>You can’t prompt your way to [architectural design] knowledge. You can’t download that experience. You have to earn it. And if you’re letting AI do the work, you’re not earning anything except a dangerous dependency.

I agree, but I do wish it weren't true, and we had a better toolkit/set of terms/actual studied and consistent methods. Sometimes it feels like "well of course not, [reasons]" and sometimes it's just "surely we have more strong patterns than GoF or Uncle Bob wrote up, and random blog posts aren't the bleeding-edge of our skill sharing".

(in no small part because I don't want Uncle Bob to have described the most reliable strategies, that'd be incredibly depressing)

The Augmentation vs Abdication framing is great. It also reflects my own experience in a different field: marketing. More specifically, coming up with messaging & positioning.

If you want something clear and compelling you can’t one-shot it, so you end up spending all day and night going back and forth with Gemini or Claude or whatever your cup of tea…

In the end I had something that looked great from the surface, but I felt completely lost in it. I couldn’t tell you what’s the core idea underpinning the whole thing, let alone explain it convincingly to the founders I work with.

The feeling is unsettling, but it has a benefit: it’s a signal that you’ve gone too far and need to re-calibrate.

In the end I found a great balance between the AI’s ability to synthesize vast information and offer endless alternatives to phrasing, with my personal taste and intuition. Augmentation.

This whole article is just AI slop itself. I couldn’t read past the first paragraph before the emdashes and the stench of GPT crept in.