AI with a side of thinking

There is an undeniable fear and discomfort for how much AI is able to do today. I've also seen overblown performance, where benchmarks or demos look perfectly designed to make the machine succeed. I haven't yet made up my mind about where all of this is leading us. I have, on the other hand, thought about some of its impact.

As I find myself further away from the coding aspect of my job, I'm still able to whip up a POC pretty quickly. The help of AI has been instrumental in making this possible, allowing me to prove a concept within a working day. Copilot has helped as a smarter autocomplete but I have yet to find its usefulness in resolving hard problems. In companies that create tech for others to consume, there's a plethora of ideas that have not been explored or implemented before. Some of the problems I have witnessed require such specific knowledge and context that generative AI is not able to compensate for it. It is also fair that I haven't tried too hard to make my prompts more refined and run some quality control on the output.

What works for me is having the expertise to tell when a generative model does a very poor job vs a decent one. Even when I explore things that are new to me (e.g. browser extension development), I'm still able to tell when ChatGPT/Claude/Whatever produces nonsensical results. This is still good, I can often refine the prompt and get to what I really want. If that was not the case, I'm not sure anything created by generative AI could really go beyond somewhat basic functionalities. This is to not to say that it can't. I'm more worried that people are so enamored by what it can do for you that they let it do the thinking too.

Thought

Generative AI has completely changed how engineers do their work and, inevitably, will change how anyone does their work. If you let it do all the thinking for you, I have a feeling you will only push it so far.

If you leverage it to unblock deeper thinking and understanding, then you can truly propel your growth AND make the best out of the latest models. I have mentioned this in a previous thought, today you can explore most topics in the way best fitting for you. No more digging through many books/videos/tutorials. You can even feed that material and interact with it until you are able to understand its content. This is part of what I am most excited about. Sadly I can also see (as some recent cases have reported already) how some people might find AI as a shortcut and I'm afraid that, if the keep going down that path, they will be left behind.