I was not aware of auto mode in Claude. In fact, it looks like Claude had it before cursor. Cursor has workspace scoping in a way that Claude does not seem to, but my comment above is mostly moot.
The cost is skill atrophy. When was the last time you wrote something entirely from scratch by hand without AI assistance? It’s a skill entirely separate from prompting and reviewing. And it atrophies when you stop using it.
I hear what you're saying but I'm not sure I buy it in the context of this thread (a response to someone who is 54 and has been coding since they were eight).
I am in a similar boat, having been coding full-time for fourty years. The way I use the current tools is that I own all architectural and design decisions but let Claude Code fill in the blanks. I reckon the quality of the output is about 90% of what it would have been had I done everything myself, but I get a lot more done (easily 3-5X).
Will I forget how to write a "for" loop just because I haven't been writing many of them by hand lately? Those skills are so deeply ingrained that I seriously doubt it. I can ride a bike after a multi-year break, or converse in a language I haven't regularly spoken for several decades. Or write using pen & paper even though I hardly ever do it. I don't see why coding would be any different.
I have a greater concern about societal skill atrophy.
I also am not about to forget how to for(;;), that said, as a result of some years invested in aligning old pre WGS84 mapping with modern GPS and improving digital mapping, there are fewer people per capita with the skills to navigate via paper maps in the absence of GPS.
Old farts coding since age 8 (in which I include myself with a decade+ over a sprightly young 54) will retain coding skills for as long as they apply them - the fear is that fewer and fewer others will develop and exercise such skills due to AI.
It remains to be seen if that's a bad thing long term.
I am not worried about the loss of skills per se. Over the centuries the average person has become less skilled at, for example, butchering animals. Is that bad for society? I don't know.
What I am worried about is us becoming dependent on tools that we as individuals neither own nor fully control, and gradually losing our ability to function without those tools. This, I think, is a huge societal risk.
> Heavy headphone use makes people feel lonelier, the survey found.
Correlation for sure, I’m less sure about causation though. It seems equally likely to me that other factors are driving increased social anxiety/isolation which in turn drives people to wear headphones to avoid social interactions.
I'll chuck autism and overstimulation in there too. There's a reason that there's the stereotype of the autist wearing their noise-cancelling headphones.
Yeah, I'm surprised this isn't highlighted more in these comments. "A small study" and "an article" and such seems to be the basis for this article, and yet there's seemingly no work done to identify if it's actually that people's attitudes have changed, and they're adopting headphones because of that.
It's not as if there's been major, literal earth-changing events that happened in incredibly recent memory that might have changed how people socialize or interact or anything, right? Let's just blame a specific brand of a piece of technology that has existed for decades, instead.
>> It seems equally likely to me that other factors are driving increased social anxiety
Social anxiety thrives on avoidance. It's a feedback loop. So likely it's correlation + causation. Your anxious so you wear the headphones to block out the world which only breeds more anxiety.
A coding agent should make short work of that. However I'm a bit doubtful if the results would actually be meaningful.
I'm thinking that some of the LLM-isms are a bit more complex than just repeated phrases. It's often more that short, punchy writing style with quick setups and punchlines. But would be interesting nonetheless. I really think that some things (like "solving real problems" or "it's not"/"this isn't") would show up.
> The districts of both representatives (Chicago for Garcia, and Harrisburg for Perry) flatly oppose it, as do their state governments.
You’ll have to cite your sources there, friend. As a constituent of one of those districts myself, I certainly do not oppose it! All my homies hate ALPRs.
Your alderman supports Chicago's deployment of them and is doing nothing to stop that. Nobody would ever claim everybody in any district supports ALPRs. Apologies to your homies.
Income != profit. Income is revenue. It sure would be nice if businesses were taxed on income, given that’s how people are taxed and all. Aren’t corporations supposedly people now thanks to citizens united?
I appreciate your polite corrections with well sourced info! Being a bit silly, I’ll say you’re a shiny beam of knowledge in a dark expanse of confusion
