I noticed a funny thing a while back after using the “bird’s eye view” capability in my car to help with parallel parking: I couldn’t parallel park without that feature anymore after a few years. It made for an awkward situation every time I visited the Bay Area and rented a car. I realized I had become so dependent on the bird’s eye view that I had lost the ability to function without it.

Luckily in this particular case, being able to parallel park unassisted isn’t all that critical in the overall scheme of things, and as soon as I turned that feature off, my parking skills came back pretty quickly.

But the lesson stuck with me, and when LLMs became capable of generating some degree of functioning code, I resolved not to use them for that purpose. I’m not trying to behave like a stodgy old-timer who increasingly resists new tech out of discomfort or unfamiliarity—it’s because I don’t want to lose that skill myself. I use LLMs for plenty of other things like teaching myself interesting new fields of mathematics or as a sounding board for ideas, but for anything where it would (ostensibly) replace some aspect of my critical thinking, I try to avoid them for those purposes.