Before AI, when building anything, you’d have to have a lot of context from different parts of the app. And then work with that knowledge to build the feature out in those places. Keeping that context in your head was tough and coming back the next day required you to “fill your internal RAM” with the context and then start.
Now we can use our “internal RAM” thinking about the bigger picture and bigger projects. We’ve just gone an abstraction layer deeper.
Art provides a counterpoint. The invention of cameras allowed you to capture reality in ways never seen before, and yet this lead to art having a _really weird_ few decades/century where artists rejected realism and instead embraced abstraction.
The difference between AI and no AI is like the difference between a hammer and a nail gun not a hammer and a banana.
If you have a nail gun you have to pay attention to what you are nailing together because it might rip through or the nail might stick out on the other side before you get a chance to pull it out and pick a shorter nail.
Participants are asked to drive 20 nails into a plank of wood. Group A is given a hammer and an unripe banana. Group B is given only a banana. Halfway through the experiment, the hammers are taken away.
Hammers erode your ability to persist at hard things…
My point being that AI is a new tool that allows us to work on harder things at a higher level. It’s like having a team of 100 skilled workers with nail guns (and all manner of other tools) that never tire, and you get to direct them. Once you experience that, it’s a bit disheartening to go back to building alone with your bare hands… even if you lament the decline in your hand-eye coordination.