Telling codex how to program a feature is a much different, much easier type of thinking than back in the olden days of a year ago, when I had to get everything to work myself. I can't imagine that's going to be great for my long-term brain health.
This only holds when you keep the task fixed and compare with and without AI. But because AI changed expectations the difficulty of work we supervise today is much higher. My theory is that AI runs our brains just as hard as no-AI, maybe harder. That is if you want to have high quality outputs, not for slop.
Certainly, AI is allow us to 10x our code, but also 10x our mental work. Steve Yegge calls this the AI Vampire[0] and it does effect us, more so than TV or old school social media ever did.
My father went through a stroke a few years ago, and is now always online. He blames the stroke for his brain fog, but I still feel that the modern day dopamine addiction is a huge factor.
It is possible if you consider madaxe_again's theory(comment here). If the debris just started descending without interruption, there would be no receding.
I clicked an ad for a quote on a shower door, followed the prompts, and gave my # to what seemed like a single company. The phone calls haven't stopped since.
At a few companies I've worked at, they squelch this kind of bug/security breach reporting by immediately making it the discoverer's job to fix the problem and champion it through the system to production, taking on all responsibility if something breaks of course. You only have to go through that once to get the message.
This is standard because after a year of experience, a fresh junior dev is worth roughly twice as much on the open market. Most companies won't give a 100% raise because it would upset the apple cart with other employees wanting similar raises. So the junior dev has to move on to get paid what they're worth.
> This is standard because after a year of experience, a fresh junior dev is worth roughly twice as much on the open market.
My internal Brandolini's Law alarm is ringing loud and clear on this one. Absolutely not. This is only true for the best junior devs in the most competitive markets. From my professional experience, it is very difficult to keep star junior devs. The "gravity" pulling them away is simply too strong.
The problem with CSS is it's a) all broad and no depth and b) constantly adding major new paradigms. If you don't get up to speed and stay there, you lose it.
Pre-AI I'd say I've gotten over the hump 3 times with CSS, only to lose it again by the next time I had to use it in volume.
> it enables the already productive to be proportionally more productive
I finally got a real feature to develop and started using Codex a couple weeks ago. Before that, I was just using ChatGPT for small things. For the most part, I was doing a lot of monkey-patching and deep troubleshooting that I didn't think Codex would be good at.
I was wrong. I had no idea how smart these tools are.
I now realize, as the tech lead on a large project with me, 2 front-end developers, a full-stack-ish developer, a tester, two product people, and a PM - that I could do this entire project more efficiently with just me and the tester.
I'm doing SQL for the first time in 20 years, which would have slowed me down in the past, but not now. It used to take me an hour to program a new feature and two hours to get it to look right, if I had to do the CSS myself. Now I can do that w/o anyone's help. Writing tests used to take as long as writing the code. Maybe it still does, but that's an hour instead of a day. And it's so much less painful. There's no satisfaction of the aha moment when writing tests. It's just a slog.
We're a very small shop that usually only has 1-2 devs on a project. So we're not set up to do big projects, we aren't doing agile, and it's just a mess. We waste probably 80% of our effort just communicating.
The product team was needed/useful in the beginning to define the broad scope of the project and lay down the UI/UX patterns. But now it's like pulling teeth to get them interested in our internal client's ever-evolving wishlist. I can handle that, and always come to the product team with very specific asks when I need UI design help. Just give me the tester, who's so thorough it's annoying, to catch the weird edge cases I hadn't thought of.
I'm not saying I'm God's gift at any of these things, just that I'm reasonably competent at them. It's kind of terrifying what a seasoned full-stack dev with a decent feel for UX and the ability to manage stakeholders can do with this.
Your comment resonates with me due to the cognitive dissonance of seeing the benefits and issues with AI as far as development work. I have been struggling to identify a process improvement that AI can improve not only the development aspect by the overall productivity of our company. We are a dev shop mostly C++ and python. At our company I see the development workflow and it is very inefficient. The biggest issue is communication. AI can certainty increase the coding output and velocity, but the rest of the process relies on humans.
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