Competency Debt
by Gordon Weakliem
Joe Reis posted on what he calls “competency debt”, essentially that the use of AI makes our brains lazy.
the only vaccine against the brain-rot zombie plague is a return to the fundamentals. Write the memo yourself. Read a book. Manually debug the code once in a while. If you stop using your brain, you shouldn’t be surprised when it stops working.
He’s not wrong, but my gut-level response is that communications and planning skills are essential to successfully using AI. I use the mental model of “digital assistant” or “force multiplier” with AI. An LLM won’t make a bad idea good, it might help you to refine your thinking or help you brainstorm. When you’re using an LLM, you’re more in the mode of a PM/PO/EM. These people don’t necessarily have engineering skills and may not be able to understand the code the engineers write, but they ideally design and guide the building of software. Doing that job well requires clarity of thought and purpose.
Five years ago, we had joke O’Reilly covers like “Copy Pasting Answers From Stack Overflow”, and I don’t care to think about how much complex code I’ve seen that had no tests or documentation. Joel Spolsky wrote in 2008 when he was introducing Stack Overflow
Programmers seem to have stopped reading books. The market for books on programming topics is miniscule compared to the number of working programmers.
Instead, they happily program away, using trial-and-error. When they can’t figure something out, they type a question into Google….
And you won’t even get an expert answer. You’ll get a bunch of responses typed by other programmers like you. Some of the responses will be wrong, some will be right, some may be out of date, and it’s hard to imagine that with the cooperative spirit of the internet this is the best thing we programmers have come up with.
You know what that sounds like? These days we’d call it a hallucination.