20251016:20 - Bicycles of the mind
Is AI Code assist/agentic chat no fun? Am I losing my mind?
This video is really healthy feedback, in my opinion.
Sure, the title's click-bait, but it's not just a rant, there's some good advice here, particularly about breaking problems down, to plan the solution for it, or to give different aspects of a project to different specialized custom agents. But the point about not finding coding fun anymore — and why — cuts deep.
I'm not a developer now, and I've always been on the fringe of being one, but I do code for work as well as for fun. I think I enjoy using Duo for code assist mainly because it helps as a learning tool or a "rubber duck"/"pair programmer", but I can definitely see that if I spent my day trying to use AI to write code and then fix its mistakes, I'd end up talking to it sarcastically like Tony Stark.
I don't know if there is anything else constructive to take away from this video, in terms of the direction GitLab is taking. Maybe?
Steve Jobs once advocated for personal computers being "bicycles for the mind", in a similar context of public opinion. I think that using AI assistants does risk us literally losing our minds if we cede all of our creative or analytic and critical thought to them. Maybe in GitLab we should be advocating for using AI like a bicycle: it can help with the down-hill and flat parts of development, but you still have to do the work when going up hills. We should highlight this in our external communications, to continue to advocate not only for the new hotness, but also for the developers who are our main users.
Actually, thinking about bicycles (and ignoring e-bikes), it took me a long time to learn about using gears on a bike to assist, as well as to just "go faster". Yes, the high gears are great on the flats and down hills and you can really zoom along, much faster than running or with a bike that has no gears, but to go up hills, it is better to switch right down to the lowest gear, even if that is only the same pace as a walk (or slower). If you try to go up a hill faster than you could by just getting off and pushing, then that's not fun. Sometimes actually getting off and pushing is better than continuing on the bike, too.