Beautiful article. Believe it or not, the author actually addresses the issue with AI at the end.

Here’s a snippet:

This is the danger of bypassing both System 1 and System 2. If we no longer struggle to learn (System 2), and no longer build intuition (System 1), we become entirely dependent on tools we don’t understand. We trade capability for convenience.

And my favorite:

In my personal work, I avoid chasing trends. I choose tools that are battle-tested. Tools I can reason about. Sure, at work, I use whatever the job demands. But when I build for myself, I want to understand every line.

And this one here is the goldmine:

Learning to learn is a noble idea. But more important is learning to unlearn, and knowing when to resist the comfort of automation. Because one day, when the machine stops, we’ll need to remember how to think.

What a pleasant read!

It’s a beautiful essay.

Once I learn to be effective in a certain technology setting, I develop a bias against every new trendy technology that comes to change it, be it AR/VR and Crypto/NFT of yesterday, or the LLM/AI of today. I didn’t bother to learn TypeScript until 2016 and React until 2017, even though most of my peers had been super excited about it for a year or two by then.

Most of the time, it is for good: the new trend gets forgotten, the fundament remains, I keep going. Sometimes though I have to catch up with the technology once it becomes mainstream (as it was with React or mobile web), and I can do it fairly quickly, but it costs me a lot of mental energy. Unlearning is real hard.

I am in the same boat as you. I take time to adjust to new things which is bad, but usually by the time I join in, the hype has disappeared and there’s some stability.

THIS. With crypto, I was always looking for something fundamental and I couldn’t find it. The math and the crytographic was fine but the economics never made sense unless you were among the early movers. It’s for the better now because that wave is dead.

It is hard. But it’s better than wasting time and energy on tools, concepts, languages and frameworks that end up nowhere. Like you said, the fundamentals are everything. Let’s stick to them.