I really liked this article as it explained and put something I have always thought about into words. It gave me the words for me to actually even understand that feeling. The reason for sometimes letting go of a problem and waiting for it to be solved is the productive void. That moment when you're walking or doing something and the mind is turning over a problem unconsiously is a wonderful thing.
And that is because the resistance of a surface agains a pen or pencil creates an important friction that works its way through your body and into your mind. That resistance is valuable; it forces us to slow down.
I think this statement is very true, the slowdown of our tools is sometimes helpful to truly learn something. I think this is even more true when we use a pencil and our hands. There is some sort of deeper learning that happens in me when I write something down versus writing via keyboard.
This is something I'd like to try more of, I've thought about blogging via pencil but its not something I've fleshed out yet.
That gives our mind time to process each move and consider the next. The best digital tools preserved some of this productive friction.
AI tools offer no such thing, by design. They collapse the space between intention and result, between thinking and making. They eliminate the productive void — that space where uncertainty leads to discovery.
This quote gets to the heart of the article and my own distaste for AI. I am very much a fan and I think the tech is cool but as a learning tool I think it needs to be very carefully used. This void where you contemplate what you're doing is eliminated when you use an AI tool.
I found this to be the case when I used Copilot to write rust code. Rust is not a language I'm familiar with and I found that when Copilot gave me a suggestion, I would read it, pretend to understand and move on. It wasn't until I disabled Copilot that I realized that I didn't actually know what to do and had to think it through.
I think that experience made it clear to me that AI is great for when you know something but for real learning, I may not want to use it.
I'm a believer that AI is going to automate and destroy jobs but I also believe that like every other major change to work, humans will find something else to do and ultimately we'll always need more. I don't think AI is going to cause change to this idea.
I'm not sure yet but something I believe is that the doomerism around AI is valid. It is not like writing, the calculator, the television or the assembly line. It is not something that I think we can say will for sure turn out for the better. For some reason I think it's a special branch of innovation that is going to change what it means to be human.
I don't think humans are going to become obsolete, jobs might be taken over by AI and people will need to find other things to do. I would bet that the world becomes more productive not less. However I think focus, attention and skill are going to change in ways that may not actually be positive.
Maybe.
One of the comments in the HackerNews thread says that using AI and working iteratively maybe makes one more productive but they don't feel like they actually learned or got better at coding. They haven't really grown their own knowledge. I definitely feel that and is why I don't actually use chatgpt until I actually tried searching first.
Reading and searching google and then trying to adapt what one person from 15 years ago wrote is a good way to learn and internalize something. Though this is probably what people said about the internet when people started to do that instead of reading manuals.