I miss -- wow Sandy, yu are awesome !

Grinding throughout the night and sometimes for days on end, and then finally, when the code is cracked — Wow Sandy — yu are awesome!

That is how my time used to be at work and at home too, on personal projects. I am sure I am not the only one, and yu would have experienced similar situations when, after banging your head over some problem, you finally crack it — yu finally crack the magician's code. And that euphoric moment — it can't be expressed in words.

Nowadays, whether it is an engineering problem, coding, or anything else, we tend to go to Large Language Models (LLMs) and it's products (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) and ask them to reason, and we have become so impatient that we don't even stop to think or try to solve the problem at hand with our own experience.

The nitty-gritty and hard lessons yu learn when grinding through a problem yourself will be useful down the line when you encounter a new problem, or they just help you gain a deeper understanding of what yu are working on.

Yes -- this is AI generated Image :D

Want to share some of my past Wow Sandy moments and how I have started missing them.

I can go on with so many examples, but I will try to list a couple of examples in no specific order--

Sudoku solver — I love solving puzzles, and back then Sudoku was still a bit of a novelty. I felt the logic could be coded out to accept any puzzle and churn out an answer. This was back in 2008-ish, and I had just started engineering. We had Turbo C++ as one of our subjects, and I had a decent history of coding and building some functions/simple algos, so it was easy to start with. Shoutout to my brother — because of him, I had access to a laptop and permission to try anything I wanted to.  So yeah, I loved 2-D, 3-D and higher-dimensional arrays, and I used a 4-D array too and made a Sudoku solver.

It was not about optimisation back then, but more about translating my Sudoku-solving method into C++ functions. And back then, yu had to fight hard for simple errors. On top of that, no one was there to guide you through the logic, and I spent hours and hours, and maybe days, but finally got it up and running. My dad had a Nokia mobile, and it had 100 levels, and the code would solve 98 out of 100. That was so satisfying — a big win moment. Like something yu crafted from scratch, troubleshooting each and every aspect, and sometimes waking up in the middle of the night and going back to rewrite the logic, and finally seeing it working.

That grind helped me learn C++ and coding in general much better than if I had relied on other websites to give me a solution. There are so many other examples related to coding — the hobby projects didn't scale to production, but I learnt a lot and spent countless nights developing and debugging. All were worth it. I can't quantify it, but I am sure that kept my logical neural pathways active, and that helped me at work and in life in general.

Then there was this Physics book for tough problems in 11th–12th grade by P.S. Bangui, and God — it still gives me tremors. Each problem took multiple iterations and recalculations. I would never get it right on the first go. Luckily, I had answers at the back to cross-check and professors to help with a few of the problems, but the rest were, again, a hard grind. And each problem gave me a dopamine or euphoric-feeling boost — just that back then I didn't know it was called dopamine or a euphoric feeling. :P

Just imagine not getting the answer and quickly checking online for the solution. In this process, yu don't go through all the options or ways to solve that problem. Yu also don't learn why a certain method works and why that method didn't work for another problem at hand.

Nowadays, this is what we are doing — how to do XYZ? Quickly open any GenAI LLM model and start working with it, and then let it create a blue-background, 10-slide PPT or HTML slide deck. And worst of all, when yu have to present it to someone, yu fumble because AI made up content — yu didn't review it, yu didn't challenge it at all, and took everything at face value.

A better approach could be that yu sit with the thought first and then list down the points. Then have AI for further brainstorming or to help you challenge your assumptions, etc., and then let it spin off some slide deck. Then yu go back again and check if it came out the way you wanted. Otherwise, yu might be better off with a manual PPT — the intention is to convey your thought and not a fancy-looking slide deck.

Remember 20 years back or so — we all remembered so many landline numbers. I can challenge that each of us remembered at least 20 different landline numbers — friends, family, crushes. :P Then later, a few carried that habit forward and started remembering mobile numbers. Although mobile phones had a phone directory, sometimes yu would use a landline to call a mobile and yu remembered the numbers.

Then slowly, mobile calls started becoming cheaper, the phone had its own memory, and yu stopped memorising them, and slowly that part of the brain stopped working or being less active than it used to be. Then, in the last few years, we had OTPs, and we could remember a 6-digit code for a minute or less. But thanks to mobile phones scanning our text messages, it auto-fills the OTP, and yu never even look at it or remember it. Another small brain activity cut off.

I hope you are getting where I am going with this.

Then I have some other good examples from my friends — one of my friends would always do mental maths at the checkout counter in a grocery store. Another friend has gone back to fully manual coding, and it was a good, quick realisation for him — as he wasn't able to write a simple SQL query after Copilot came into the picture. Then my dad — still remembers so many landline and mobile phone numbers. Phew — incredible.

So, in the last year or so, I too got gripped a lot by AI and had so few moments where I got that dopamine rush where I could say — Wow Sandy, you are awesome! Now I wish to go back to it. Maybe not totally, but in a few areas I will take back full control, and in a few cases I will work with AI and figure out ways to preserve my analytical skills.

I really would love to hear your stories and experiences. Where do you go with all this?