AI is making me dumb and lazy
Disclaimer: this essay is NOT about simple landing pages or one-of web apps. I’m talking about production systems that are meant to be maintained
I wasted couple hours trying to make cursor agent configure monorepo with Bazel. Finally Claude Code managed to get it working, but I learned nothing in the process - lazy.
Subconsciously I chose to use AI to solve my problem as a path of least resistance. I knew I it’s a stopgap solution, that I would need to learn it anyway, but chose otherwise - dumb.
When AI makes me more efficient?
I get most of AI when I know how correct solution should look like. I might only have high level idea of the desired outcome, that’s enough.
Sometimes LLMs cover more edge cases, sometimes I need to prompt to make sure to cover something. The key point is that don’t have to spend time figuring out everything from scratch and I’m the one driving the implementation.
This obviously requires expertise, knowledge, experience - everything that “vibe coders” try to circumvent.
When AI makes me waste time?
Illusion that AI can do all the work for me. This is a common pitfall and I blame techfluencers and the hype train they created - “X just killed Y”, “Z is taking your job”… I’m sure you saw plenty of those.
Even if in some cases AI actually can do all the work for you, at some point you will have to understand how things work. At some point things will bug out, something will break and you will have to go in and figure it out (vibe debugging my ass).
That’s the bottleneck - me and my understanding. There is no going around this. Sure, asking AI to explain helps and I use it a lot, but in the end I have to do the work.
Moving forward
Effective use of AI tools is a skill to learn and I don’t think we developed usage pattterns to fully take advantage of it. To be honest I don’t think there is one-size-fit-all approach. We all have different background knowledge, experience and skills.
It is crucial to set the expectations right. Having AI producing code for you does not mean you can afford not knowing how things work. It’s a debt that you will have to pay.