I originally posted this post on my blog.
There's good laziness and bad laziness.
One day, the VP of a company I was contracting with called me "lazy." That was a compliment. You know the lazy that finds an easy way to solve a problem. The good lazy way.
But AI is turning us into "bad" lazy.
The "I don't want to think" kind of lazy. And I don't want that type.
I've been experimenting with AI for my coding. When I sit down to code, I open Copilot on a browser to see what I can offload.
Recently, I've been migrating a legacy Visual Basic app and I've used Copilot to code faster by helping me with boring tasks.
The problem?
The other day, I was stuck on a stupid problem: find a value in a dictionary from a list of possible keys.
Maybe I needed some rest...or coffee, but I couldn't think of a LINQ query for that. I was so tempted to wake up the genie in the bottle for that. It felt like the easy way out.
It's so tempting to go directly to the AI and outsource our thinking, even for simple tasks. It's fast and too convenient. Just a paragraph or two, wait for one or two seconds, and Boom! An answer.
Just the other day, I found a coder desperate because he couldn't code without AI anymore. If we're not careful enough, any one of us could become that coder. (From my quick experiment, it seems I was going in the same direction.) And that's the real problem.
AI is faster at generating code than we are. No doubt!
But being a good coder isn't about typing fast. It's about teamwork, clear communication, and other skills that don't show up in autocomplete.
I've packed those lessons into my book: Street-Smart Coding: 30 Ways to Get Better at Coding. It's the roadmap I wish I had when I was starting out.
Top comments (1)
Legacy project in Visual BASIC? From what you say, I guess you it's Visual BASIC.NET, fortunately. I mean, Visual BASIC 6 doesn't support Linq.
In that case, you could decompile the assemblies and convert the project into C#...