Cognitive Offload
Over the years I have gotten bad at spelling. It is not terrible but enough to make the 12-year-old me who used to win spelling bees and stuff gasp in horror. There are a lot of factors. The main one was that I stopped caring. After school, most of the work I have done is programming or writing things online. Everything has a spell check. I stopped bothering about being correct.
It is funny how quickly you lose the ability. Whether I am in a hurry and make a typo or just approximate a spelling knowing it will be fixed. Who cares about spelling it is the idea that matters right?
I see the same happening with the use of Cursor+Sonnet these days. Whenever I approach a new codebase or new language I don't really need to 'know' the language. I know computer science and that is enough. I can tackle codebases in any language or even a different paradigm. Just like the spell check it frees some cognitive bandwidth for me to focus on things that are more important.
That is good, right? Yes, but it does not stop there. I have this spidey sense that tingles whenever I am trying to take the easy way out. And lately, with cursor+sonnet I found myself offloading a lot of my thinking. I found myself itching to ask it every time I came across a hurdle or had any doubt. I have felt my thinking depreciate somewhat as well.
The problem is I think of Sonnet as this thing that knows the codebase. Like a teacher and I am some dumb student asking it all kinds of questions. That makes sense right? It is the Socratic method. It knows a lot, just ask it. Have it think for you and feed you the answers. And one day someone pulls the plug on the AI and you are left with no ability to think for yourself or fend for yourself.
The only solution is to treat it as a colleague who owns that part of the codebase. At work, I will never just go up to someone like that and bother them with a lot of questions for hours. I will glance at the codebase once myself. I might ask them the best way to tackle it as someone new to it. Telling them about things I am familiar with.
I will try and find out on my own as much as possible. Only ask when I am stuck(ego comes in so this is somewhat rare, but for Sonnet it can be relaxed). This I feel is the best way to work with cursor+sonnet when tackling a new codebase. That is if you want to preserve your ability to think.
On the flip side, I am not sure if this is 'uncle talk'. I learned programming before all this. I feel like an old man telling people they need to know how to survive in the wilderness. Looking down on the city folks who have no clue how to hunt or forage for their food. Sonnet is like that, serving food on nice clean shelves. You still have to cook by yourself. Maybe it is not such a bad idea to offload some of your cognitive capacity to it. It would be faster right?
Feels like a slippery slope. I am sure the fast food version is coming soon as well. No thinking needed. You won't catch me eating that junk. I will still be hunting.