I don’t think there’s compelling evidence that using AI makes you less intelligent overall¹. However, it seems pretty obvious that using AI to perform a task means you don’t learn as much about performing that task. Some software engineers think this is a decisive argument against the use of AI. Their argument goes something like this:

1. Using AI means you don’t learn as much from your work
2. AI-users thus become less effective engineers over time, as their technical skills atrophy
3. Therefore we shouldn’t use AI in our work

I don’t necessarily agree with (2). On the one hand, moving from assembly language to C made programmers less effective in some ways and more effective in others. On the other hand, the transition from writing code by hand to using AI is arguably a bigger shift, so who knows? But it doesn’t matter. Even if we grant that (2) is correct, this is still a bad argument.

Until around 2024, the best way to learn how to do software engineering was just doing software engineering. That was really lucky for us! It meant that we could parlay a coding hobby into a lucrative career, and that the people who really liked the work would just get better and better over time. However, that was never an immutable fact of what software engineering is. It was just a fortunate coincidence.

It would really suck for software engineers if using AI made us worse at our jobs in the long term (or even at general reasoning, though I still don’t believe that’s true). But we might still be obliged to use it, if it provided enough short-term benefits, for the same reason that construction workers are obliged to lift heavy objects: because that’s what we’re being paid to do.

If you work in construction, you need to lift and carry a series of heavy objects in order to be effective. But lifting heavy objects puts long-term wear on your back and joints, making you less effective over time. Construction workers don’t say that being a good construction worker means not lifting heavy objects. They say “too bad, that’s the job”².

If AI does turn out to make you dumber, why can’t we just keep writing code by hand? You can! You just might not be able to earn a salary doing so, for the same reason that there aren’t many jobs out there for carpenters who refuse to use power tools. If the models are good enough, you will simply get outcompeted by engineers willing to trade their long-term cognitive ability for a short-term lucrative career³.

I hope that this isn’t true. It would be really unfortunate for software engineers. But it would be even more unfortunate if it were true and we refused to acknowledge it.

The career of a pro athlete has a maximum lifespan of around fifteen years. You have the opportunity to make a lot of money until around your mid-thirties, at which point your body just can’t keep up with it. A common tragic figure today is the professional athlete who believes the show will go on forever and doesn’t prepare for the day they can’t do it anymore. We may be in the first generation of software engineers in the same position. If so, it’s probably a good idea to plan accordingly.

edit: this post got a lot of comments on Hacker News. I was a bit disappointed to see many people (even Simon Willison, whose blog I read) respond with variations on the point that engineers can use AI to do more engineering work, even if they’re no longer writing code by hand. First, once you stop writing code by hand, I worry that your ability to understand the codebase in general will atrophy; second, the rate of change is so high that nobody knows what will happen in a decade or two. I should have emphasized these points more.