[tjr]

People often compare working with AI agents to being something like a project manager.

I've been a project manager for years. I still work on some code myself, but most of it is done by the rest of the team.

On one hand, I have more bandwidth to think about how the overall application is serving the users, how the various pieces of the application fit together, overall consistency, etc. I think this is a useful role.

On the other hand, I definitely have felt mental atrophy from not working in the code. I still think; I still do things and write things and make decisions. But I feel mentally out of shape; I lack a certain sharpness that I perceived when I was more directly in tune with the code.

And I'm talking, all orthogonal to AI. This is just me as a project manager with other humans on the project.

I think there is truth to, well, operate at a higher level! Be more systems-minded, architecture-minded, etc. I think that's true. And there are surely interesting new problems to solve if we can work not on the level of writing programs, but wielding tools that write programs for us.

But I think there's also truth to the risk of losing something by giving up coding. Whether if that which might be lost is important to you or not, is your own decision, but I think the risk is real.

[majormajor]

It's very difficult to operate effectively at a higher level for a continued period of time without periodically getting back into the lower levels to try new things and learn new approaches or tools.

That doesn't even have to be writing a ton of code, but reading the code, getting intimately familiar with the metrics, querying the logs, etc.

[sathish316]

I do think there’s a real risk of Brain Atrophy when you rely on AI coding tools for everything and while learning something new. About a year ago, I dealt with this problem by using Neovim and having shortcuts like below to easily toggle GitHub Copilot on/off. Now that AI is baked into almost every part of the toolchain in VSCode, Cursor, ClaudeCode, Intellij, I don't know how the newer engineers will learn without AI assistance.

[IhateAI]

I think in-line autocomplete is likely not that dangerous, if it's used in this manner responsibly, it's the large agentic tools that are problematic for your brain imo. But in-line autocompletes aren't going to raise billions of dollars and aren't flashy.

[xpct]

I'd say autocomplete introduces a certain level of fuzziness into the code we work with, though to a lower degree. I used autocomplete for over a year, and initially it did feel like a productivity boost, yet when I later stopped using them, it never felt like my productivity decreased. I stopped because something about losing explicit intent of my code feels uncomfortable to me.

[IhateAI]

I definitely think what you're losing is extremely important, and can't be compensated with LLMs once its gone.

Back when automatic piano players came out, if all the world's best piano players stopped playing and mostly just composing/writing music instead, would the quality of the music have increased or decreased. I think the latter.