Are we going to end up delivering super smart things that we don’t even understand?
The world has started to evolve around AI, many people are slowly adapting it into their professional as well as their personal life.
It is not just about AI, we are tapping into an era where previously, in certian areas you had to have experience or be super familiar with. Today, you no longer have to be a graphic designer, with the help of Canva you can create a very decent flyer in under 10 minutes, when not too long ago you had to convince your friend or pay someone $250 to get something similar.
I, as many people, have integrated AI to correct grammar, proofread a long forum post, dumb down a long email to a sentence or two, or even give me a good template of a script, in any language I write.
The real question is tho, are we getting smarter because we have more time to do more things or are we getting dumber because we don’t practice what we know.
I think, unfortunately, the latter is true.
I sat with one of my teammates this week, he challenged himself to write a SQL query without the help of AI. I must say, that made me miss the days before AI where we had to pull our hair out to figure out a SQL syntax error… and oh boy, the satisfaction after figuring it out! I miss the days where I started a 500 line bash script from scratch I also miss designing on my own complex SQL with foreign keys, interjoins, views, procedures etc.
While in the states now, I worked with another teammate who wrote two major projects that involved some AI and real time analytics (which I hope to write in my next post). With the help of AI, we converted large JavaScript files to Python within seconds. It was fascinating to watch, but as mentioned, the thrill of figuring it all out from scratch was gone.
But without a doubt, it definitely sped up the process to finalize both projects just in time for the deadline.
Why am I posting about this, would you ask?
Well, I am here to remind you to practice your skills, you and your brain will eventually be very thankful that you exercised your knowledge and skills.
Here are some exercises for ya:
Take your most challenging task you ever gave to AI and write it on your own. Learn from your mistakes, use old fashioned Google to search for answers, use trial and error and perhaps when you feel tired shut your laptop, that “final try” will wait for tomorrow.
P.S. I did not use AI to assist me here 😉