Stop using ChatGPT and other AI tools

The title of course is a clickbait. So if you expected some great Anti-AI, dystopian terminator kind of post. Stop right here and consider reading something else. AI tools are very useful. But I've seen a trend of juniors who just got into their job using it, a lot. I'm just trying to argue a case with them to learn on their own and not to rely on the LLMs.

It is okay to use AI tools to do the mundane, repetitive work. But don't keep that as your daily driver or as your magical genie that makes your work 10x easier and 10x faster.

• I've been reviewing code clearly written with the help of AI

• I'm getting emails from team mates that is literally written by AI

Let's take software development as a career path. When you begin your career, you must learn the basics. Most of you would agree that our college education is very disconnected from the expectations of job market. Some of us know that most of our colleges aren't doing a very good job of teaching even in the outdated syllabus.

So most of our first chance at any actual, real world learning happens at your first job. There you have to go through a cycle of doubts, confusion, frustration, self doubt and then success. This incremental learning loop make sure that you get your fundamentals right and you develop an approach at problem solving and analytical thinking.

What I feel is that this loops is broken by the shortcut of the seemingly intelligent AI chatbots. If I ask someone to send me an email, they ask chatGPT for content, when I ask them why, they say their English isn't that good. I was very poor in English as well until my second job, where I was forced had to chat and discuss with a UK client on daily basis. After a few weeks, the fear of English went away and I keep getting better at it the more I write, read and make mistakes.

Imagine if I never had the chance to make mistakes and just kept using chatgpt, my English skills may not have improved (Some pedantic people can still find lot of issues in my English, but shhhh go away now, I'm making a point).I'm picking English as an example, but put any skill there.

I now see junior devs copy and paste code directly from chatGPT, business analysts taking document queues from there. But if you keep using these tools to hide your quirks and imperfections, how are you going to improve and how are you going to receive feedback?

How a developer can develop the very critical problem solving, debugging and breaking down issues if he turns to chatGPT at the sign of every issue?

Am I using AI?

I'm using Claude almost every day, It is better that other chatbots IMO. But I only use it as a search engine. Not as a problem solver, not as my content writer, not as my debugging assistant.

My main use case is,

1. Ask it to compare few products/services

2. Ask it to analyse and state pros/cons of different designs

3. Ask it to format/improve/optimise code, then double check it manually

4. Ask it to explain some basic overview of tech topics I want to explore more

5. Sometimes Using AI to create abstract wallpapers for phones

I used to the below things, but now stopped doing those.

1. Using it to write code and copy paste

2. Using it to fine tune my blog posts or emails

3. Using it as prompt for blog ideas

4. Using it within my IDE

This helps me to do some mundane stuff faster, but I always make sure it doesn't hallucinate by cross checking. Because I've already wasted 2 hours when chatGPT suggested some non-existent syntax for Elasticsearch.

Do the hard stuff

As a junior dev, it always pays off learning the hard stuff. I suggest people to learn javascript instead of react. CSS instead of tailwind. Similarly, learn on your own. Find out the weird corners of the internet, find out people who worked on similar stuff and similar issues, find out old memes about the current stuff you're working on.

You're missing out a lot if you use AI as your daily driver. They are not smart, they are just statistical models fooling you into thinking that they can answer everything. This is not to discredit the novelty, they are good and they'll keep getting better. But there are equally good reasons to not to use AI tools, but I'm not asking you think the big picture here.

Just stop using AI for your own learning and sake. Don't do something with AI that you can't do on your own yet.