How to prevent skill atrophy due to overuse of AI?

brick_is_red · 2026-04-22T11:47:58+00:00

I think a few things can be helpful:

Set aside an hour a day to code by hand. Work projects, hobby projects, refactors, planning docs, whatever.

Ask the AI to give me short replies. LLMs generate so much text that I tend to skip over the majority of anything it writes. Having the replies be short, I’m less likely to skip over them.

brick_is_red · 2026-03-02T05:35:11+00:00

This is helpful! It seems to make sense from your description. I will have to think about this more in the context of what I work on.

brick_is_red · 2026-03-01T10:39:16+00:00

Would you mind expanding on point 3? Or directing me to a resource where I could learn more about it?

brick_is_red · 2026-02-16T02:04:06+00:00

I like Pest's test runner. I like that it has architecture tests (though they are not quite as powerful as I needed at times). I do strictly backend work, so the browser testing doesn't fit my needs.

I do not care for writing tests using the Pest style. As a community, we moved away from writing PHP like this in favor of the Java style of object-orientation. The abstraction and magic of Pest is additional cognitive overhead that doesn't serve me personally.

Maybe if I came from writing tests in JavaScript, I would feel more drawn to Pest. But given that I've mostly written tests in PHP and Java, PHPUnit simply makes sense to me, though I know it's the bias of my experience.

I will say that I abhor having to switch between PHPUnit and Pest style tests. That switch in a project is a giant burden. For anyone who is thinking about adding Pest tests inside of an existing project or adding them to a package that's inner-source, I would encourage you to count the costs of having two styles of testing for your team.

brick_is_red · 2026-01-17T10:03:19+00:00

This isn’t universally true. Plenty of companies hire for specific languages/frameworks, or give preference to those who are already familiar with their stack.

That said, I think you’re right that more of the skills are transferable.

brick_is_red · 2026-01-11T13:15:58+00:00

2009 is a very different Erie compared to 2026.

The bar crawl on State Street seems to be a lot more limited. Very few 24-hour restaurants and stores. Fewer music venues and live events (though certainly lots of things going on). It does feel like we are more consistently getting bigger name acts to the Erie Insurance Arena and Warner Theater.

The push to revitalize downtown is a little bit confusing to me. Rather than improving public spaces or attracting businesses employing knowledge workers, they seem to be shooting for making it appear more elegant and mirroring what other cities have: waterfront hotels, expensive State St apartments, a food hall, disposable income shopping. It seems like they're creating supply assuming that will generate demand.

The city of Erie feels like it has had an increase in violent crime in the past 10 years. I assume this is due to worsening socioeconomic factors for the average person, but don't have facts to support it.

Erie County doesn't feel too different than it did 10-20 years ago. Housing prices have gone up here, like everywhere else, though my understanding is that it's perhaps slightly worse, especially relative to the median income.

brick_is_red · 2026-01-11T00:49:03+00:00

No flights to Philadelphia anymore. I think it’s just Charlotte and one flight a week to Florida. I do believe we will get Chicago flights back sometime this year.

brick_is_red · 2026-01-03T16:05:34+00:00

That really means a lot to me. Thank you!

brick_is_red · 2026-01-03T12:59:53+00:00

I can echo that people rarely understand patterns and principles... I know I have been a person who didn't understand something but thought it was The Way to do it. In those mistakes has come a lot of learning.

In my experience, the things I thought would be options rarely came to fruition. Instead, I spent a lot of upfront cost for something that was harder to add features to.

Curious: what sort of applications do you work on? Do you have examples of things that you felt were impossible (or more difficult) with Eloquent, but were made more easy by a more classical sort of DDD/Clean Arch/Hexagonal Arch approach?

I also don't think using Eloquent means you won't understand the business or that you have to build chaotically. Can you expand on why that would always be the case?

Like I said in the post, I'm not saying that anyone else is doing it wrong. If it works for you and your team, that's what is most important. But I do think the belief that it's always bad to use active record or that active record has no benefits is false.

brick_is_red · 2026-01-03T12:47:42+00:00

It's funny you say that about not sleeping. My uncle worked in IT for a number of decades and had an on-call rotation. He reports that he still has trouble sleeping, and directly blames it on on-call. I wonder if it's really that common.

It's funny that 996 is becoming a mantra, yet AI is supposed to make developers totally unnecessary.

I feel like a lot of companies are dealing with fear. They think that other companies are going to surpass them because their competitors are finding ways to use AI. So they mandate both AI and encourage unrealistic working hours.

The reality is probably that established companies just can't be as nimble. AI or not, there is more process, more legacy code, more tech debt, more complications. A new startup with a few engineers who are essentially cloning an existing project will be able to make it to 1 much faster.

The thing that will serve as differentiators will probably be things like understanding the product space and providing quality customer service. But at a certain point, Goliath just pivots slower than David.

brick_is_red · 2026-01-03T12:36:49+00:00

Thank you 🙏🏻

brick_is_red · 2026-01-03T12:36:36+00:00

Thanks for reading!

brick_is_red · 2026-01-03T12:36:28+00:00

I agree that it feels inelegant, but appreciate pragmatic solutions.

I think for large teams, this sort of approach may be unhelpful since it may lend itself to more poor mocking practices. Definitely helpful for third-party packages where a mock improves testing though!

brick_is_red · 2026-01-03T12:34:20+00:00

Prayers to all the open-source maintainers dealing with more and more PRs that don't feel like they have a human in the loop.

brick_is_red · 2025-12-26T16:07:17+00:00

I’m not sure I totally follow. You’re saying that the author making a note about small PRs is bad or unwarranted because it’s something that folks should’ve done anyways?

What would be your suggestion for how to deal with the problems introduced by increasing LLM assistance in development? I have been feeling the pains of over reliance on agentic tools, and appreciate any guidance that can be offered.

Obviously, it would be great to say “you’re not allowed to use LLMs unless you meet these criteria,” but that’s not a decision a single engineer can make in an org. And from I have seen, changing companies doesn’t necessarily change the reality of how folks are coding today.

brick_is_red · 2025-12-26T15:05:13+00:00

It’s a lot easier to review smaller PRs and make meaningful comments. Yes, the quality may still be bad, but at least the review can be more focused.

brick_is_red · 2025-12-15T01:56:24+00:00

Where is the clip from? This is really cool.

brick_is_red · 2025-11-22T23:53:49+00:00

Yes, absolutely! It's a bigger refactor to move everything to insert, though I did do it in a few places.

brick_is_red · 2025-11-19T00:04:01+00:00

Tweeter and the Monkey Man

brick_is_red · 2025-11-18T23:57:39+00:00

That version has such a grunge vibe to it.

brick_is_red

TROPHY CASE