I've been coding professionally for almost 30 years and it's only really in the last few months I've started to "trust" AI to do a better job than I can within given time constraints - but with a big caveat - as the article points out, the AI needs to be kept on track and questioned about its approach, told about inconsistencies etc. To aid with that it helps to have a lot of Cursor rules that guide the approach - built up over time, mostly based on seeing what AI didn't get right.
Well that's at work - but I've actually taken a different approach for my own personal project and generally now allow AI to do things in its own way - I put my effort into checking the functionality rather than the code itself. This does result in some fairly sprawling code and some bits that are practically now only really maintainable/"understandable" by AI. Functionality is still fine though, which is what really matters there when there's no other team members and understanding every part of the code isn't critical. Guess in future it may just self-refactor it without even being prompted.
Yes, ‘Sloptraptions’ advertises itself as an AI-assisted newletter.
Whatever your feelings about AI writing (I make a point of not using AI for writing, myself), it's silly to claim Rao is not the one making the point here. The piece links to the transcript of the chat session that generated it, where after having the LLM ingest the paper, he prompts it:
> ‘I want to make the following critical argument: “Have you met the median manager with a few reports or median faculty with a few grad students? Not your work, not your cognitive debt. Otoh, this sort of framing entirely misses the new kinds of work you are doing, which is often illegible or even invisible. A curious factor affecting AI discourse is that most people researching and commenting about the second-order effects have “individual contributor” mindset. Even a modest amount of supervisory experience demonstrates the difference between thinking vs monitoring/supervising, and between being responsible for getting thinking done versus accountable for it. I use AI a lot and it feels indistinguishable from supervisory work to me, with similar cognitive effects. If you manage too much versus doing your own hands on work, you become… a manager. How good you are depends on your aptitude for management work.’
