Cheating Yourself

You cheated not only the game, but yourself. You didn't grow. You didn't improve. You took a shortcut and gained nothing. You experienced a hollow victory. Nothing was risked and nothing was gained. It's sad that you don't know the difference.

• A gamer, mad that someone cheated to beat the final boss of a videogame

A small rant about the fundamentals. And calculators.

A few weeks ago, a colleague sent us an email. "Hey, I asked ChatGPT for some PowerShell and it doesn't work, can you help fix it?"

This prompted some conflicting feelings.

Regardless of our thoughts generally on the use of generative AI, it would be difficult to argue that this colleague's use of it wasn't indirectly saving us time; before 2024, this colleague would ask for our help writing even the most basic of scripts - and then suddenly, those requests stopped appearing.

We assumed that he'd gone off and learned something, rather than running something he probably doesn't understand on production servers. And eventually, he reached an issue it was unable to debug because there was a dependency on something internal to the company. [1]

Yesterday, we saw a screenshot of this Reddit post, and it got us thinking