A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

Lots of interesting debates in this thread. I think it is worth placing writing/coding tasks into two buckets. Are you producing? Or are you learning?

For example, I have zero qualms about relying on AI at work to write progress reports and code up some scripts. I know I can do it myself but why would I? I spent many years in college learning to read and write and code. AI makes me at least 2x more efficient at my job. It seems irrational not to use it. Like a farmer who tills his land by hand rather than relying on a tractor because it builds character or something. But there is something to be said about atrophy. If you don't use it, you lose it. I wonder if my coding skill will deteriorate in the years to come...

On the other hand, if you are a student trying to learn something new, relying on AI requires walking a fine line. You don't want to over-rely on AI because a certain degree of "productive struggle" is essential for learning something deeply. At the same time, if you under-rely on AI, you drastically decrease the rate at which you can learn new things.

In the old days, people were fit because of physical labor. Now people are fit because they go to the gym. I wonder if there will be an analog for intellectual work. Will people be going to "mental" gyms in the future?

"But there is something to be said about atrophy. If you don't use it, you lose it. I wonder if my coding skill will deteriorate in the years to come..."

"You don't want to over-rely on AI because a certain degree of "productive struggle" is essential for learning something deeply."

These two ideas are closely related and really just different aspects of the same basic frailty of the human intellect. Understanding that I think can really inform you about how you might use these tools in work (or life) and where the lines need to be drawn for your own personal circumstance.

I can't say I disagree with anything you said and think you've made an insightful observation.

In the presence of sufficiently good and ubiquitous tools, knowing how to do some base thing loses most or all of its value.

In a world where everyone has a phone/calculator in their pocket, remembering how to do long division on paper is not worthwhile. If I ask you "what is 457829639 divided by 3454", it is not worth your time to do that by hand rather than plugging it into your phone's calculator.

In a world where AI can immediately produce any arbitrary 20-line glue script that you would have had to think about and remember bash array syntax for, there's not a reason to remember bash array syntax.

I don't think we're quite at that point yet but we're astonishingly close.

Wait until AI prints out something that doesn't work and you can't figure out how to fix it because you don't know how it works so you do trial and error for 3 hours.

The difference is that you can trust a good calculator. You currently can't trust AI to be right. If we get a point where the output of AI is trustworthy, that's a whole different kind of world altogether.

For replacement like I described, sure. But it will be very useful long before that.

AI that writes a bash script doesn't need to be better than an experienced engineer. It doesn't even need to be better than a junior engineer.

It just needs to be better than Stack Overflow.

That bar is really not far away.