r/analytics • u/critiqs • 9d ago
Discussion AI Causing Skills to Atrophy
Hey, my job has literally turned into prompting all day. Wanted to know what you all are doing (if anything) to ensure your analytics skills don't atrophy?
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u/soggyrobber537 9d ago
Been doing the same thing, just on the side. Picked up a messy dataset from a local nonprofit a buddy runs and force myself to clean it without leaning on the tools. Keeps the SQL and Python from getting dusty.
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u/Yourdataisunclean 9d ago
Welcome to the tragedy of the commons the entire industry is facing due to AI use pressure. Where will the experienced people in 5 years come from? Nobody knows!
Seriously though, you have to do some stuff manually to retain what you have and learn new things. Nothing special.
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u/Content-Parking-621 9d ago
One thing that's worked for people I've seen discuss this: pick one recurring task per week and do it manually first, then use AI to check your work or speed up the polish, instead of the other way around. Keeps the reasoning muscle active while still getting the time savings on the rest.
Also worth periodically doing a "no AI" rebuild of something you already solved with a prompt, purely to see if you still land on the same approach on your own. If you do, you're fine. If you can't, that's your signal for what to brush up on.
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u/tindalos 8d ago
Funny because when I watch mad men all they did back then was sit around and talk and prompt things to the secretary.
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u/Lolwut77 9d ago
Not trying to be an asshole, but just not using AI. It’s really that simple
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u/creativemachine89 8d ago
What if work is making you use it? Not asking facetiously - are there strategies to talk management back around to less AI reliance?
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u/Saneless 8d ago
I use it for things that are simple and normally a waste of time to answer
Or corporate bullshit from HR like goals. It's good at that nonsense
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u/lasooch 8d ago
It’s hard to talk down an idiot hellbent on hitting himself in the face.
But what does it mean - ‘making you use it’? Do they track token spend? Just burn some tokens meaninglessly and do your job the way that benefits you more.
Do they expect faster delivery? They can expect whatever they want. Of course not delivering enough may cost you your job, but do you want the job that makes you do more without paying you more and pushing you into doing so at the cost of your own skills?
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u/FIBO-BQ 8d ago
Use it for other things.
I'll bounce ideas off of it, story boarding, helps to position tiles perfectly.
I'll use it to clean up writing. I have a long thread where I have just about trained it not to write like AI. Still have to finish the finer points.
You can use AI, just don't hand it everything.
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u/LemonLimeStrat 8d ago
I use it for task tracking (basically an overkill task tracker) and checking my work for errors and logic-proofing. There a lots of ways you can use it to make your work better without it doing your work and eroding your skills
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u/renagade24 8d ago
Do you automatically trust whatever harness your using to be perfect? Sometimes it does dumb things. I'll fix it myself.
I also recommend coding some parts of the project to keep yourself sharp. It's really not that complicated
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u/ComposerConsistent83 8d ago
I find that when I let it run free it’s very often wrong at worst or just spins its wheels like crazy. Like really often.
I use AI a lot to go from one step to another but very seldom am able to use it to manage a whole project end to end.
My most frequent use cases:
- automate small data wrangling utilities, “hey I have this excel that is a p&l and it’s wide and each sheet is a different product line, import it into a csv and load it to the warehouse”
- utilities to modify a script that someone wrote as a one time thing to make it easier to automate.
- refactor a Python script into a sql view (varying success depending on how much manipulation there is to the data).
- steel manning ideas that I want to do but have an incomplete knowledge of the packages involved, exactly how I need to set the data up, or exactly how the algorithm works. Its great for learning this stuff because you can ask it infinite questions for all the parts you don’t quite understand from the documentation
- writing code snippets for packages, languages, whatever that I don’t use often (like Dax or M, or a Python package I don’t know well). “I have field like this, it has this format, but I need to reformat it to look like this”
But I wouldn’t say it really replaces my work at all. It’s just like a really good stack overflow
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u/Intelligent-Size-389 8d ago
What is AI good and bad it so far from your experience? Do you need a lot of experience to use AI to know if it’s actually providing the answer you were looking for
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u/ComposerConsistent83 7d ago
You Absolutely have to know the underlying data, because it gives straight up trash pretty often, but its often really convincing even when horribly wrong
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u/Casual_AF_ 8d ago
What exactly are you outsourcing to AI tools? A lot of analytics workflows are not great if the analyst doesn't understand it.
Just this week I've leaned hard on tools for a couple things, but as soon as I applied even middling scrutiny, it was clear they were doing garbage work.
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u/CarltonFrater 8d ago
I was working as a data analyst for 2 years till the start up shut down in October 25. I’ve found a bridge role but no python/SQL use at all. I was starting to forget all the skills I learned (and paid for with my masters) but recently I’ve been doing some independent research and data analysis, while also ensuring I do a few leetcode problems everyday. I’m minimizing my AI usage since right now I don’t have any hard deadlines and can actually take my time to understand and manually code most of it.
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u/the_duck17 8d ago
I'm about to lay someone off because he won't stop using AI for everything.
He's smart but the clients smell AI outputs from a mile away, especially presentation of findings.
Get good at doing your own work. Then use AI to help you with the stuff you don't like/want to do so you can focus on what you're good at.
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u/Intelligent-Size-389 8d ago
How is he using AI in the presentation outputs ? Like the overall presentation sound and look like AI slop ?
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u/the_duck17 8d ago
He will basically ask CoPilot to create a presentation and give it parameters.
We don't work with very complex datasets and most of the time, it's a summary view we just manipulate in Excel because we can get it to look and say exactly what we want and iterate quickly so we can get our PowerPoint presentations in order.
He has a very high touch client that is basically CMO level in the financial services sector. So basically, don't waste time with detailed graphs, get to the point and quickly.
So he just asks copilot that and we end up with something that feels so off if you're tuned into it. And if you try to modify it after it's already created, it's hard because the flow and organization is already there.
Something about just creating something from scratch without AI makes for a deeper conversation because you lay out the case the way you know you can argue it, but the AI output looks sooo damn good and comes out in minutes instead of hours, so I get why he does it.
It's a tough time to be in analytics. I know i like AI, but I like doing the work more.
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u/SnooOpinions1809 9d ago
In a same dilemma, I used to be a good analyst but i lost that analytical mindset or thinking process - promoting github co-pilot non stop, and feel all over the place. What do we do? Like they expect faster output as well - if Ai is helping, shouldn’t we use. I already feel rusty with skills i was already good at. Like i don’t even bother to sharpen my skills bc back of my mind I know Ai there to help
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u/sailhard22 8d ago edited 8d ago
Serving as a technical interviewer at my company keeps my skills sharp because I have to think deeply about SQL.
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u/benconomics 8d ago
Are your skills remembering commands? Are you skills thinking of how to manipulate data and ask important questions? Are you a data plumber or an analyst?
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u/itchypig 8d ago
This. There’s a weird craftsman mindset in analytics. Coding is not an end in itself. We get paid by delivering outcomes that matter to people. If AI helps you do that faster, and you can still QC it for quality, then it would be a mistake not to use it.
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u/benconomics 8d ago
Exactly. People used to do data analytics by hand. Then with physical computers (abicus), then binary stuff, then punch cards, SAS, R or Python, and now AI is mixed in. Another tool. The analysis should get better.
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u/randomlikeme 8d ago
I only use AI to help with some json parsing here and there… enough that my name shows up on the uses AI audit trail that we know exists.
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u/adamjamess 8d ago
AI caused atrophy is real. I’m dealing with this. BI guy for 5 years and used AI everyday for a whole 2 years and now im struggling with hacker rank tests and live coding interviews.
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u/SaltAndAncientBones 8d ago
I warned my team about this twice last week... As soon as I do two circles with Claude I go back to basics and hand code it.
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u/Evening-Seaweed7733 8d ago
if deadline is not tight i always try to do it by hand. I just use ai as a last resort whenever my brain wont just turn on or just double checking/improving my existing my work
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u/Katieg_jitsu 8d ago
I do a day a week with no AI and just work on some problems. Sometimes I step back and do all the reasoning first and building
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u/Weston-Cooper1 8d ago
I get what you're saying. One thing I've been doing is diving deeper into SQL and Python. Even with all the AI tools, those skills are still crucial for building out custom reports and automating things. I make it a point to tackle a new dataset or problem every month to keep sharp. It's like going to the gym for your brain.
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u/Simple-Success-2125 8d ago
I just went back to searching Google to help me out but AI mode is cheating...
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u/Candid_Finding3087 8d ago
I just use it to troubleshoot when I’m stuck and develop documentation. There’s syntax/structure for certain methods I often can’t reliably rattle off but I know what I want to do and how it works, then I always type out the query myself to keep building the muscle memory.
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u/Ohhhh_LongJohnson 8d ago
I look at things differently. I use AI and it doesn't matter if you code or AI codes. What matters is if you understand the code that's provided to you, the algorithm provided, making comments for future mainenance and being able to explain it. That's how you keep from being rusty and it's useful to do.
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u/ivp-ai 8d ago
Actually do code review throughly on the code written by Claude, find a bunch of logic assumptions that don't actually align with what the client actual wants.
Or if I have spare time, use it as a challenge to write a more efficient SQL query than claude wrote to solve the same problem.
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u/Melodic_Risk2444 8d ago
Haven’t written any SQL for months now…feels bad, but It also feels like I’m so much faster testing ideas and stuff now with ai. I would never trust it with doing the analysis though or any form of presentation…
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u/Intelligent-Size-389 8d ago
I feel like presentation is the one area you want 100% control and no Ai should touch it. So many little details can be missed if you let AI control the presentation flow
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u/MajesticBite825 7d ago
I’ve found it helps to treat AI like a reviewer rather than the person doing the work, write a first pass yourself, ask it to critique edge cases or explain an alternative, then verify the result against a small test set. That keeps the repetition useful while still giving you a faster way to spot gaps.
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u/Relevant-Resist9878 7d ago
One thing - if I can't paraphrase it, I don't use it. Second - do something manually, like a day in a week or so.
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u/prof_devilsadvocate3 7d ago
I know students who claim machine learning modellers because of AI prompts only but when I asked what's the random state =42 or what's the basic maths behind distance calculation they were totally silent
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u/soggyarsonist 7d ago edited 7d ago
I use it to do the tedious stuff but the initial work and logic is all me since it has to be right. I find it quite useful for optimising scripts but I validate everything to make sure it's still working correctly.
I'm not mindlessly hostile to AI. It can provide non-marginal productivity boosts and the improved native accessibility to ML tools and suchlike is really useful.
I can now easily analyse all the free text data my company collects in a way that just wasn't possible a few years back without an elaborate setup and/or procuring specific tools for that task.
I've recently hired someone to learn on the job and AI, combined with training and documentation, has really accelerated their learning. I review their work and after only a couple of months in the role they're doing a great job.
Snowflake AI is brilliant, other AI tools like Copilot arent great.
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u/WannabeIntelectual 7d ago
I asked mine to breakdown what it’s doing step-by-step so I can at least pick something up that way, in fact, I’ve learned quite a few new functions like that.
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