1031: My Coding Skills Are Atrophying

**Wes Bos** (0:00)
Welcome to Syntax. Today, we got a potluck episode for you today. You bring the questions, we bring the answers. Questions about, does anybody still use Hermes?
What AI should I sub to? You got budget for one, which is the one that you're giving your 100 or 200 bucks a month to.
Is it time to move on from VS Code? Somebody has asked, my coding skills are atrophying, and I feel like I'm falling behind. Do you ever hit flow state with AI coding? And some really good questions around how to know when to move on from a specific technology and when it's working just fine. If you got a question, please go to Syntax.fm in the potluck, in the nav, there's a potluck button. You can ask a question there, or just leave the question down below in the comments. On Spotify, on YouTube, whatever it is, we'll see it. We'll answer it in an upcoming episode.

**Scott Tolinski** (0:57)
All right, the first question we have here is, from the Fox cost, it really hurts me to feel like I really feel left behind, because whenever I start a project, I always let AI make code in terms of autocomplete or code generation. So my code base always has like 80 to 90% AI generated code, which led me to forget about the most basic things I couldn't even do an HTTP request with my own hands without AI. So tell me, please, how do I solve this issue? Should I relearn those things or what?
Yes, I think this is one of those things, and I'm going to talk about this a lot more.
By the time this is out, you'll have seen my video, if you haven't, give it a watch on mental health and AI coding. The brain drain of letting AI do it for you is not just fake. It's not just something that we all feel. It's quite simply, by not doing those things in repetition and by not allowing our brain to understand these processes, your brain is actually letting those neural pathways go away, or those pathways are becoming inaccessible. So it's not just like a feeling of brain drain, by not being actively involved in an active participant in your code or the process by which things are doing things, your brain is in fact not using those skills anymore. Not brainin. Yeah, it's not brainin. It's so funny, I know a lot of marketing around brain training apps, use the word neuroplasticity, but it's a real thing and it is one of those things where you do need to use it, otherwise you will lose it.

**Wes Bos** (2:46)
I think it's kind of a tricky thing because there's the syntax of it, which somebody tweeted the other day like, will the name of this podcast become something retro when the syntax doesn't necessarily matter all that much? And forgetting the syntax, like if you're doing a reduce, what are the arguments to reduce callback?
Knowing what that signature is, I don't think is as important as actually understanding how this stuff works. And if you are, I know a lot of people are just kind of glazing over the code or don't necessarily care how it's happening. If you don't know how a request flows through your application or how an API call is made, then you're going to hit performance issues. You're going to not understand how it works from end to end. And I think that those are two separate things of understanding the syntax, of being able to code it by hand. Because certainly, there are things from 10 years ago that I would not be able to code by hand. I do not know how to do the PNG fix from 20 years ago on IE. And that's fine because it's totally changed. But understanding the fundamental flow of your application and the mechanisms and how everything works together, that is super important. And I think as people become careless of not reading the code, because you don't necessarily have to, you also can get careless with actually understanding how these things work and just boop, boop, boop, type in the box and you don't necessarily care what comes out the other end. And that not caring, I think, is kind of dangerous because then all of a sudden you start to just like, you don't get that from learning how things work and understanding it all. And then it just, you're rounded off and then you have no skills at the end of the day. So I think that it's very important that you keep up those things. And how do you do that? Well, understand how things work. Solve problems.