I miss coding pre-chatpgt. It's an amazing technology but I’ve realized that using it over the last year has severely negatively impacted my skills as a programmer. Moreso, it seems like we’re heading into a future where the large majority of code is AI generated. To me this seems like going from artisans making pots by hand to Ikea making thousands of (almost) indistinguishable pots at the same time. And although the end-product is usually totally removed from the code (the user doesn’t care how you implemented the search function) I care.

As a result I’m going back to programming by hand, canceling my gpt-4 subscription and only using gpt as a time-saver for menial tasks, not as something to come up with ideas or write functions for me. Most of the time when I use chat gpt to do things for me it's not perfect but it’s “good enough” and I’ll accept the impacted quality or confusing-roundabout way of doing something for the sake of convenience and fact that I don’t care enough about the sanity of my future self trying to understand what something does.

You might argue that there’s no point in any of this, even learning to program is a waste of time because there's a chance that programming as we know it won't even exist in 10 years. Personally I don’t think anyone can predict the future but even if that’s true I can't imagine any possible future were someone that can think logically, focus for long periods of time and has a strong knowledge of programming concepts (DSA, software architecture, computer systems, etc) will be worse off than someone who doesn’t. If you’re really autistic you can even turn this into a sort of Pascal's Wager

Scenario 1, AI takes over

No change and nothing you did beforehand really matters anyways, do whatever you want

Scenario 2, Humans still contribute to society

Person who actually spent time learning >> smoothbrain prompt engineer

And at the end of the day It’s also just so much more fun and rewarding to program and solve problems on your lonesome, instead of begging some tech overlord to give a coherent answer.