Why Human Thinking Still Matters
Have you ever reached the end of the week and felt like you haven't had any time to actually complete anything you set out to do? We're building tools to save time but the resulting pressure to produce more and faster often leaves us with less time to think about why we are building anything. At the end of the day, computers are there to help us as humans. With APIs we build them for computer interactions, but with a clear aim of shared value to produce something useful for us; they're not an end in itself. The same should be the case with AI.
When the goal becomes AI integration itself however we risk shifting our focus from the human outcome (time-saving productivity) to the technological output. When this happens it feels like it doesn't matter how it's being used or where, but rather the usage itself is the goal. Wide claims of productivity gains from AI are leading to new expectations of how much can be achieved in a given time period resulting in more and more things being built without the time for thinking.
Thinking is the key part of the development process - refining and synthesizing ideas - this is way we grow through working through the different options and elements of the idea getting through this messy stage into a valuable refined idea. If we skip this and jump straight to the implementation we end up with so many things being built - some with no purpose, some without enough time to ensure they are sufficient quality. Others started and never completed because of a pivot to the latest technology trend.
AI doesn't look to be going away any time soon and it can bring some value and benefits if we are careful around how we make use of it. We need to approach it as any other tool with a clear purpose and strategy to reach our goals - using the AI to handle the "busy work" to reclaim that time for the valuable deep work. Focusing on using AI to solve problems that are tedious or complicated for humans to work on rather than to replace creative human thinking. AI shouldn't replace inter-human communication - I'd much prefer to read raw thoughts in a couple of paragraphs than a 4 page polished AI generated document that was built from that.
The goal isn't to build more, it's to build better. AI can help give us some of the speed but only if we clearly articulate the direction.