Have been using AI since the early days of Open AI and it has been nothing short of amazing. I use it actively for web application development and on numerous occasions it has unblocked me and helped me progress. At times, to debug something and at other times to tell me an approach to solve a certain problem.

This is exciting as I am able to solve things pretty independently.

Even with all this I do not outsource my thinking to AI. I do not blindly follow its approaches.

For instance, I was in a situation where my web application had to send notification to users on slack channels. Obviously, the notifications should only be sent if the channel itself is configured and my app is authorized by the user to do so.

The first approach that the AI suggested was not good. It gave me an approach that was complicated and it seemed as if it wasn’t aware that Laravel (the framework I am using for my project) already had that feature built in.

All I needed to do was to use the following method and add my conditional logic there:

public function shouldSend(object $notifiable, string $channel): bool //Feature that Laravel already has
    {
        if ($channel === 'slack') {
            $slackService=new SlackService();
            $slack_connect=$slackService->getSlackConnection($notifiable->currentTeam->id);
            if ($slack_connect)
            {
                if ($slack_connect->slack_channel_id)
                {
                    return true;
                }
                return false;
            }
            return false;
        }

        if ($channel === PushoverChannel::class) {
            $pushoverService = new PushoverService();
            $pushover_connect=$pushoverService->getPushoverConnection($notifiable->id);
            if ($pushover_connect)
            {
                return true;
            }
            return false;
        }

        return true;
    }

I went through Laravel docs and found out about this.

The moral of the story is, use AI but don’t outsource your thinking.

I am seeing more and more people using it as a thinking companion which will kill people’s ability to think and reason.

But the consequence of outsourcing thinking are far more dangerous.

Do this outsourcing enough times and you’ll lose your ability to think and as a result to stay confident.

I already see that. People respond to emails using AI, they respond to slack messages using AI, heck even in one on one chat messages people have started using AI. The worst part is, people think that no one can make out that its AI, but people do realize, they just won’t call it out, out of politeness or just fear the consequence of calling out especially at work.

I am not making a case to not use AI, I use it all the time, it would be foolish to not use it to work efficiently. However, not taking a moment to think of a solution to a problem by yourself and letting AI be the first one to tell you what to do, is not something that is making you efficient, it is literally making you DUMB and LAZY.

And I do not need to predict what happens with people who are DUMB and LAZY.

Good luck!