Andrew Childs on Elevate

Thank you for writing this. It's a really important issue that feels drowned out. Personally, I switched off Copilot auto-completion and instead will occasionally trigger it on demand with a shortcut, as I found that it was constantly disrupting my ability to concentrate. And I try to use LLMs as a tool for reference and for scaffolding only - I'm trying to keep myself responsible for the hard stuff in my work, but the temptation to just let the AI do its thing is there. I do worry about the effects of even this level of AI use on myself, and for the effect of AI on all software developers, particularly those just starting out. Honestly, I think it just means that people that can actually do the hard mental work themselves, without AI, will become much more rare and in-demand.