As a developer I’m slowly ramping up my use of AI for development. At this point my concern is mostly that AI is making me lazy.
Discussion
It is making you lazy, that's no joke. Asking someone else to do everything or tell you exactly how to do it without putting in the practice, does not benefit neuroplasticity
I guess that works different on everyone. I let the ai do the hard work, but still check the code it generates and learn from it. Definitely I am way more efficient and effective using ai, and also more knowledgeable.
If you already have some knowledge prior to AI, theres a bias to account for.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
And no im just just wasting bandwidth. There is correlations to suggest it has a negative impact on the ability to think.
That's arguable. I still can make complicated arithmetics on a piece of paper but I'd rather use a calculator or an excel sheet and derive the spare energy to reach further.
I learned to fly following a vor beacon but I'd rather use the gps navigator and dedicate the spare time to better attend coms.
I keep my brain busy, it is just focused on higher level tasks that improve the overall experience.
AI is a tool, a very powerful one.
How to make use of it depends solely on you.
Again that's the bias, you have the previous knowledge. It can rust, but its doesn't as much to maintain it.
The same can't be said for someone who is still learning or doesn't have that knowledge ingrained yet.
Ok, we can partially agree on that. Taking shortcuts is not a good way to learn anything. That's the only downside if it.
But just consider that most of those people who are now able to code, or do anything else, relying on AI, would have not even dare to approach those matters without it. They just get a job done that previously they could not. They were not interested in learning about that before, so they are not missing thinking abilities, and conversely they are acquiring new skills.
When I use AI for coding. I might ask for implementations or snippet examples, but i end up writing my own.
perhaps not lazy, more efficient with your time?
Here’s an example of what I mean. Call it what you want. The feeling I experienced is laziness.
I’ll run into an error or bug when testing app. I don’t want to read the logs or error message because I know the AI agent can for me. I just want to copy and paste the entire log with a description of the issue to the AI agent to tell me what is wrong and how to fix instead of just reading the log, identifying the specific relevant error messages and troubleshooting with AI in a more targeted (less tokens) route.
So it's just saved you a bunch of time that you can use to do different things? Whether it's made you lazy or not depend on if you're using that extra time productively or not.
I have the same concern 🫂