AI Is Making You An Illiterate Programmer

i don't need an LLM to make me illiterate, i can do that myself

I had to use AI to tell me that I was illiterate because I didn't know what illiterate was. - This message is powered by YourMom'sAIGPT

I use LLMs as rubber ducks on steroids. Just challenging my ideas with them often helps a lot. Sometimes I don't even send my text, because I see the solution while explaining my problem. But sometimes, the LLMs actually give me ideas I haven't thought of before. It's only when you just copy and paste the LLMs solutions that you harm your own intellect and creativity.

I WROTE THIS! Thanks for covering this Primeagen ❤ you'll be seeing more of me!

A few weeks back I was helping a junior dev reason about a small bug coming from a simple JavaScript expression. It was an expression in an if-statement that was checking the value in a deeply nested object. But there was no protection against if any of the properties in the nested object were nullish so we were seeing the typical "Cannot read properties of undefined..." error. I literality sat there next to him, telling him simply to use optional chaining, talking to the side of his face while he was asking ChatGPT 4o mini on his first monitor, and Phind (or whatever that other one is called) on his second monitor for how to solve this simple problem. These free LLMs were suggesting some bloated code that didn't even fix the problem because he didn't prompt correctly. It was wild. It took us like 10 minutes for him to finally just listen to and understand what I was saying. It's a crazy time to be a junior dev.

I love the idea of “emotional resilience”. Encountering a problem that feels entirely overwhelming at first is so crushing, but figuring it out makes you feel like you have divine intellect.

1:05 Dude just described how SaaS has worked for the last 10 years lmao

10:33 you sound ike saul goodman here

I’ve actually had the opposite effect. Ai pisses me off when it does the work for me because when it gets it wrong I don’t know how to fix it. So instead, I use it to ask “what does this mean” “how would I implement that”, “what is xyz protocol” etc. then I look over it and when it makes sense I use that code. If anything the fact that I can answer my question extremely fast reduces the amount of times I get pissed off that I couldn’t find the extra comma. I will also say as a visual learner I weed out bad ideas by being able to visualize and have a conversation about my thoughts. It’s like the rubber ducky effect but with someone that has some sort of awareness and logic.

The satisfaction when AI fixes your code after 10 different prompts feels so good !