WARNING ! AI rots your Brain

Just makes me thinking..
Auto-complete has been playing a big role in people's ability to remember spellings and details.
Even while coding I have noticed that those who use auto complete don't tend to remember the details of the functions etc.

That leaves more brain bandwidth for other things. There are so many APIs out there. It may make sense to memorise the ones you use daily. But all others: let the tools do the work?

That leaves more brain bandwidth for other things. There are so many APIs out there. It may make sense to memorise the ones you use daily. But all others: let the tools do the work?

Fair point! But will it affect the ability of people to focus on details? I am not saying they have to remember all the APIs. What I have seen is ( especially while taking interviews ) people who are so used to autocomplete struggles to put a fully functional code in place, even with some basic functions.    

We often forget, especially in human resources, that the purpose of hiring is to bring in people who can solve problems, not people who are just good at interviews.

I count myself amongst that group.  I always refer to existing code, examples, previous blogs and google.

If I haven't written a case: statement in the last few weeks, I need to google it.

I feel the same way.  I have never strived to remember syntax, or parameter positions in a function call, as there are plenty of sources for those answers. Code completion tools can help with that.  What I do focus on when writing code is make it readable and functionally sound.  I have known people with great recall that can't program to save their lives, because they don't have the skills to logically break down problems into pieces and then to utilize the pieces in a concise way.

I use the AI tools to help with code completion, and API discovery too.

Here's an example.

Through usual experience, I know that if I want to calculate the radius of a circle from the area of it, then math.h will have a function to perform the square root. But I don't need to remember the parameters, nor even the name of the function.

In the screenshot below, you can see in gray text that the AI-powered auto-completion suggested the API function name for me, and the parameter too.

It's in grey and up to me to accept it by pressing tab, or ignore and keep typing as normal.

That API discovery is powerful, and it's not unusual that it can find a better function than I might have chosen.

Notice I don't have the constant M_PI defined, but hovering over it tells me that. I either need to create my own definition of Pi, or use one in a library.

Then, the AI can see I'm trying to print the radius, which is a floating-point value, so it auto-completed the string, and the variable name.

All the time the user is in control, but can let the AI take over with this fine line-per-line interactivity, and override whenever it's desired. The user is still responsible for architecture and individual functions, just as if they were not using AI, but can get a speed-up to do the boring bits of filling in lines of code.

It also encourages the user to write more descriptive variable names and code comments, since that's more input into the AI.

Absolutely.. LLMs are merely tools that requires human input, which just happens to be in our natural spoken language, to produce a digital output.

Here's an interesting talk just published on social media, which touches on how software is changing: https://x.com/aaditsh/status/1935611395653226588

Edit. Video also found on YouTube.

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RE: WARNING ! AI rots your Brain

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