alt Hacker NewsThis behavior is not very surprising to me, and I think the conclusion is a bit off. Here is an analogous study:
Participants are asked to drive 20 nails into a plank of wood. Group A is given a hammer and an unripe banana. Group B is given only a banana. Halfway through the experiment, the hammers are taken away.
Hammers erode your ability to persist at hard things…
My point being that AI is a new tool that allows us to work on harder things at a higher level. It’s like having a team of 100 skilled workers with nail guns (and all manner of other tools) that never tire, and you get to direct them. Once you experience that, it’s a bit disheartening to go back to building alone with your bare hands… even if you lament the decline in your hand-eye coordination.
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for those that have spent 20 years of their career, perfecting the art of coding / writing / research / all forms of knowledge work, it sure is depressing to see the career moats we tried to shore up just diminish practically overnight. The ability to operate at a higher level of abstraction is real, but so is the sudden devaluation of skills that previously required years to acquire.
You hit it right on the nail! You do lose hand-eye coordination, but I’d argue you’d get an even better skill, the ability to orchestrate.
Before AI, when building anything, you’d have to have a lot of context from different parts of the app. And then work with that knowledge to build the feature out in those places. Keeping that context in your head was tough and coming back the next day required you to “fill your internal RAM” with the context and then start.
Now we can use our “internal RAM” thinking about the bigger picture and bigger projects. We’ve just gone an abstraction layer deeper.