I don’t think there’s compelling evidence that using AI makes you less intelligent overall 1 . However, it seems pretty obvious that using AI to perform a task means you don’t learn as much about performing that task . Some software engineers think this is a decisive argument against the use of AI. Their argument goes something like this:

Using AI means you don’t learn as much from your work

AI-users thus become less effective engineers over time, as their technical skills atrophy

Therefore we shouldn’t use AI in our work

I don’t necessarily agree with (2). On the one hand, moving from assembly language to C made programmers less effective in some ways and more effective in others. On the other hand, the transition from writing code by hand to using AI is arguably a bigger shift, so who knows? But it doesn’t matter. Even if we grant that (2) is correct, this is still a bad argument .

Until around 2024, the best way to learn how to do software engineering was just doing software engineering .…