I do think there’s a real risk of Brain Atrophy when you rely on AI coding tools for everything and while learning something new. About a year ago, I dealt with this problem by using Neovim and having shortcuts like below to easily toggle GitHub Copilot on/off. Now that AI is baked into almost every part of the toolchain in VSCode, Cursor, ClaudeCode, Intellij, I don't know how the newer engineers will learn without AI assistance.
replyI think in-line autocomplete is likely not that dangerous, if it's used in this manner responsibly, it's the large agentic tools that are problematic for your brain imo. But in-line autocompletes aren't going to raise billions of dollars and aren't flashy.
replyI'd say autocomplete introduces a certain level of fuzziness into the code we work with, though to a lower degree. I used autocomplete for over a year, and initially it did feel like a productivity boost, yet when I later stopped using them, it never felt like my productivity decreased. I stopped because something about losing explicit intent of my code feels uncomfortable to me.
replyIt's very difficult to operate effectively at a higher level for a continued period of time without periodically getting back into the lower levels to try new things and learn new approaches or tools.
replyThat doesn't even have to be writing a ton of code, but reading the code, getting intimately familiar with the metrics, querying the logs, etc.
I definitely think what you're losing is extremely important, and can't be compensated with LLMs once its gone.
replyBack when automatic piano players came out, if all the world's best piano players stopped playing and mostly just composing/writing music instead, would the quality of the music have increased or decreased. I think the latter.