Info
The term AI, which being mentioned in this post is an activity of prompting and getting the response from Generative AI1
Foreword
Remembered back in 2022, it was my very first College experiences, going to school, pay attention to the lectures and actually studying something. 3 months later, ChatGPT made it debut, everyone was amazed by such “smart and advance” AI, including me.
It was so useful to the point, it replaced my critical thinking, it led me like I am a cow, blindly follow what it said.
My initial career plan was to become a Software Engineer. I learnt from FreeCodeCamp2, The Odin Project3, Full Stack Open4,… They were all great resources to learn, but my approach was terrible, whenever I ran into problems, I think of ChatGPT first. Basically, copy and paste the whole context and tell it what to do, got the response and trying to read and “understand”.
Fast-forward, January 2024, I got my first internship as a Software Engineer at a local company. To be honest, I did not learn anything, even though we managed to build the entire project from scratch (they wanted us to use their crappy application as foundation, which we couldn’t). The main reason was, no surprise “ChatGPT”, and it was mention as the main objective of the internship, is to take advantages of ChatGPT Plus to enhance our skill sets.
The Limitation
You can blame me for not knowing how to use it properly, which in this case “ChatGPT”, and I don’t even deny your claim. We are the laboratory mouse, this is a subjective claim from a long time AI user. Due to being a prototype, there are so many features that were lacking back then, remember when I was trying over and over again just to get the same response.
Not until 3 years later, we got a model with the thinking capability and really trying to understand. And it was invented by China, like I will sell my souls to Xi Jinping just to get some help from a “Thinking AI”, which I did…
However, my Penetration Testing path was my first AI-free experience, the regulations do not allow them to tell me how to “hack” a system. There was nothing I can do except from researching on my own.
Awaken
My journey started when I discovered Quartz5, a site generator for Markdown. I began to write more, with the help of AI, the dependence was still there. The more I write, the more I realize how fixed my mind is. Using Visual Studio Code and Copilot extension, I was just typing some words and wait for it to suggest the rest. In the end, those words were not mine by any mean, it was not what I thought but rather what the algorithm recommended.
Making changes were not easy, but knowing something bad is happening and turn a blind eyes will leave consequences. SO, I changed to Obsidian, everything you are reading right now is hand typing by me, using my own thoughts (with LanguageTool6 to check my grammar).
Ending
In the end, human managed to reach this far, mostly depends on our critical thinking. If human never trusted themselves and put all the belief in some guidances from something else, I might not be able to sit here today.
Ask yourself whenever you about to use AI, will it benefit my learning journey? Even if the answer is yes, put some doubts on the responses.