This is post is not meant to be an anti-AI post but a story of how overelying on AI has had some side effects on me.
When I learned about AI
Ever since I started getting into the computer programming world, I learned about AI, back then we referred to it more commonly by ML (Machine Learning), that was back in late 2010’s shortly before the public release of ChatGPT in late 2022.
The following video by Tom Scott was interesting to watch although back then I still had no idea how big of a deal it would turn out to be.
Watching this along with other cool projects like LaMDA, that was the first time I learned about something similar to ChatGPT, when a Google Engineer conducted an interview with LaMDA and believed it was sentient. I read the whole conversation and I was really impressed but I didn’t think a tool like this would be available to the hands of everyone very soon. Even back then it seemed dangerous to interact with given how the Google Engineer started believing the model was sentient, after all these years some people still believe LLMs are sentient.
Seeing all this, I remember being excited about ML and its progress. However, even after seeing LaMDA and GPT 3 in action, I did not think about the impact LLMs would have in our lives, especially in the programming world, which was very important to me as my goal was to become a Software Engineer. I had seen the Gmail auto complete and thought it was pretty cool, little did I know it was one of the earky use cases of LLMs.
ChatGPT release
I was an early adopter of ChatGPT, I learned about it through Twitter. The first screenshot I saw was from Jeff Geerling and suddenly my whole feed was full of ChatGPT screenshots of people asking random questions, songs, haikus, etc.
I signed up as soon as I found out about it and started askingit to write poems lol. I started showing it to my friends of the Android community and generated this poem for the Moto G5 Cedric.
Of course that was a very dumb use case but hey, it was still very impressive to ask for a poem about something so unusual abd get a decent result. That day I kept on asking for more poems and random questions until I hit the rate limit.
ChatGPT became mainstream
Low-key I would’ve prefer to gatekeep ChatGPT to tech nerds lol but it suddenly became extremely popular as millions of people learned about it through TikTok. A couple weeks later, evryone at uni was using ChatGPT for everything and whenever it went down, we just waited for it to come back. I think that’s where the problem started.
I became too reliant on AI
I was suddenly able to get all my boring homework done extremely quickly thanks to ChatGPT! Teachers were slow to catch up with what was going on so I guess they just thought we all became smart all of a sudden lol.
Fast forward a couple months, I did everything that seemed too boring with AI. Other times I used AI to review my work even with the subjects I actually enjoyed and the work that I liked doing such as programming or translating and presenting slideshows from Cisco Netacad because it just looked better when AI did it.
AI Rotted My Brain
I think I never really recovered from those days. AI only became more and more common, and what most expected to be a bubble about to explode, is still very much present in our daily lives, sometimes a little too much.
I used to enjoy running commands on the terminal and memorizing them, nowadays I just use MCP tools that I vibe coded and ask Claude to fix and troubleshoot issues.
I used to enjoy the process of programming and finding the solution to a problem on my own. Even when early models like GPT 3.5 came out, I still had to do a lot of manual work and think by myself. Nowadays LLMs are smart enough to solve most problems if I provide them with th3 right tools. I still need to steer them in the right direction a lot of times but that’s becoming less necessary and I’m too far in some codebases that I started on my own, then passed them through Claude and now I don’t understand half the codebase lol.
Something very embarrasing also happened recently, I forgot you don’t loop with for each in react, you use array.map() for creating multiple components. How did I forget something so essential?! The answer is because of lack of practice and letting AI do everything.
My New Goal
After seeing the effects AI has had on my brain, I think it’s time for me to walk backwards a little bit and embrace AI less. I am not one of those AI haters, I actually find it just as fascinating as in the beggining if not more, but relying on it too much has had bad side effects in me and I don’t want AI to become a roadblock in my career instead of something that should allow me to be more productive and efficient.