Before writing about how I feel about AI, some ideas that sometimes help me:
- plan your breaks, e.g. "1h hour of work and then go away from the computer for 5 or 10 minutes"
* try to break the "just plan a little further" loop
- accept that you cannot be concentrated for hours and that reading an AI chat is mentally challenging (see first point about breaks)
- Talk with your coworkers about it. You are not alone, it is important to talk about how you feel
- set some boundarys, e.g. I don't work in parallel on different stuff
- do NOT doom scroll while the AI is "thinking". Try some meditation or mindfullnes exercises. Doom scrolling on reddit, HN or youtube will mess up your brain even more.
- from every task, try to do something on your own, and then scale this up by AI. That tip is from a former co-worker. Their idea was that you need to figure out things first and then let AI do the boring task to scale it up. Depends on the topic sadly.
- do some things by hand, especially if they are fun for you. E.g. I really like UI design, somethign that basically is gone now for me.
It feels very strange on multiple levels.
There is the tiredness of reading text all day long. The fear of loosing my coding abilities because Claude does is. I am totally loosing track of what I did when. I can tell you about things I coded 5 years ago, I cannot tell you what I did with Claude last week.
And don't get me wrong, I LOVE planning stuff out before doing that. If there is anything positive about AI, then it is people actually PLANNING before doing.
On the other hand, I can now do/try out things I did not do because I did not have time. But at the same time, it feels like I am working on making myself not needed anymore in the future.
Worst thing, I feel like I am getting dumber. My attention spans or the "I need to know why this happens" span gets shorter, because with AI everything has to be faster?! Riiight?
I don't know how this will turn out in the future.
I see people underselling themselves becoming anxious about working without AI (either because of how they think about their abilities or management pressure).
I am getting chat snippits from AI conversations via Teams, PR checks are skills now and we need 3 rounds of discussing findings with AI ...
We live in interesting times. But yeah, I am feeling with miserable about it.
- accept that you cannot be concentrated for hours and that reading an AI chat is mentally challenging (see first point about breaks)
- Talk with your coworkers about it. You are not alone, it is important to talk about how you feel
- set some boundarys, e.g. I don't work in parallel on different stuff
- do NOT doom scroll while the AI is "thinking". Try some meditation or mindfullnes exercises. Doom scrolling on reddit, HN or youtube will mess up your brain even more.
- from every task, try to do something on your own, and then scale this up by AI. That tip is from a former co-worker. Their idea was that you need to figure out things first and then let AI do the boring task to scale it up. Depends on the topic sadly.
- do some things by hand, especially if they are fun for you. E.g. I really like UI design, somethign that basically is gone now for me.
It feels very strange on multiple levels.
There is the tiredness of reading text all day long. The fear of loosing my coding abilities because Claude does is. I am totally loosing track of what I did when. I can tell you about things I coded 5 years ago, I cannot tell you what I did with Claude last week.
And don't get me wrong, I LOVE planning stuff out before doing that. If there is anything positive about AI, then it is people actually PLANNING before doing.
On the other hand, I can now do/try out things I did not do because I did not have time. But at the same time, it feels like I am working on making myself not needed anymore in the future.
Worst thing, I feel like I am getting dumber. My attention spans or the "I need to know why this happens" span gets shorter, because with AI everything has to be faster?! Riiight?
I don't know how this will turn out in the future.
I see people underselling themselves becoming anxious about working without AI (either because of how they think about their abilities or management pressure).
I am getting chat snippits from AI conversations via Teams, PR checks are skills now and we need 3 rounds of discussing findings with AI ...
We live in interesting times. But yeah, I am feeling with miserable about it.