skillmaxxing is the game to play
the rule and consequences of the game
I read this tweet somewhere that roughly said, “if you want to excel at coding, have your fundamentals strong, have clarity on what you’re doing, and practice a lot! Spend 4 to 6 good hours coding manually, without the aid of AI or with the aid of AI, whatever, but spend time doing the thing which you want to learn.”
Right now, coding is the most outsourced task. Literally anyone can code using plain english.
I don’t have a strong desire to learn how to code. Because I don’t see it as a leverage for me. AI does and is going to do a much better job at it than me.
But when I think about writing. Writing has also been disrupted by AI. But I see it as a leverage for me because writing helps me think clearly, make decisions, it helps me amplify everything I do.
So, I want to be phenomenal at writing. I want to have my fundamentals strong, have clarity on what I am doing, and practice a lot!
I am choosing what skills I want to be exceptional at and what skills I want to leverage with AI.
That’s the rule of skillmaxxing:
You have to decide which skills are important to you and which you want to leverage.
Because there’s one more shift happening with the AI revolution that’s going unnoticed.
AI is making us worse at stuff
Anthropic did a trail where they made two groups of programmerscompete against each other.
They examined how quickly they picked up a new Python library with and without AI assistance, and whether using AI made them less likely to understand the code that they just wrote.
On a quiz that covered the concepts they just used, the group that used AI scored 17% lower than those who coded everything by hand.
The AI group was less engaged, less fulfilled and low on skillmaxxing.
They found that when you use AI assistance, it leads to decrease in mastery.
Anthropic didn’t do research on writing or thinking but you must have observed already that anything you give AI to do too much, whether that’s talking about your feelings or thoughts or taking help for writing, you are not getting better at it. You are just there from where you started, or you have gotten worse.
Now, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Humanity has always used technology to improve their ability to do things at the cost of the core skill.
Think hunting, sewing, fishing, farming. These are life skills that kept our ancestors alive. It protected them and put food on the table.
Earlier everyone was practicing these core skills for survival, but not anymore, because it has gotten easier with the technology.
When’s the last time you shot an arrow to catch a rabbit? We don’t have to anymore. No wonder we’re not good at it, huh?
Humans learn by practice. Iteration. We learn while doing the thing.
So when we use AI to complete our task, it hinders our ability to learn while doing the task.
AI is trained the same way. It also learns by practice. In fact, when I watched this documentary called, The thinking Game by Deepmind, I got to know how AI models were made to play 90s games to train it. They played the same game thousands of time. That’s how they recognize patterns and learn how to win.
If you’re trying to learn something, make it difficult. You have to approach it from different angles. And ideally, you would do most of that hard work yourself because how else is your brain going to grow?
AI improves your leverage, but it does so at the cost of eroding your core skills.
You pick and choose what parts of your life it makes sense to hand off to AI.
So, which skills you want to excel at and which you want to leverage with AI?
Poitu varen (I will go and come back)
Akanksha