Will AI Replace Human Thinking? The Case for Writing and Coding Manually

Tools like Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex CLI have boosted my productivity massively. They already handle about 90% of the coding work, and I just step in to finish the last 10%. Every month they get better, maybe in a year it’s 95%, in two years 97%, in three years 98%. We can all see where this is going.

You are fortunate to have the pre-AI background experience to know how to recognize the 10%. People graduating college right now may never be so fortunate.

You're an early adopter, so you're seeing massive gains. But eventually everyone gets the same productivity boost and that becomes the new baseline expectation.

Any clever prompting techniques that give you an edge today will evaporate quickly. People figure out the tricks, models absorb them, and tools automate them away.

There's no substitute for actually coding to learn software development. For new engineers, I'd strongly recommend limiting AI code generation on real work. Use it to explain concepts, not do the work for you. Otherwise you'll never develop the judgment to know what that 10% actually is.

This doesn't just apply to software development - it applies across the board in any form of knowledge.

An example would be economics - an LLM can spit out a bunch of words about an economic model. But if you don't take the time to learn, visualise and understand it for yourself - it means nothing to you. And in that case, if you already possess mastery why would you waste your resources playing around with an inferior tool to you?

You wouldn't.

Absolutely agreed. Thinking anything else is nothing but cope, and these comments are FULL of it. it would be laughable if they weren't so gate keepy and disengenuous about it.

> They already handle about 90% of the coding work, and I just step in to finish the last 10%

So how many hours off work that 90% equates to?