Survival Mode

Stopped using Copilot outside of work a few weeks ago. Coding's begun to feel fun again since making that change. I hadn’t even noticed the disappearance of that joy until it started coming back either.

The honeymoon period with Copilot was so cool. It was exciting to be able to blow through any fiddly little problem without needing to put in any effort. I guess the novelty wore off.

It left behind a severe dependence on this new tool too. You get proper lazy from relying on AI. The speed boost’s the selling point, and replacing your thought process and research with AI suggestions accounts for most of that. The lack of use is death for those skills.

Worse still, I noticed I was often less than proud of the work I was producing with this thing. LLMs write HTML and CSS in particular with all the care and precision of a skywriter pilot trying to hold in a poo. Bloody depressing to have worked so hard to get particularly good at those and then see this trendy new tool slowly steal that talent like the aliens in Space Jam and replace it with mediocrity-as-a-service.

So then I was randomly pissing around with MacVim the other day and didn't have Copilot configured. And it was like "Wait, what's going on? What's this funny feeling?". Turned out to be happiness. The eureka moment came when I installed the Vim Copilot plugin and the joy went away again.

From there the decision to cut this tool out of the creative process was obvious. It's dead similar to my relationship with creative mode in MineCraft actually. I find instant access to every item and block really uninspiring and massively prefer the chaos and struggle of survival mode. The struggle's where all the meaning is.

In creative mode you pick the blocks you need from the same huge menu as everyone else. Optimising how fast you can work with that UI becomes part of being "good" at the game. In survival mode you generally rummage through some kind of warehouse or bunker full of storage chests that you've built. Every item in those chests has a story behind it, so even the act of getting something out of storage replenishes the world-building magic of the game. It's slower but without it the world feels sterile.

I got into this whole career by accident. I rediscovered coding sometime around 2004, found it really fun, and next thing I knew I was doing it all the bloody time. The end of that fun was happening just as accidentally as its beginning, and I'm glad I identified it early enough to address it. Copilot suggestions will probably stay enabled during work hours for the time being while I rebuild my independent problem-solving abilities. But it's been switched off for weeks now in everything else I do and it feels amazing.