11 ms·

The skill of the future is not 'AI', but 'Focus'

184 points by weird_trousers 1y ago

Ozzie_osman 1y ago
> Search enginers offer a good choice between Exploration (crawl through the list and pages of results) and Exploitation (click on the top result). LLMs, however, do not give this choice. I've actually found that LLMs are great at exploration for me. I'd argue, even better than exploitation. I've solved many a complex problem by using an LLM as a thought partner. I've refined many ideas by getting the LLM to brainstorm with me. There's this awesome feedback loop you can create with the LLM when you're in exploration mode that is impossible to replicate on your own, and still somewhat difficult even with a human thought partner.
- tombert 1y ago
  I'm kind of in the same boat. I've started doing something that I have been meaning to do for years, which is to go through all the seminal papers on concurrency and make a minimal implementation of them. I did Raft recently, then Lamport timestamps, then a lot of the common Mutex algorithms, then Paxos, and now I'm working on Ambient Calculus. I've attempted this before, but I would always get stuck on some detail that I didn't fully grasp in the paper and would abandon the project. Using ChatGPT, I've been able to unblock myself much easier. I will ask it to clarify stuff in the paper, and sometimes it doesn't even matter if it's "wrong", so much as it's giving me some form of feedback and helps me think of other ideas on how to fix things. Doing this, I manage to actually finish these projects, and I think I more or less understand them, and I certainly understand them more than I would have had I abandoned them a quarter of the way through like I usually do.
- boleary-gl 1y ago
  I was a skeptic until I started seeing it this way. I do think that this is exactly why we’ve seen LLMs overtake search engines so quickly in the last 12-18 months. They allow a feedback loop that just doesn’t exist scrolling and clicking.
- marbro 1y ago
  [dead]
HiPHInch 1y ago
the Exploitation and exploration got me thinking, what if LLM generate, say, 5 results at a time and let user choose the best
- mock-possum 1y ago
  I have that experience plenty with gpt and gemini
ToucanLoucan 1y ago
I'm definitely gonna get hate for saying this but: the rise of coding with LLM assistants is going to worsen an issue our industry is already struggling with: we have tons of developers out there who do not know their fundamentals in programming, who are utterly rudderless without heaps upon heaps of framework code doing lots of work for them, who are now being further enabled by machines that write even that code for them with some tweaking afterwards. I have interacted with software developers at conferences who cannot do basic things with computers, like navigate file systems, or make changes to the Windows registry, where to get and how to use environment variables, how to diagnose and fix PC issues... Like in a perfect world your IT department sorts this stuff for you but I struggle to take seriously someone who claims to create software who seemingly lacks basic computer literacy in a number of areas. And I'm sorry, "it compiles and runs" is the bare fucking minimum for software quality. We have machines these days that would run circles around my first PC in the late 90's, but despite that, everything is slower and runs worse. My desktop messaging apps are each currently sucking up over 600 MB of RAM apiece, which is nearly 3 times what my original PC had total. Everything is some bloated shite that requires internet access now at all times or it utterly crashes and dies, and I'm sorry but I cannot separate in my mind the fact that we have seemingly a large contingent of software developers out there that can't bloody use computers to thank for this. And cheap-ass management, to be clear, but I think these are nested problems.
- iwontberude 1y ago
  > It compiles and runs …and rapidly becomes deprecated not due to quality but because the requirements for operation or development changed substantially. This second order effects make the “compile and run” focus paradoxically efficient and correct use of resources. Engineers, especially academically experienced ones, prematurely optimize for correctness and arbitrary dimensions of quality because they are disconnected from and motivated by interests orthogonal to their users.
  - ToucanLoucan 1y ago
    > …and rapidly becomes deprecated not due to quality but because the requirements for operation or development changed substantially. Did they? Like I have no data for this nor would I know how one would set about getting it, but like, from my personal experience and the experiences of folks I've spoken to for basically my entire career, the requirements we have for our software barely change at all. I do not expect Outlook to have chat and reaction functionality. I do not desire Windows to monitor my ongoing usage of my computer to make suggestions on how I might work more efficiently. These things were not requested by me or any user I have ever spoken to. In fact I would take that a step further and say that if your scope and requirements are shifting that wildly, that often, that you did a poor job of finding them in the first place, irrespective of where they've now landed. They are far more often the hysterical tinkerings demanded by product managers who must justify their salaries with some notion of what's "next" for Outlook, because for some reason someone at Microsoft decided that Outlook being a feature complete and good email client was suddenly, for no particular reason, not good enough anymore. And again speaking from my and friend's experiences, I would in fact love it very much thank you if Microsoft would just make their products good, function well, look nice and be nice to use, and then stop. Provide security updates of course, maybe an occasional UI refresh if you've got some really good ideas for it, but apart from that, just stop changing it. Let it be feature complete, quality software. > Engineers, especially academically experienced ones, prematurely optimize for correctness and arbitrary dimensions of quality because they are disconnected from and motivated by interests orthogonal to their users. I don't think we're disconnected at all from our users. I want, as a software developer, to turn out quality software that does the job we say it does on the box. My users, citation many conversations with many of them, want the software to do what it says on the box, and do it well. These motivations are not orthogonal at all. Now, certainly it's possible to get so lost in the minutia of design that one loses the plot, that's definitely where a good project manager will shine. However, to say these are different concerns entirely is IMO, a bridge too far. My users probably don't give a shit about the technical minutia of implementing a given feature: they care if it works. However, if I implement it correctly, with the standards I know to work well for that technology, then I will be happy, and they will be happy.
arkj 1y ago
Losing focus as a skill is something I see with every batch of new students. It’s not just LLMs, almost every app and startup is competing for the same limited attention from every user. What LLMs have done for most of my students is remove all the barriers to an answer they once had to work for. It’s easy to get hooked on fast answers and forget to ask why something works. That said, I think LLMs can support exploration—often beyond what Googling ever did—if we approach them the right way. I’ve seen moments where students pushed back on a first answer and uncovered deeper insights, but only because they chose to dig. The real danger isn’t the tool, it’s forgetting how to use it thoughtfully.
- schneems 1y ago
  I feel that respecting the focus of others is also an important skill. If I'm pulled 27 different ways. Then when I finally get around to another engineer’s question “I need help” is a demand for my synchronous time and focus. Versus “I’m having problems with X, I need to Y, can you help me Z” could turn into a chat, or it could mean I’m able to deliver the needed information at once and move on. Many people these days don’t even bother to write questions. They write statements and expect you to infer the question from the statement. On the flip side, a thing we could learn more from LLMs is how to give a good response by explaining our reasoning out loud. Not “do X” but instead “It sounds like you want to W, and that’s blocked by Y. That is happening because of Z. To fix it you need to X because it …”
  - daveguy 1y ago
    > Many people these days don’t even bother to write questions. They write statements and expect you to infer the question from the statement. This is one of my biggest pet peeves. Not even asking for help just stating a complaint.
    - MichaelZuo 1y ago
      Well it seems like an easy way to filter them into the ignore pile…
throeijfjfj 1y ago
People will need AI just to communicate in a polite manner! What is todays politically correct language? Who is current approved celebrity? What if you quoted something, that is somehow offensive today?! No, skill for future is using AI to carve out safe space for yourself, so you can focus without distractions!
djsavvy 1y ago
> This idea summarizes why I disagree with those who equate the LLM revolution to the rise of search engines, like Google in the 90s. Search enginers offer a good choice between Exploration (crawl through the list and pages of results) and Exploitation (click on the top result). > LLMs, however, do not give this choice, and tend to encourage immediate exploitation instead. Users may explore if the first solution does not work, but the first choice is always to exploit. Well said, and an interesting idea, but most of my LLM usage (besides copilot autocomplete) is actually very search-engine-esque. I ask it to explain existing design decisions, or to search for a library that fits my needs, or come up with related queries so I can learn more. Once I've chosen a library or an approach for the task, I'll have the LLM write out some code. For anything significantly more substantive code than copilot completions, I almost always do some exploring before I exploit.
- trollbridge 1y ago
  I’m finding the same usage of LLMs in terms of what actually I use them for day to day. When I need to look up arcane information, an LLM generally does better than a Google search.
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    How do you verify the accuracy of "arcane information" produced by an LLM? "Arcane Information" is absolutely the worst possible use case I can imagine for LLMs right now. You might as well ask an intern to just make something up
    - trollbridge 1y ago
      I check the sources. Usually this is documentation for some package I’ve never used before. I will also admit to using LLMs to create unit tests, and then building a test suite to test this unit tests.
schneems 1y ago
The flip side of focus (to me) is responsiveness. A post to SO might deliver me the exact answer I need, but it will take focus to write the correct question and patience to wait for a response and then time spent iterating in the comments. In contrast an LLM will happily tell me the wrong thing, instantaneously. It’s responsive. Good engineers must also be responsive to their teammates, managers, customers, and the business. Great engineers also find a way to weave in periods of focus. I’m curious how others navigate these? It seems there was a large culture shift when Covid hit and non-async non-remote people all moved online and expected online to work like in person. I feel pushed to be more responsive at the cost of focus. On the flip side, I’ve given time and space to engineers so they could focus only to come back and find they had abused that time and trust. Or some well meaning engineers got lost in the weeds and lost the narrative of *why* they were focusing. It is super easy to measure responsiveness: how long did it take to respond. It’s much harder to measure quality and growth. Especially when being vulnerable about what you don’t know or the failure to make progress is a truly senior level skill. How do we find balance?
- mrj 1y ago
  Notification blindness. I've been struggling with finding balance for years as a front-line manager who codes. I need to be responsive-ish to incoming queries but also have my own tasks. If I am too responsive, it's easy for my work to become my evening time and my working hours for everybody else. The "weaving" in of periods of focus is maintained by ignoring notifications and checking them in batches. Nobody gets to interrupt me when I'm in focus mode (much chagrin for my wife) and I can actually get stuff done. This happened a lot by accident, I get enough notifications for long enough that I don't really hear or notice them just like I don't hear or notice the trains that pass near my house.
  - MrDarcy 1y ago
    This also worked for me. I flipped to permanent DND mode with clear communication I check notifications at specific times of day. There are very few notifications that can’t wait a few hours for my attention and those that cannot have the expectation of being a phone call.
quantadev 1y ago
For new developers wanting to learn to code, AI is great today to help them. For experienced developers AI is also great because it can write tons of code for us that we already know how to evaluate and test, because of years of experience doing it in the "pre-AI" world. However the future is uncertain, when we reach a point where most developers have used generated code most of their lives, and never developed the coding skills that are required to fully understand the code. I guess we'll adapt to it. We always do. I mean for example, I can no longer do long division on paper like I did in elementary school, so I rely totally on computers for all calculating.
bufferoverflow 1y ago
This article makes no sense. It criticizes current LLMs and then without stopping for a second pretends future LLMs will have these problems. Even though hallucination levels have been going down with every generation. Even though every test and benchmark we can come up with, LLMs do better with every generation.
- ToucanLoucan 1y ago
  > Even though hallucination levels have been going down with every generation. Gonna need a BIG citation on that one, chief. > Even though every test and benchmark we can come up with, LLMs do better with every generation. Has it occurred to you the people making the tests and benchmarks are, more often than not, the same people making the LLM? Like yeah if I'm given carte blanche to make my own test cases and I'm accountable to no one and nothing else, my output quality would be steadily going up too. The other day I tried asking Copilot for a good framework for accomplishing a task, and it made one up. I tried the query again, more specifically, and it referred me to a framework in another language. And yes, I specified.
  - financetechbro 1y ago
    > Gonna need a BIG citation on that one, chief. OP has consumed so much LLM they’ve started to hallucinate themselves
    - ToucanLoucan 1y ago
      Perhaps the real hallucinations were the friends we made along the way
- otabdeveloper4 1y ago
  > Future bicycles will fly. Just two more rounds of venture capital investment, trust the plan.
  - sebastiennight 1y ago
gitroom 1y ago
Good read!
obscurette 1y ago
I'm old enough to remember myriad of experts 10+ years ago who were active selling a view, that smartphones with constantly connected social media will change everything, we just have to learn to use it wisely.
- marbro 1y ago
  [dead]
- kennyadam 1y ago
  They weren't wrong. Unfortunately, we didn't use it wisely and obliterated objective reality and allowed people to create spaces where they never have to engage with anything challenging.
  - disgruntledphd2 1y ago
    This isn't smartphones, it's the Internet. The only reason that smartphones made a difference is that way more people use online services on mobile than would've done the same on the Internet. The convenience and ubiquity lead to a step change.
- rglover 1y ago
  And AI will be no different. People will rush head first into the fire and be flabbergasted when all of the hype and promise of utopia results in utter chaos and inequality. If we assume that civilization is already teetering thanks to the smartphone/social media, the fallout of AI would make Thomas Cole blush.
- JambalayaJimbo 1y ago
  It did change everything
alganet 1y ago
Using aimbot in Gunbound didn't make players better. Yes, it changed everything: it destroyed the game ecosystem. Can humanity use "literacy aimbot" responsibly? I don't know. It's just a cautionary tale. I'm not expecting to win an argument. I could come up with counter anectdotes myself: ABS made breaking in slippery conditions easier and safer. People didn't learned to brake better, they still pushed the pedal harder thinking it would make it stop faster, not realizing the complex dynamics of "making a car stop". That changed everything. It made cars safer. Also, just an anecdote. Sure, a lot of people need focus. Some people don't, they need to branch out. Some systems need aimbot (like ABS), some don't (like Gunbound). The future should be home to all kinds of skills.
- cadamsdotcom 1y ago
  Appreciate the balanced take. An improvement to a technology can be good, or it can be harmful - and beyond a certain point, further amplification can destroy society and the commons which we all benefit from. Coca leaves are a relatively benign part of daily life in Peru & a few other surrounding countries - they’re on the table in your hotel lobby, ready to be stirred into your tea. But cocaine - same base but made more intense with technology - causes many problems - and don’t even start about crack cocaine. So when thinking of technology through the lens of what it amplifies we can consider traditional Internet research & writing contrasted vs. using AI - the latter gives instant answers and often an instant first draft. Great for some; harmful for others. Where that point lies and what factors contribute is different for every individual.
  - alganet 1y ago
    You are right in the sense that addiction and overuse are common concerns regarding new technologies. Similar concerns existed for the TV and video-games, for example. The idea of a balance works if you put the problem on a spectrum. "Too much, then it's bad" is a general good advice for anything. In high school, I started learning geometry. I was puzzled by the angles in the exercises always being 30, 60, 90, 120 (notable angles). I tried a lot to come up with something that could work outside notable angles on my own. I figured that it would be on the next class (it never got there), until I gave up and asked my math teacher. She also didn't knew how to do it by hand. Until this day I don't know. That's probably due to calculators existing. If they didn't, we would be forced to know. Maybe I would have failed that class and had to work harder, maybe not. I will never know. There is no such thing as an addiction to calculators. I am not against them. I don't think there are too many calculators in the world. Good, honest tech. However, I wish doing some math outside notable angles were in my high school curriculum. My teacher was kind and helped curious students. I wish she knew how to do it so she could teach me. I know that now I could learn that on the internet, or ask an LLM to explain it to me. Notable angles are not the point, right? Just another anecdote. I chose Gunbound aimbot as an example of something that is not good, not even a little bit. Not because aimbot is addictive (it's the contrary, cheating takes away the reward sensation), but because it unbalanced the game ecosystem. No one could beat the cheaters, who rapidly reached a plateau themselves. If everyone used aimbot, there was no reason to play it, to learn the quirks of each character, to practice, to train your skills. It's just an anecdote. I tend to stay away from those, but sometimes they're useful. Regarding focus now, the "skill of the future" and its relation to AI: We always needed focus. It is as skill of the past too, not tied to a niche tech, not the only human skill, not a point in a spectrum.
vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
Being allowed to focus seems to be a privilege these days. When I started in the 90s I could work on something for weeks without much interruption. These days there is almost always some scrum master, project manager or random other manager who wants to get an update or do some planning. Doing actual work seems to have taken a backseat to talking about work.
knallfrosch 1y ago
When I use LLMs, I quickly lose focus. Copy-paste, copy-paste. No real understanding of the solutions, even for areas of my expertise. I just don't feel like understanding the flood of information, without any real purpose behind the understanding. While I probably (?) get done more, I also just don't enjoy it. But I also can't go back to googling for hours now that this ready-made solution exists. I wish it would have never been invented. (Obviously scoped to my enjoyment of hobbyist projects, let's keep AI cancer research out of the picture..)
- spacemadness 1y ago
  I recommend using them to ask questions about why something works rather than spit out code. They excel at that a lot of the time.
- dimal 1y ago
  I’ve gotten into this mode too, but often when I do this, I eventually find myself in a rabbit hole dead end that the AI unwittingly lead me into. So I’m slowing down and using them to understand the code better. Unfortunately, all the tools are optimized for vibe coding, getting the quick answer without understanding, so it feels like I’m fighting the tools.
bikedspiritlake 1y ago
Phrasing LLMs as encouraging exploitation is important, because they can still be powerful tools for exploration. The difference comes in the interface for LLMs, which is heavily focused on exploitation whereas search engine interfaces encourage exploration. Newer models often end responses with questions and thoughts that encourage exploration, as do features like ChatGPT's follow up suggestions. However, a lot of work needs to be done with LLM interfaces to balance exploitation and exploration while avoiding limiting AI's capabilities.
blotfaba 1y ago
On the other hand: with thinking models, agents, and future models to come we are offloading the exploration phase to the models themselves. It really depends on constraints and pressures.
thih9 1y ago
> LLMs, however, do not give this choice, and tend to encourage immediate exploitation instead. Users may explore if the first solution does not work, but the first choice is always to exploit. You can ask the llm to generate a number of solutions though - the exploration is possible and relatively easy then. And I say that as someone who dislikes llms with a passion.
friendlyprezz 1y ago
The number one skill in the future is the ability to predict the future Always has been
PaulRobinson 1y ago
It's going to be a different kind of focus. Technologies are regularly predicted to diminish a capability that was previously considered important. Babbage came up with the ideas for his engines after getting frustrated with log tables - how many people reading this have used a log table or calculated one recently? Calculators meant kids wouldn't need to do arithmetic by hand any more and so would not be able to do maths. In truth they just didn't have to do it by hand any more - they still needed the skills to interpret the results, they just didn't have to do the hard work of creating the outputs by pen and paper. They also lost the skill of using slide rules which were used to give us approximations, because calculators allowed us to be precise - they were no longer needed. Computers, similar story. Then the same came with search engines in our pockets. "Oh no, people can find an answer to anything in seconds, they won't remember things". This is borne out, there have been studies that show recall diminishes if your phone is even in the same room. But you still need to know what to look for, and know what to do with what you find. I think this'll still be true in the future, and I think TFA kind of agrees, but seems to be doing the "all may be lost" vibe by insisting that you still need foundational skills. You don't need to know the foundational skills if you want to know what the answer to 24923 * 923 is, you can quickly find out the answer and use that answer however you need. I just think the work shifts - you'll still need to know how to craft your inputs carefully (vibe coding works better if you develop a more detailed specification), and you'll still need to process the output, but you'll become less connected to the foundation and for 99% of the time, that's absolutely fine in the same way it has been with calculators, and so on.
kazinator 1y ago
I frequent Hacker News and have not noticed that much buzz around AI and LLMs. The vast bulk of that buzz is insubstantial and therefore off topic here. Sites like LinkedIn on the other hand are overrun with the swill.
namaria 1y ago
"In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." Herbert Simon (1971)

> Search enginers offer a good choice between Exploration (crawl through the list and pages of results) and Exploitation (click on the top result). LLMs, however, do not give this choice. I've actually found that LLMs are great at exploration for me. I'd argue, even better than exploitation. I've solved many a complex problem by using an LLM as a thought partner. I've refined many ideas by getting the LLM to brainstorm with me. There's this awesome feedback loop you can create with the LLM when you're in exploration mode that is impossible to replicate on your own, and still somewhat difficult even with a human thought partner.

tombert 1y ago
I'm kind of in the same boat. I've started doing something that I have been meaning to do for years, which is to go through all the seminal papers on concurrency and make a minimal implementation of them. I did Raft recently, then Lamport timestamps, then a lot of the common Mutex algorithms, then Paxos, and now I'm working on Ambient Calculus. I've attempted this before, but I would always get stuck on some detail that I didn't fully grasp in the paper and would abandon the project. Using ChatGPT, I've been able to unblock myself much easier. I will ask it to clarify stuff in the paper, and sometimes it doesn't even matter if it's "wrong", so much as it's giving me some form of feedback and helps me think of other ideas on how to fix things. Doing this, I manage to actually finish these projects, and I think I more or less understand them, and I certainly understand them more than I would have had I abandoned them a quarter of the way through like I usually do.
boleary-gl 1y ago
I was a skeptic until I started seeing it this way. I do think that this is exactly why we’ve seen LLMs overtake search engines so quickly in the last 12-18 months. They allow a feedback loop that just doesn’t exist scrolling and clicking.
marbro 1y ago
[dead]

HiPHInch 1y ago

the Exploitation and exploration got me thinking, what if LLM generate, say, 5 results at a time and let user choose the best

mock-possum 1y ago
I have that experience plenty with gpt and gemini

ToucanLoucan 1y ago

I'm definitely gonna get hate for saying this but: the rise of coding with LLM assistants is going to worsen an issue our industry is already struggling with: we have tons of developers out there who do not know their fundamentals in programming, who are utterly rudderless without heaps upon heaps of framework code doing lots of work for them, who are now being further enabled by machines that write even that code for them with some tweaking afterwards. I have interacted with software developers at conferences who cannot do basic things with computers, like navigate file systems, or make changes to the Windows registry, where to get and how to use environment variables, how to diagnose and fix PC issues... Like in a perfect world your IT department sorts this stuff for you but I struggle to take seriously someone who claims to create software who seemingly lacks basic computer literacy in a number of areas. And I'm sorry, "it compiles and runs" is the bare fucking minimum for software quality. We have machines these days that would run circles around my first PC in the late 90's, but despite that, everything is slower and runs worse. My desktop messaging apps are each currently sucking up over 600 MB of RAM apiece, which is nearly 3 times what my original PC had total. Everything is some bloated shite that requires internet access now at all times or it utterly crashes and dies, and I'm sorry but I cannot separate in my mind the fact that we have seemingly a large contingent of software developers out there that can't bloody use computers to thank for this. And cheap-ass management, to be clear, but I think these are nested problems.

iwontberude 1y ago
> It compiles and runs …and rapidly becomes deprecated not due to quality but because the requirements for operation or development changed substantially. This second order effects make the “compile and run” focus paradoxically efficient and correct use of resources. Engineers, especially academically experienced ones, prematurely optimize for correctness and arbitrary dimensions of quality because they are disconnected from and motivated by interests orthogonal to their users.
- ToucanLoucan 1y ago
  > …and rapidly becomes deprecated not due to quality but because the requirements for operation or development changed substantially. Did they? Like I have no data for this nor would I know how one would set about getting it, but like, from my personal experience and the experiences of folks I've spoken to for basically my entire career, the requirements we have for our software barely change at all. I do not expect Outlook to have chat and reaction functionality. I do not desire Windows to monitor my ongoing usage of my computer to make suggestions on how I might work more efficiently. These things were not requested by me or any user I have ever spoken to. In fact I would take that a step further and say that if your scope and requirements are shifting that wildly, that often, that you did a poor job of finding them in the first place, irrespective of where they've now landed. They are far more often the hysterical tinkerings demanded by product managers who must justify their salaries with some notion of what's "next" for Outlook, because for some reason someone at Microsoft decided that Outlook being a feature complete and good email client was suddenly, for no particular reason, not good enough anymore. And again speaking from my and friend's experiences, I would in fact love it very much thank you if Microsoft would just make their products good, function well, look nice and be nice to use, and then stop. Provide security updates of course, maybe an occasional UI refresh if you've got some really good ideas for it, but apart from that, just stop changing it. Let it be feature complete, quality software. > Engineers, especially academically experienced ones, prematurely optimize for correctness and arbitrary dimensions of quality because they are disconnected from and motivated by interests orthogonal to their users. I don't think we're disconnected at all from our users. I want, as a software developer, to turn out quality software that does the job we say it does on the box. My users, citation many conversations with many of them, want the software to do what it says on the box, and do it well. These motivations are not orthogonal at all. Now, certainly it's possible to get so lost in the minutia of design that one loses the plot, that's definitely where a good project manager will shine. However, to say these are different concerns entirely is IMO, a bridge too far. My users probably don't give a shit about the technical minutia of implementing a given feature: they care if it works. However, if I implement it correctly, with the standards I know to work well for that technology, then I will be happy, and they will be happy.

arkj 1y ago

Losing focus as a skill is something I see with every batch of new students. It’s not just LLMs, almost every app and startup is competing for the same limited attention from every user. What LLMs have done for most of my students is remove all the barriers to an answer they once had to work for. It’s easy to get hooked on fast answers and forget to ask why something works. That said, I think LLMs can support exploration—often beyond what Googling ever did—if we approach them the right way. I’ve seen moments where students pushed back on a first answer and uncovered deeper insights, but only because they chose to dig. The real danger isn’t the tool, it’s forgetting how to use it thoughtfully.

schneems 1y ago
I feel that respecting the focus of others is also an important skill. If I'm pulled 27 different ways. Then when I finally get around to another engineer’s question “I need help” is a demand for my synchronous time and focus. Versus “I’m having problems with X, I need to Y, can you help me Z” could turn into a chat, or it could mean I’m able to deliver the needed information at once and move on. Many people these days don’t even bother to write questions. They write statements and expect you to infer the question from the statement. On the flip side, a thing we could learn more from LLMs is how to give a good response by explaining our reasoning out loud. Not “do X” but instead “It sounds like you want to W, and that’s blocked by Y. That is happening because of Z. To fix it you need to X because it …”
- daveguy 1y ago
  > Many people these days don’t even bother to write questions. They write statements and expect you to infer the question from the statement. This is one of my biggest pet peeves. Not even asking for help just stating a complaint.
  - MichaelZuo 1y ago
    Well it seems like an easy way to filter them into the ignore pile…

throeijfjfj 1y ago

People will need AI just to communicate in a polite manner! What is todays politically correct language? Who is current approved celebrity? What if you quoted something, that is somehow offensive today?! No, skill for future is using AI to carve out safe space for yourself, so you can focus without distractions!

djsavvy 1y ago

> This idea summarizes why I disagree with those who equate the LLM revolution to the rise of search engines, like Google in the 90s. Search enginers offer a good choice between Exploration (crawl through the list and pages of results) and Exploitation (click on the top result). > LLMs, however, do not give this choice, and tend to encourage immediate exploitation instead. Users may explore if the first solution does not work, but the first choice is always to exploit. Well said, and an interesting idea, but most of my LLM usage (besides copilot autocomplete) is actually very search-engine-esque. I ask it to explain existing design decisions, or to search for a library that fits my needs, or come up with related queries so I can learn more. Once I've chosen a library or an approach for the task, I'll have the LLM write out some code. For anything significantly more substantive code than copilot completions, I almost always do some exploring before I exploit.

trollbridge 1y ago
I’m finding the same usage of LLMs in terms of what actually I use them for day to day. When I need to look up arcane information, an LLM generally does better than a Google search.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  How do you verify the accuracy of "arcane information" produced by an LLM? "Arcane Information" is absolutely the worst possible use case I can imagine for LLMs right now. You might as well ask an intern to just make something up
  - trollbridge 1y ago
    I check the sources. Usually this is documentation for some package I’ve never used before. I will also admit to using LLMs to create unit tests, and then building a test suite to test this unit tests.

schneems 1y ago

The flip side of focus (to me) is responsiveness. A post to SO might deliver me the exact answer I need, but it will take focus to write the correct question and patience to wait for a response and then time spent iterating in the comments. In contrast an LLM will happily tell me the wrong thing, instantaneously. It’s responsive. Good engineers must also be responsive to their teammates, managers, customers, and the business. Great engineers also find a way to weave in periods of focus. I’m curious how others navigate these? It seems there was a large culture shift when Covid hit and non-async non-remote people all moved online and expected online to work like in person. I feel pushed to be more responsive at the cost of focus. On the flip side, I’ve given time and space to engineers so they could focus only to come back and find they had abused that time and trust. Or some well meaning engineers got lost in the weeds and lost the narrative of *why* they were focusing. It is super easy to measure responsiveness: how long did it take to respond. It’s much harder to measure quality and growth. Especially when being vulnerable about what you don’t know or the failure to make progress is a truly senior level skill. How do we find balance?

mrj 1y ago
Notification blindness. I've been struggling with finding balance for years as a front-line manager who codes. I need to be responsive-ish to incoming queries but also have my own tasks. If I am too responsive, it's easy for my work to become my evening time and my working hours for everybody else. The "weaving" in of periods of focus is maintained by ignoring notifications and checking them in batches. Nobody gets to interrupt me when I'm in focus mode (much chagrin for my wife) and I can actually get stuff done. This happened a lot by accident, I get enough notifications for long enough that I don't really hear or notice them just like I don't hear or notice the trains that pass near my house.
- MrDarcy 1y ago
  This also worked for me. I flipped to permanent DND mode with clear communication I check notifications at specific times of day. There are very few notifications that can’t wait a few hours for my attention and those that cannot have the expectation of being a phone call.

quantadev 1y ago

For new developers wanting to learn to code, AI is great today to help them. For experienced developers AI is also great because it can write tons of code for us that we already know how to evaluate and test, because of years of experience doing it in the "pre-AI" world. However the future is uncertain, when we reach a point where most developers have used generated code most of their lives, and never developed the coding skills that are required to fully understand the code. I guess we'll adapt to it. We always do. I mean for example, I can no longer do long division on paper like I did in elementary school, so I rely totally on computers for all calculating.

bufferoverflow 1y ago

This article makes no sense. It criticizes current LLMs and then without stopping for a second pretends future LLMs will have these problems. Even though hallucination levels have been going down with every generation. Even though every test and benchmark we can come up with, LLMs do better with every generation.

ToucanLoucan 1y ago
> Even though hallucination levels have been going down with every generation. Gonna need a BIG citation on that one, chief. > Even though every test and benchmark we can come up with, LLMs do better with every generation. Has it occurred to you the people making the tests and benchmarks are, more often than not, the same people making the LLM? Like yeah if I'm given carte blanche to make my own test cases and I'm accountable to no one and nothing else, my output quality would be steadily going up too. The other day I tried asking Copilot for a good framework for accomplishing a task, and it made one up. I tried the query again, more specifically, and it referred me to a framework in another language. And yes, I specified.
- financetechbro 1y ago
  > Gonna need a BIG citation on that one, chief. OP has consumed so much LLM they’ve started to hallucinate themselves
  - ToucanLoucan 1y ago
    Perhaps the real hallucinations were the friends we made along the way
otabdeveloper4 1y ago
> Future bicycles will fly. Just two more rounds of venture capital investment, trust the plan.
- sebastiennight 1y ago

gitroom 1y ago

Good read!

obscurette 1y ago

I'm old enough to remember myriad of experts 10+ years ago who were active selling a view, that smartphones with constantly connected social media will change everything, we just have to learn to use it wisely.

marbro 1y ago
[dead]
kennyadam 1y ago
They weren't wrong. Unfortunately, we didn't use it wisely and obliterated objective reality and allowed people to create spaces where they never have to engage with anything challenging.
- disgruntledphd2 1y ago
  This isn't smartphones, it's the Internet. The only reason that smartphones made a difference is that way more people use online services on mobile than would've done the same on the Internet. The convenience and ubiquity lead to a step change.
rglover 1y ago
And AI will be no different. People will rush head first into the fire and be flabbergasted when all of the hype and promise of utopia results in utter chaos and inequality. If we assume that civilization is already teetering thanks to the smartphone/social media, the fallout of AI would make Thomas Cole blush.
JambalayaJimbo 1y ago
It did change everything

alganet 1y ago

Using aimbot in Gunbound didn't make players better. Yes, it changed everything: it destroyed the game ecosystem. Can humanity use "literacy aimbot" responsibly? I don't know. It's just a cautionary tale. I'm not expecting to win an argument. I could come up with counter anectdotes myself: ABS made breaking in slippery conditions easier and safer. People didn't learned to brake better, they still pushed the pedal harder thinking it would make it stop faster, not realizing the complex dynamics of "making a car stop". That changed everything. It made cars safer. Also, just an anecdote. Sure, a lot of people need focus. Some people don't, they need to branch out. Some systems need aimbot (like ABS), some don't (like Gunbound). The future should be home to all kinds of skills.

cadamsdotcom 1y ago
Appreciate the balanced take. An improvement to a technology can be good, or it can be harmful - and beyond a certain point, further amplification can destroy society and the commons which we all benefit from. Coca leaves are a relatively benign part of daily life in Peru & a few other surrounding countries - they’re on the table in your hotel lobby, ready to be stirred into your tea. But cocaine - same base but made more intense with technology - causes many problems - and don’t even start about crack cocaine. So when thinking of technology through the lens of what it amplifies we can consider traditional Internet research & writing contrasted vs. using AI - the latter gives instant answers and often an instant first draft. Great for some; harmful for others. Where that point lies and what factors contribute is different for every individual.
- alganet 1y ago
  You are right in the sense that addiction and overuse are common concerns regarding new technologies. Similar concerns existed for the TV and video-games, for example. The idea of a balance works if you put the problem on a spectrum. "Too much, then it's bad" is a general good advice for anything. In high school, I started learning geometry. I was puzzled by the angles in the exercises always being 30, 60, 90, 120 (notable angles). I tried a lot to come up with something that could work outside notable angles on my own. I figured that it would be on the next class (it never got there), until I gave up and asked my math teacher. She also didn't knew how to do it by hand. Until this day I don't know. That's probably due to calculators existing. If they didn't, we would be forced to know. Maybe I would have failed that class and had to work harder, maybe not. I will never know. There is no such thing as an addiction to calculators. I am not against them. I don't think there are too many calculators in the world. Good, honest tech. However, I wish doing some math outside notable angles were in my high school curriculum. My teacher was kind and helped curious students. I wish she knew how to do it so she could teach me. I know that now I could learn that on the internet, or ask an LLM to explain it to me. Notable angles are not the point, right? Just another anecdote. I chose Gunbound aimbot as an example of something that is not good, not even a little bit. Not because aimbot is addictive (it's the contrary, cheating takes away the reward sensation), but because it unbalanced the game ecosystem. No one could beat the cheaters, who rapidly reached a plateau themselves. If everyone used aimbot, there was no reason to play it, to learn the quirks of each character, to practice, to train your skills. It's just an anecdote. I tend to stay away from those, but sometimes they're useful. Regarding focus now, the "skill of the future" and its relation to AI: We always needed focus. It is as skill of the past too, not tied to a niche tech, not the only human skill, not a point in a spectrum.

vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago

Being allowed to focus seems to be a privilege these days. When I started in the 90s I could work on something for weeks without much interruption. These days there is almost always some scrum master, project manager or random other manager who wants to get an update or do some planning. Doing actual work seems to have taken a backseat to talking about work.

knallfrosch 1y ago

When I use LLMs, I quickly lose focus. Copy-paste, copy-paste. No real understanding of the solutions, even for areas of my expertise. I just don't feel like understanding the flood of information, without any real purpose behind the understanding. While I probably (?) get done more, I also just don't enjoy it. But I also can't go back to googling for hours now that this ready-made solution exists. I wish it would have never been invented. (Obviously scoped to my enjoyment of hobbyist projects, let's keep AI cancer research out of the picture..)

spacemadness 1y ago
I recommend using them to ask questions about why something works rather than spit out code. They excel at that a lot of the time.
dimal 1y ago
I’ve gotten into this mode too, but often when I do this, I eventually find myself in a rabbit hole dead end that the AI unwittingly lead me into. So I’m slowing down and using them to understand the code better. Unfortunately, all the tools are optimized for vibe coding, getting the quick answer without understanding, so it feels like I’m fighting the tools.

bikedspiritlake 1y ago

Phrasing LLMs as encouraging exploitation is important, because they can still be powerful tools for exploration. The difference comes in the interface for LLMs, which is heavily focused on exploitation whereas search engine interfaces encourage exploration. Newer models often end responses with questions and thoughts that encourage exploration, as do features like ChatGPT's follow up suggestions. However, a lot of work needs to be done with LLM interfaces to balance exploitation and exploration while avoiding limiting AI's capabilities.

blotfaba 1y ago

On the other hand: with thinking models, agents, and future models to come we are offloading the exploration phase to the models themselves. It really depends on constraints and pressures.

thih9 1y ago

> LLMs, however, do not give this choice, and tend to encourage immediate exploitation instead. Users may explore if the first solution does not work, but the first choice is always to exploit. You can ask the llm to generate a number of solutions though - the exploration is possible and relatively easy then. And I say that as someone who dislikes llms with a passion.

friendlyprezz 1y ago

The number one skill in the future is the ability to predict the future Always has been

PaulRobinson 1y ago

It's going to be a different kind of focus. Technologies are regularly predicted to diminish a capability that was previously considered important. Babbage came up with the ideas for his engines after getting frustrated with log tables - how many people reading this have used a log table or calculated one recently? Calculators meant kids wouldn't need to do arithmetic by hand any more and so would not be able to do maths. In truth they just didn't have to do it by hand any more - they still needed the skills to interpret the results, they just didn't have to do the hard work of creating the outputs by pen and paper. They also lost the skill of using slide rules which were used to give us approximations, because calculators allowed us to be precise - they were no longer needed. Computers, similar story. Then the same came with search engines in our pockets. "Oh no, people can find an answer to anything in seconds, they won't remember things". This is borne out, there have been studies that show recall diminishes if your phone is even in the same room. But you still need to know what to look for, and know what to do with what you find. I think this'll still be true in the future, and I think TFA kind of agrees, but seems to be doing the "all may be lost" vibe by insisting that you still need foundational skills. You don't need to know the foundational skills if you want to know what the answer to 24923 * 923 is, you can quickly find out the answer and use that answer however you need. I just think the work shifts - you'll still need to know how to craft your inputs carefully (vibe coding works better if you develop a more detailed specification), and you'll still need to process the output, but you'll become less connected to the foundation and for 99% of the time, that's absolutely fine in the same way it has been with calculators, and so on.

kazinator 1y ago

I frequent Hacker News and have not noticed that much buzz around AI and LLMs. The vast bulk of that buzz is insubstantial and therefore off topic here. Sites like LinkedIn on the other hand are overrun with the swill.

namaria 1y ago

"In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." Herbert Simon (1971)