AI

Right now, I feel like the whole world is surrounded by AI. Everybody is talking about AI—whether it's influencers, founders, investors, or even ordinary people. There's this story that with AI, we can make money, startups can get funding, companies can gain market share, and governments can gain power. It seems like with AI, we can access information faster and more easily than before. We can even earn more money.

However, I don't think so.

Here is my argument: it seems like we can get information more efficiently with something (AI) that has already summarized the context and gives us complete notes. With AI, I can just upload all my course materials and turn it into a lecturer that teaches me everything, gives me the key points for exams, and explains knowledge in simpler words.

There are even many influencers who feel like cheaters—they use AI to summarize information, reduce the cost of creating posts on social media, and present it as “fully organized notes” or something similar, without even processing the information through their own brains. With so much AI-generated information in my daily life, I start to question what is actually being learned.

But why do I feel like I never actually learn anything new?

I still have so many things to learn. A lot of the information feels vague—it's like I've heard it before, but I can't explain it clearly. I still have a lot of homework before the deadline. With AI, it feels like I can finish things faster than before, but why does it still take me so long—and I end up gaining less knowledge than before?

AI has deprived me of my ability to truly learn new things and to process information deeply.

Take a look at one of my recent commits:

Who on earth can map out an entirely new product requirement and implement it flawlessly in under ten minutes? Nobody used to be able to do that. Yet today, that is the standard we are told to simply accept.

Am I really learning anything new here? No. I am just using AI to generate the thoughts through code for me. Previously, if I wanted to build a large-scale feature like this, I would have had to spend a significant amount of time reading documentation, understanding the codebase, searching for related resources in the open-source community, and then writing the code by hand. Now, I can just let AI generate it for me.

With AI, I seemingly save a lot of time building large-scale features, but in reality, I am not learning anything new. I am merely using AI to generate information. Worse yet, I am losing my sense of oversight because I find myself blindly clicking the "accept" button without even reading the code, turning AI's output into an addictive shortcut.

This has become a normal daily occurrence for many of us.

Faced with this disappointment, I started to question whether this must be the working style of the future. How can we pivot this situation into something positive? When we cannot change our environment, we can only change ourselves.

Therefore, what I do now is after AI delivers a result, I try to ask it more questions, treating it like a real lecturer. I ask why it chose a specific approach. Fortunately, the silver lining is that I have a lot of raw, hands-on experience from the past. Since this code uses Next.js and React, I am incredibly familiar with how it works.

My extensive hands-on coding in 2024 gave me the technical foundation I need to actually supervise and guide these AI tools today.

This foundational experience means I can push myself to a more senior level. I now have a fleet of junior developers (AI agents) helping me build code, which allows me to inject my own critical thoughts and practical experience to make the system more efficient and scalable.

This is exactly what I want to achieve in this era. It is no longer just about gaining hands-on programming experience, but about developing soft skills and leadership. Because more and more manual development will be replaced by AI agents, we must shift our focus to higher-level architecture and strategy.

To summarize, AI can absolutely deprive us of our ability to learn new things and process information deeply. However, it also presents a rare opportunity to overhaul our workflow, elevate our skills to a higher level, and consciously decide what we truly want to build.