alt Hacker NewsHN hug of death strikes again.
I still do LeetCode problems occasionally. It feels weird to write code and work through complex logic manually again, but I think it's more crucial than ever these days. It's like physical exercise. If you don't use your brain and keep challenging yourself, your problem-solving skills will eventually atrophy.
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I feel like you should do the opposite? Use your brain for real life coding exercises while working. The kind of problems you solve with LeetCode are so disconnected from real life complex systems
People exercise for sport because we've automated away much of manual labour, so if you don't exercise, you look and feel like a string bean or a watermelon.
The AI age is trying to automate away our thinking, which runs the risk of making our brains look and feel like the same way as our bodies if we don't actively try to work them.
In the case of exercise, the majority of people don't pursue it in a somewhat post-labour era. I'm certain we'll see even less mental exercise in a post-thinking era. And it's deeply unsettling to think about how that will play out if we don't wake up and put a bit more mandatory/intentional thinking into the way we live with AI.
You use your brain for things like problem solving literally everywhere and there are myriad of possible high intensity brain exercises from video games to meeting new people.
The only thing that will 100% atrophy when not coding is coding skill.
panic about “ai brain fry” is overblown
I mean judging by a lot of comments I read here where people conclude AI code is perfect and there are no downsides and we should never write a single line of code again and it's all over. I think people's brains have atrophied already.
Anyway, I'm still writing the vast majority of code by hand and only getting AI to check my work at the end as an extra reviewer. I still am happily employed and sure am a lot happier with my job than the slop goobers posting here.
When I read things like this I have a mixed feeling of not knowing wether I’m sad cause I’d like to have time to do leetcode too, or wether I’m simply too anxious to let the productivity improvement spiral go and chill a bit.