David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)
SHAPIRO: Ok, so you’ve spent your career television without AI, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had that tool to solve those thorny problems…
SIMON: What?
SHAPIRO: … Or saying…
SIMON: You imagine that?
SHAPIRO: … Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.
SIMON: I don’t think AI can challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
SHAPIRO: But if you’re trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you’re stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an AI and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
SIMON: I’d rather put a gun in my mouth.
What makes me sad is how it’s an IQ test. If using AI makes you feel like you’re becoming a better coder, what do you think is cheaper for Anthropic or OpenAI, to make you feel something or to actually do something? Same business model as Fox News: don’t actually inform people, just make them feel informed. Much cheaper and sells like hotcakes.
I’m using a lot of agentic coding at work. The code isn’t better, far from it, but it gets to a working state much much faster and that’s what my company values unfortunately.
It’s also really tricky because it seems to get better but whenever I’ve let my guard down it starts slopping about for real.
But I see it more like IKEA furniture vs hand made. It’s quality (if you have a decent craftsman) vs price, and as long as the price is lower many companies are going all in on IKEA.
I remember hearing once that when your brain knows there is an option to depend on an external source for something it could’ve stored in its memory, it loses (or at least weakens) the opportunity to utilize the elasticity that would’ve made the effort into storing that information, and this problem compounds the more often one uses the external source.
I think about that whenever I turn to a search engine to look something up. I can’t imagine how much more I’d think about that using an AI to think for me.
A real world example: phone numbers. How many phone numbers do you know by heart? Before cellphones, people would know dozens of phone numbers, family, friends, commonly called places.
If AI does anything better than you, you aren’t very good at it and using AI won’t help you get better. Learn and practice instead until you can get the results you want. If people abandon working on themselves we’ll have nothing left but a bunch of talentless losers and ai slop.