Recently after a month of heavily AI assisted programming, I spent a few days programming manually.
The most striking thing to me was how frustrating it was.
"Oh my god, I've melted my brain" I thought. But I persisted in my frustration -- basically continuous frustration, for seven hours straight -- and was able to complete the task.
Then I remembered, actually, it was always like that. If I had attempted this task in 2019 (or a similar task, in terms of difficulty and novelty), it would have been the same thing. In fact I have many memories of such experiences. It is only that these days I am not used to enduring the discomfort of frustration for so long, without reaching for the "magically fix everything (probably)" button.
If I had to guess, I'd say that is the main "skill" being lost. There's a quote like that, I think.
Genius ... means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all. —Thomas Carlyle
The most striking thing to me was how frustrating it was.
"Oh my god, I've melted my brain" I thought. But I persisted in my frustration -- basically continuous frustration, for seven hours straight -- and was able to complete the task.
Then I remembered, actually, it was always like that. If I had attempted this task in 2019 (or a similar task, in terms of difficulty and novelty), it would have been the same thing. In fact I have many memories of such experiences. It is only that these days I am not used to enduring the discomfort of frustration for so long, without reaching for the "magically fix everything (probably)" button.
If I had to guess, I'd say that is the main "skill" being lost. There's a quote like that, I think.
Genius ... means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all. —Thomas Carlyle