[travisgriggs]

You had me at "AI is an impediment to learning..."

I use GPT all the time. But I do very little learning from it. GPT is like having an autistic 4 year old with with vast memory as your sidekick. It can be like having a super power when asked the right questions. But it lacks experience. What GPT does is allow you to get from some point As to other point Bs faster. I work in quite a few languages. I like that when I haven't done Python for a few days, I can ask "what is the idiomatic way to flatten nested collections in Python again?". I like that I can use it to help me prototype a quick idea. But I never really trust it. And I don't ship that code til I've ever learned more to vouch for it myself or can ask a real expert about what I've done.

But for young programmers, who feel the pressure to produce faster than they can otherwise, GPT is a drug. It optimizes getting results fast. And since there is very little accountability in software development, who cares? It's a short term gain of productivity over a long term gain of learning.

I view the rise of GPT as an indictment against how shitty the web has become, how sad the state of documentation is, and what a massive sprint of layering crappy complicated software on top of crappy complicated software has wrought. Old timers mutter "it was not always so." Software efforts used to have trained technical writers to write documentation. Less is more, used to be an effort by good engineering. AI tools will not close the gap in having well written concise documentation. It will not simplify software so that the mental model to understand it is more approachable. But it does give us a hazy approximation of what the current internet content has to offer.

(I mean no offense to those who have autism in my comment above, I have a nephew with severe autism, I love him dearly, but we do adjust how we interact with him)