"I have to do the typing myself because you learn with your fingers"
Absolutely.
Discussion
I do agree with the take that agentic AIs make you dumb, and don't solve a lot, I like the "pair programmer" anology as well.
Always had massive respect for DHH, still do. He said many things in this interview that I wholeheartedly agree with.
Although, doesn't everyone start off just reading the code, and then eventually editing it, by hand, and then eventually writing it, themselves? That's the progression I find myself in, with Typescript. That's a new language for me.
But maybe you only fall into that progression, if you've already spent years manually typing in code in other languages. 🤔
And a lot of manual coding has always been copy-paste from StackOverflow or other people's repos, and then making it fit into your code base. 🤷🏻♀️
Learning a new language and working with something you already know have different paths. AI are great to learn, but you need to take control of the code ASAP.
But Agentic AIs are built up to completely manage your work, and since you lose over time what you don't train, you actually become a little more dumb, as DHH says.
Ah, okay. I guess I haven't been doing the agentic version. I type in commands like, "Fix this merge conflict." or "refactor this function into this function, that function, and this service" or stuff like that.
I'm probably not doing that right, since I micromanage the AI and review every step and constantly intervene. What I've seen so far hasn't made me inclined to let it take over the codebase, unsupervised, tho.
The code it writes keeps improving, but it's increasingly opinionated and breaking my data security measures and then lying about it and stuff. If keeps getting smarter, but also more naughty, and I have to audit more and more carefully.
it makes you dumb in a specific way: you don't have the mental model of the program, so when you want to go somewhere to change it you are completely lost. it's like taking over a codebase designed by someone else.
Ah, interesting. Yeah, sort of the way you can't keep track of where you are in an e-book, the way you can with a physical book, as you're missing the spacial orientation.
True. But as DHH reported, it also weaks your memory and your specific ability to manage simple primitives.
Everyone has already experienced this with GPS navigation systems and the associated loss of spatial orientation; this time the interested area is quite larger.