The Vanishing Art of Deep Thinking in an AI-Driven World

In a world where artificial intelligence can generate code, solve problems, and build entire applications in minutes, one developer is asking a profound question: when was the last time you truly thought hard?

This isn't about casual problem-solving or quick debugging sessions. It's about sitting with a difficult problem for days or weeks, letting your mind work through it relentlessly until a solution emerges. It's about the satisfaction of deep, prolonged mental struggle—what the author calls "The Thinker" in their personality.

The Two Sides of a Developer's Soul

The author describes their personality as built on two primary traits: The Builder and The Thinker. The Builder craves velocity and utility—the dopamine hit of deploying something useful, the satisfaction of seeing someone use your tool. It's pragmatic, productive, and focused on getting things done.

But The Thinker is different. It's the part that needs deep, prolonged mental struggle. The author traces this back to their physics days in university, where they encountered problems so difficult that just approaching them was a challenge. They observed three types of students when facing these problems:

• The majority who gave up after a few tries
• The Researchers who sought similar problems in libraries
• The Thinkers who simply sat with the problem for days or weeks

The Thinkers, the author notes, were almost as rare as the 1% of natural geniuses. But their method never failed them. Given enough time, they could solve anything.

The AI Conflict

Software engineering initially hit the perfect balance between these two needs. Hard problems satisfied The Thinker while building things satisfied The Builder. But something has changed. The number of times the author truly ponders a problem for more than a couple of hours has "decreased tremendously."

AI tools have made building faster, but they've also starved The Thinker. "Vibe coding" satisfies the Builder's need for velocity, but it drastically cuts down the time needed to come up with creative solutions for technical problems. The author is writing more and more complicated software than ever, yet feels they're not growing as an engineer at all.

The Pragmatist's Trap

The conflict runs deeper than just preferring one approach over another. It's about pragmatism. The author acknowledges that their third manual rewrite of a module would likely be better than anything AI can output. But if they can get a "close enough" solution in a fraction of the time and effort, it's irrational not to take the AI route.

This is the real problem: they cannot simply turn off their pragmatism. They are, at their core, a Builder. They like building things, and the faster they build, the better. Even if they wanted to reject AI and return to the days when The Thinker's needs were met by coding, the Builder in them would struggle with the inefficiency.

The AI solution might only hit 70% of what a manual solution would achieve, but that 70% usually hits the "good enough" mark.

The Search for Balance

What's the solution? The author doesn't know. They're still figuring it out. They've tried to get that feeling of mental growth outside of coding—returning to physics textbooks, solving old problems. But that hasn't been successful either. It's hard to justify spending time and mental effort on problems that aren't relevant or state-of-the-art when they could be building things.

Their Builder side won't let them just sit and think about unsolved problems, and their Thinker side is starving while they vibe-code.

A Broader Question

This isn't just about one developer's personal struggle. It's about what we lose when we optimize for speed and efficiency at the cost of deep thinking. The author quotes Philipp Mainländer: "God has died and his death was the life of the world." It's a poetic way of saying that something fundamental has changed, and we're still figuring out what that means.

As AI continues to advance, making more and more problems "easy" to solve, we may find ourselves in a world where deep, prolonged thinking becomes increasingly rare. And if we lose that ability, what else do we lose with it?

The question remains: can we find a way to satisfy both The Builder and The Thinker in an AI-driven world, or are we destined to choose between building fast and thinking deeply?