this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
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You use a forklift to do things you physically can't do. This is a bad analogy. Even if you never used a forklift at all you'd still likely not have the muscle capacity to lift 500+ lbs pallets all day. You certainly couldn't just lift a tonne.
And you wouldn't use a forklift to increase your muscle tone, or build muscle.
I physically can't refactor a codebase in 15 minutes.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees here because the point is, you're capable of doing the task, just not doing it in the same amount of time as a computer.
You chose a poor analogy to explain your POV. I'm pointing out the flaw in it.
And I could manually relocate all the contents of a palette, too. Just not anywhere near as quickly and easily as I can with a forklift. The analogy is still apt.
Ok. Look at it the other way. The person who can lift the heavy thing may not be able to continue to lift the heavy thing if they use the forklift all the time and don't ever train their muscles. Which is what the article is pointing out. Doing the task by hand re-enforces knowledge and skill. Over-reliance on a tool is a well known phenomenon.
And yet the person with the forklift is moving more stuff than the guy who did it by hand could manage. The "over" in "over-reliance" is a subjective value judgment and I just don't agree.
I'm not seeing the problem here. Technology is developed specifically for this purpose, to remove unnecessary burden from humans and enhance their capabilities. There's nothing noble about laboring unnecessarily hard to accomplish goals in a suboptimal manner. I could write programs in assembly language but instead I use high-level languages and compilers. Does that result in over-reliance on compilers?
John Henry died in the process of "beating" the steam hammer and then got replaced anyway. Nowadays it'd be considered foolish to do that work by hand.
Neither can AI, unless you want a garbage heap of a codebase.