opinions

For my personal projects, I use AI for discussion only. I treat it as a better Google and sometimes a fake psychiatrist. I don't really fully trust it, so I verify afterwards. If someone else wants to vibe code, I mean please do so as long as you enjoy the process. Personally I enjoy the coding process so I wouldn't want to copy/paste code, let alone letting it write directly in some editor.

For my work I use it extensively. I use Cursor as a senior engineer who breaks down problems and only writes the parts that interests me. I trust AI with other parts and do a review afterwards. AI prompting is a real skill. I don't like it but I don't like my work either.

I hear you here. I really do.

I don't know where you are in your career, me I am on the backend. But all the time I was working the constant churn of new tools/languages/frameworks and so on, the race to keep up with the vendors just wore me out. And despite all that, building software honestly never changed much.

I have been working with both Codex and Claude, and you are right, you can't trust them. My best practice I have found is constantly play one off against the other. Doing that I seem to get decent, albeit often frustrating results.

Yes, the actual building of the code is either over, or soon to be over. The part that I always considered the "art." I often found code to be beautiful, and enjoyed reading, and writing, elegant code all the time I was working with it.

But the point of code is to produce a result. And it's the result that people pay for. As you mentioned with the evolution of development in your original post, the process and tools might have changed, but the craftsmanship in operation with those using them did not.

You make a fair point that this abstraction is different — prior layers were engineered and traceable, and an LLM output isn't. But I'd argue that makes the human in the loop more important, not less. When the abstraction was deterministic, you could eventually lean on it fully. When it isn't, you can never fully step away. That actually protects the craft.

Until AI becomes a "first mover" god forbid, where there is no human in the chain from inception to product, there will always be a person like you who knows where the traps are, knows what to look out for, and knows how to break a problem down to figure out how to solve it. After all, as I have always said, that is all programming really is, the rest is just syntax.

> Is it only me, or does it feel like there are half-baked features everywhere now?

This is the argument for actually learning, so you don’t ship half-baked code, because the AI isn’t good enough. The people who are telling you it is likely have a financial interest in pushing the narrative that AI will do it all.

> LLMs, on the other hand, are non-deterministic. Therefore, we cannot treat their outputs as just another layer of abstraction.

This is another problem. A lot of code is written so exactly the same thing happens every time. If AI is going in and changing the logic in subtle ways that aren’t noticed right away when updates are made, because no one understands the code anymore-that’s a problem. In hobby or toy apps, no one cares, but in production code and critical systems, it matters.

Ive lost my ability to do basic and advanced arithmetic calculations or algebraic calculations in school.

That didn’t stop me from getting a phd.

If you think it’s all there’s to programming that llm spits out, then the problem is in you somewhere, not in llms.

Claude is a VM. Programming languages are dead https://jperla.com/blog/claude-is-a-jit

It's like a gym that has automated weights, and just going there to watch them being moved - our mental muscles aren't trained anymore.

Block the dns on router for two weeks and you will feel alive again