[grenoire]

There's a distinction between the short-term economic incentives of using AI (work gets done quicker, more code gets written, output is created faster) versus the long-term personal incentives of not using AI early on. I believe mathematics and various natural sciences benefit from having a complete understanding of the tools, their inner workings, and their potential use-cases within your head. I think programming is similar too. If you are already a skilled programmer who is able to construct complex-and-reliable (engineering incentives) systems with great accuracy and reliability, then AI will add speed to your conquests. However, if you are a beginner who is not clear on what fits where, and how a canoe is built before a cargo ship, then AI will hinder the quality of your work, and eventually put you out of a job because you're just a mere puppet to the tool.

[cproctor]

This is an insightful comment. I have been thinking about why I prefer CLI-based tools over GUI tools; one important difference is that with CLI the affordances are more in my head than in the tool (though the distinction is fuzzy). I just got a typewriter for my birthday, and have been reflecting on how different writing feels. When I write on my laptop, I process language less in my head and more on the screen--I type scattered fragments and then clean them up into sentences and paragraphs. Writing with the typewriter is slower and much harder to edit, so I need to do more composition in my head. I lose some of the affordances of the external medium (including whatever AI might contribute), but necessarily devote more attention to interrogating and composing the ideas.