AI Assistants Are Much Smarter Than Me

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For a middle-aged person who has been coding for 10 years, has had some prestigious experiences, and ultimately values face, admitting that AI is better than me is quite embarrassing.

The AI tools I use cost no more than 200 RMB per month in total, while my boss pays me far more than that.

I expect to attract a lot of ridicule,

“That’s just you”

“Junior programmers are like that”

“Can only do simple tasks”

“Can’t handle real engineering”

“Severe hallucinations”

“Not suitable for production environments”

My experience with AI tools is sufficient to ignore these taunts. This article won’t recommend any specific tools; it’s mainly for ideological resonance. I always learn a lot from the comments.

I was among the first users of GitHub Copilot, starting from the internal beta. After the beta, I didn’t hesitate to subscribe to the annual fee and have been using it ever since. Now, I no longer get excited about solving difficult problems on my own, nor do I take pride in “elegant code.” Now, the only thing that excites me is when the AI accurately understands my expression, completes my requirements, and exceeds expectations.

Among the experience accumulated over the past decade, the most useful skills when working with AI tools are:

  • Logic
  • Design patterns
  • Regular expressions
  • Markdown
  • Mermaid
  • Code style
  • Data structures and algorithms

More specifically:

  • Major premise, minor premise, appropriate relationships.
  • Create dependencies cautiously, strictly prevent circular dependencies.
  • If not necessary, do not add relationships; if not necessary, do not expand the scope of relationships.
  • Strictly control the scale of logical blocks.
  • Use regular expression searches and generate code that is easy to search with regex based on naming conventions.
  • Generate Mermaid diagrams, inspect, modify, and fine-tune them, then use Mermaid to guide code generation.
  • Use the names of data structures and algorithms to guide code generation.

I’ve spent a lot of time contributing to various open-source projects, some in familiar fields and some in unfamiliar ones. It’s experience that allows me to get up to speed quickly. You’ll find that excellent projects are always similar, while poor projects fail in their own unique ways.

If my memory gradually declines and I slowly forget all the experience I’ve accumulated, but I still have to work as a programmer to support my family, I could write a note to remind myself. If I could only write the briefest prompt, I would write: Google "How-To-Ask-Questions"

Are humans smarter than AI? Or are only some humans smarter than some AI?

I must honestly admit that there’s no practical benefit to flattering myself. As the title suggests, this article is about tearing down my pride and showing my true thoughts: AI is better than me, much better. Whenever I start to doubt AI, I should remind myself:

Is AI dumber than humans? Or are only some humans dumber than some AI? Should I rephrase my question?