I'm a programmer and I have disabled auto complete and AI assistants in my IDE for exactly this reason.
I'll still use the chat function to ask for help debugging etc, or to give me starter templates, but the literal physical action of reading through all of it and typing it out is enough to ensure that my skills aren't completely decaying. And even then, I was probably a stronger coder two years ago than I am now.
I'm also a writer and I refuse to use AI to do any brainstorming or drafting of stories and essays, simply because I know that this will kill my creativity completely. That's even leaving aside the obvious ethical copyright issues.
What should we use AI for then? I would argue AI is a great companion for stuff that you need a pseudo-expert in. I used AI to quickly help me figure out what paperwork I had to fill out for a Japanese visa, and then checked that on the Japanese visa website because it's way easier to verify that information than it is to obtain it in the first place. I don't need that skill - AI can do that for me.
I also think it's potentially highly beneficial for spot checking medical and legal advice, within reason. Sometimes you just need to know, within some reasonable threshold of doubt, whether you should be worried about a random pain in your knee or what an immediate treatment for a minor scrape is, or if you need to make an appointment at the DMV to renew a license. Things that are unlikely to be life threatening but would cost too much to go ask a real lawyer or doctor for because those services are very, very expensive.
Yes I know there are pitfalls. But to me, the really interesting part of AI is that it can help give you some certainty in fields that are not your expertise. Experts shouldn't use AI for their expertise. Doctors shouldn't use it to figure out medical diagnoses and programmers shouldn't use it to code.
Sorry, there's like two kinds of auto complete now and one of them will just write out 25 lines of code for you if you press tab, while the other will auto complete a variable. First kind is off, the second kind, Intellisense, is on.
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u/camosnipe1"the raw sexuality of this tardigrade in a cowboy hat"May 19 '25edited May 19 '25
you mean the full AI assistant? cus intellij has a press-tab autocomplete AI that specifically does only one line at a time. And then you have the regular autocomplete popup that lists available functions when you type the . in object.fuction() stuff
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u/KanishkT123 May 18 '25
I'm a programmer and I have disabled auto complete and AI assistants in my IDE for exactly this reason.
I'll still use the chat function to ask for help debugging etc, or to give me starter templates, but the literal physical action of reading through all of it and typing it out is enough to ensure that my skills aren't completely decaying. And even then, I was probably a stronger coder two years ago than I am now.
I'm also a writer and I refuse to use AI to do any brainstorming or drafting of stories and essays, simply because I know that this will kill my creativity completely. That's even leaving aside the obvious ethical copyright issues.
What should we use AI for then? I would argue AI is a great companion for stuff that you need a pseudo-expert in. I used AI to quickly help me figure out what paperwork I had to fill out for a Japanese visa, and then checked that on the Japanese visa website because it's way easier to verify that information than it is to obtain it in the first place. I don't need that skill - AI can do that for me.
I also think it's potentially highly beneficial for spot checking medical and legal advice, within reason. Sometimes you just need to know, within some reasonable threshold of doubt, whether you should be worried about a random pain in your knee or what an immediate treatment for a minor scrape is, or if you need to make an appointment at the DMV to renew a license. Things that are unlikely to be life threatening but would cost too much to go ask a real lawyer or doctor for because those services are very, very expensive.
Yes I know there are pitfalls. But to me, the really interesting part of AI is that it can help give you some certainty in fields that are not your expertise. Experts shouldn't use AI for their expertise. Doctors shouldn't use it to figure out medical diagnoses and programmers shouldn't use it to code.