LLMs are making me lose my savviness
A software engineer reflects on the loss of creative satisfaction and technical 'savviness' caused by over-reliance on Large Language Models for coding tasks. The author argues that offloading the building process to AI diminishes the intellectual challenge and personal fulfillment of engineering.
Why it matters
This highlights a growing existential crisis among developers regarding the impact of generative AI on professional identity and skill acquisition.
I don’t know what’s going on. I always wanted to solve problems and create things, but now that I have access to a tool that’s able to speed up the whole design and development process… I’m just bored.
I don’t feel the passion of building anymore, mainly because I’m not building at all. There’s no craft in letting something else build on your behalf, there’s no real thought or design in writing prompts. There’s no engineering or challenge left. It’s just: prompt, evaluate the output, adjust, and repeat. What the hell is this? Sometimes I use them to actually learn something - but it’s a different way of learning. It’s like reading a summary or a description of some math formula, without applying it - quite pointless.
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