Think Harder
Bastian Allgeier talked about "brain lock-in" on his podcast interview with Working Draft and it stuck a bit with me.
It came out from the discussions about "vendor lock-ins" when building software (Kirby CMS in this case) and the need to be cautious about building in dependencies, but Bastian interestingly extended the dependency idea to also cover oneself.
Why did this podcast episode speak to me? I guess because I've been feeling a bit on those exact feelings the last few months.
On my last few projects I've been trying to adapt to the "new game" of getting better at prompting and letting go of the hands-on-coding as I felt I was getting outpaced and outworked by "the machines" on what I used to do manually for a living (Is that called rawdog-coding nowadays?).
Brain atrophy is a real thing though, and my natural coding abilities (or at least my belief in them) seem to have a downward spiral as my productivity with AI goes upwards (or at least the feeling thereof). Bastian continued the podcast by saying "I don't really fancy that idea too much" [of getting dependant of that way of working].
Then Robin came along and wrote this on Mastodon:
And it kind of touches a similar idea.
All the tools are there to make us better and more productive than ever. But it interestingly seems to inversely correlate with the self-belief in ones own craft. At least anecdotally.
Many great creators across genres say the tools are great, but the output (or in some cases quality) while using it doesn't point towards the same conclusion.
Oh, the same goes for writing blog posts too, by the way. Full circle stuff.
Resist the urge to ask AI if this blog post makes sense.
Brain must work.