This is a story about the risks of AI-induced brainrot. You get so used to having the computer just do your work, that the second you need to engage your noggin you’re lost at sea. Or at least just frustrated.

Reading and understanding the docs and reference material has always been part of the work.

Aside from the commentary it read like an advertisement for how great the swift/macos translation APIs are. PEBCAK

Gotta say as a Swift dev I agree—followed the link the to Translate docs and was pleasantly surprised to see a discussion section clearly explaining the usage, which is not always the case for Apple APIs! But this wasn’t really just an article about the API. It was about the complexity of trying to build on the stack of Swift/SPM/ParseableCommand/Foundation/Concurrency/Translation without having a good grasp of any of them. I was frustrated reading it, but I think it does point to the underlying knowledge that’s needed to be proficient at something like this. None of it is a particular indictment of Swift as an ecosystem (though there are lots of valid criticisms)-it’s just the nature of development and something that’s massively eroded by relying too much on these ghosts

I remember reading and hearing similar rants from programmers 15 years ago, long before LLMs. The author kept going and figured it out, and probably got some pride and enjoyment from finishing the project in spite of the frustrating moments. That’s what learning to code has always been like.

The problem is there are a wide class of problems that you want solved but putting on the work will prevent you from actually doing the task because the cost isn't worth the reward. Because it's for a low impact tool. Or you can't imagine yourself dealing with this API again within a year or two by which time it will probably be completely different with v2 of the API.

So, you reach for AI and it works really well. So you start reaching for that more and more...