12 ms·

We are literally witnessing the skills split right in front of our eyes: (1) people who are able to understand the concepts deeply, build a mental model of it a

We are literally witnessing the skills split right in front of our eyes: (1) people who are able to understand the concepts deeply, build a mental model of it and implement them in code at any level, and (2) people who outsource it to a machine and slowly, slowly lose that capability. For now the difference between these two populations is not that pronounced yet but give it a couple of years.

mrits 1y ago
I suppose the question is if we need to understand the concepts deeply. I'm not sure many of us did to begin with and we have shipped a lot of code.
- tmcb 1y ago
  Well, cargo cult programming is definitely a thing, and has been for a long time. It may “deliver value”, but it is not guaranteed. I believe entrepreneurs have an easier time having AI do the work for them because their value assessment framework is decoupled from code generation proper.
- MobiusHorizons 1y ago
  I see a lot of junior engineers, or more senior engineers who are outside their areas of expertise try to prioritize making progress without taking the time to understand. They will copy examples very closely, following best practices blindly, or get someone else to make the critical design decisions. This can get you surprisingly far, but it’s also dangerous because the further past your understanding you are operating, the more you might have to learn all at once in order to fix something when it breaks. Debugging challenges all your assumptions, and if you don’t have models of what the pieces are and how they interact, it’s incredibly hard to start building them when something is already broken. Even then, some engineers don’t learn the models when debugging and resort to defensive and superstitious behaviors based on whatever solution they stumbled on last time. This is a pretty normal part of the learning process, but some engineers don’t seem to get past this stage. Some don’t even want to.
CuriouslyC 1y ago
We're just moving up the abstraction ladder, like we did with compilers. I don't care about the individual lines of code, I care about architecture, code structure, rigorous automated e2e tests, contracts with comprehensive validation, etc. Rather than waste a bunch of time pouring over agent PRs I just make them jump over extremely high static/analytic hurdles that guarantee functionality, then my only job is to identify places where the current spec and the intended functionality differ and create a new spec to mitigate.
- blibble 1y ago
  I can count the amount of times in my 20 year career that I've had to look at compiler generated assembly on one finger and I've never looked at the machine code produced by an assembler (other than when I wrote my own as a toy project) is the same true of LLM usage? absolutely not and it never will be, because it's not an abstraction
  - elAhmo 1y ago
    It is an abstraction. Just because you end up looking at what the prompt looks like “under the hood” in whichever language it produced the output, doesn’t mean every user does. Similar as with assembly, you might have not taken a look at it, but there are people that do and could argue the same thing as you. The lines will be very blurry in the near future.
    - card_zero 1y ago
      I can fart in the general direction of the code and that's a kind of abstraction too. It distills my intent down to a simple raspberry noise which could then be interpreted by sufficiently intelligent software.
      - joenot443 1y ago
        Sort of like when people argue about "what is art?", some folks find it clever to come up with the most bizarre of examples to point to, as if the entire concept rests on the existence of its members at the fringe. Personally, I think if your farts are an abstraction that you can derive useful meaning from the mapping, who are we to tell you no?
andy99 1y ago
I think the bigger issue is outsourcing all or most thought to a LLM (data labeler really). Using tools you don't understand from first principles has always been commonplace and not really an issue. But not thinking anymore is new for most of us.
chaps 1y ago
> (1) people who are able to understand the concepts deeply, build a mental model of it and implement them in code at any level, and (2) people who outsource it to a machine and slowly, slowly loose that capability. ...is it really only going to be these two? No middle ground, gradient, or possibly even a trichotomous variation of your split? > loose that capability You mean "lose". ;)
- benterix 1y ago
  Well, in real life you always have a gradient (or, more usually, a normal distribution) - actually it would be interesting to understand what the actual distribution is and how it changes with time.
  - chaps 1y ago
    It would! I'd be very interested in seeing the shape and outliers. Like, are there some folk who actually see improvements? Or who don't see any brain reprogramming at all? Do different methods of interacting with these systems have the same reprogramming effect? etc etc
el_benhameen 1y ago
What about people who use the machines to augment their learning process? I find that being able to ask questions, particularly “dumb” questions that I don’t want to bother someone else with and niche questions that might not be answered well in the corpus, helps me better understand new concepts. If you just take the answers and move on, then sure, you’re going to have a bad time. But if you critically interrogate the answers and synthesize the information, I don’t see how this isn’t a _better_ era for people who want to develop a deep understanding of something.
- aprilthird2021 1y ago
  > I don’t see how this isn’t a _better_ era for people who want to develop a deep understanding of something. Same way a phone in your pocket gives you the world's compiled information available in a moment. But that's generally led to loneliness, isolation, social upheaval, polarization, and huge spread of wrong information. If you can handle the negatives is a big if. Even the smartest of our professional class are addicted to doomscrolling these days. You think they will get the positives of AI use only and avoid the negatives?
  - prewett 1y ago
    You conflated two things. Availability to the world's information did not produce loneliness, etc., that was availability of social networks designed for engagement^Waddiction on that same device that did. You don't need to install FB et all on your phone.
    - aprilthird2021 1y ago
      Again, most people have FB on their phone. The vast majority of people will not be like snowflake HN anecdotes who claim to only get the positives and not the negatives of technology
- benterix 1y ago
  I fully agree. Using LLMs for learning concepts is great if you combine it with actively using/testing your knowledge. But outsourcing your tasks to an LLM makes your inner muscles weaker.
squigz 1y ago
The loss of expertise does not mean the loss of a need for expertise. We'll still need experts. We'll also still need people who are... not experts. To that point... > For now the difference between these two populations is not that pronounced yet but give it a couple of years. There are lots and lots of programmers and other IT people who make a living that I wouldn't say fall into your first bucket.
noboostforyou 1y ago
And it's almost the same exact trend in skill atrophy we saw between millennial and gen z/alpha where most kids these days cannot do basic computer troubleshooting even if they've owned a computer/smartphone practically their entire lives.
pengaru 1y ago
> and (2) people who outsource it to a machine and slowly, slowly lose that capability. What I'm seeing is most of this group never really had the capability in the first place. These are the formerly unproductive slackers who now churn out GenAI slop with their name on it at an alarming rate.
InfamousRece 1y ago
> slowly, slowly lose that capability. Well, not so slowly it seems.
segmondy 1y ago
And 3, people who are about to use AI to build a mental model quickly and understand the concept deeper
mooreds 1y ago
I've posted this Asimov short story before, but this comment inspires me to post it again. http://employees.oneonta.edu/blechmjb/JBpages/m360/Profession%20I%20Asimov.pdf http://employees.oneonta.edu/blechmjb/JBpages/m360/Professio... "Somewhere there must be men and women with capacity for original thought." He wrote that in 1957. 1957!
- ducttapecrown 1y ago
  It turns out incremental thought is much better than original thought. I guess.
- Terr_ 1y ago
  The first sentence made me expect Asimov's "The Feeling of Power", which--avoiding spoilers--regards the (over-)use of calculators by a society. However, since I brought up calculators, I'd like to pre-emphasize something: They aren't analogous to today's LLMs. Most people don't offload their "what and why" executive decision-making to a calculator, calculators are orders of magnitude more trustworthy, and they don't emit plausible lies to cover their errors... Though that last does sound like another short-story premise.
- zem 1y ago
  perhaps my favourite of his short stories. there's also the more satirical "the feeling of power", which touches on the same theme https://ia800806.us.archive.org/20/items/TheFeelingOfPower/The%20Feeling%20of%20Power.pdf https://ia800806.us.archive.org/20/items/TheFeelingOfPower/T...
stocksinsmocks 1y ago
(3) people who never had that capability. Remember we aren’t all above average. You shouldn’t worry. Now that we have widespread literacy, nobody needs to and few even could recite Norse Sagas or the Illiad from memory. Basically nobody has useful skills for nomadic survival. We’re about to move on to more interesting problems, and our collective abilities and motivation will still be stratified as it always has been and must be.
- rf15 1y ago
  I don't think it's down to ability, I think it's down to the decision not to learn itself. And that scares me.
  - stocksinsmocks 1y ago
    Let them. -Your Friend Mel (probably)
- jplusequalt 1y ago
  >We’re about to move on to more interesting problems, and our collective abilities and motivation will still be stratified as it always has been and must be Who is "we"? There are more people out there in the world doing hard physical labor, or data entry, than there are software engineers.
defgeneric 1y ago
A lot of the boosterism seems to come from those who never had the ability in the first place, and never really will, but can now hack a demo together a little faster than before. But I'm mostly concerned about those going through school who don't even realize they're undermining themselves by reaching for AI so quickly.
- NoGravitas 1y ago
  Perhaps more importantly, those boosters may never have had the ability to really model a problem in the first place, and didn't miss it, because muddling through worked well enough for them. Many such cases.
skissane 1y ago
The way I’ve been coding recently: I often ask the AI to write the function for me, because lazy. And then I don’t like the code it wrote, so I rewrite it. But still it is less mental effort to rewrite “mostly correct but slightly ugly code” than write the whole thing from scratch Also I even though I have Copilot extension in VSCode I rarely use it… because I find it interrupts my flow with constant useless or incorrect or unwanted suggestions. Instead, when I want AI help, I type out my request by hand into a Gemini gem which contains a prompt describing my preferred coding style - but even with extra guidance as to how I want it to write code, I still often don’t like what it does and end up rewriting it
keepamovin 1y ago
That reminds me of back when 12,500 years ago I could really shape a flint into a spear head in no time. Took me seasons to learn that skill from the Masters. Then Sky Gods came and taught people metal-fire. Nobody knows how to really chip and carve a point any more. They just cast them in moulds. We are seeing a literal split of skills in front of our eyes. People who know how to shape rocks deeply. And people who just know how to buy a metal tool with berries. I like berries as much as the next person, but give it a couple of years, they will be begging for flint tips back. I guarantee it. Those metal users will have no idea how to survive without a collective industry.
- intended 1y ago
  Ah you are an old one. I was born later, and missed this phase of our history. This reminds me of back 11,500 years ago, when people used to worship the sharper or bigger pieces of obsidian. They felt the biggest piece would win them the biggest hunt. They forgot that the size of the tool mattered less than mastery of the hunt. Why the best hunter could take down a moving mattress with just the right words, string and a cliff.
  - kamaal 1y ago
    On a more serious note, here in India most millennials/boomers remember taking a Engineering Drawing class in second semester Engineering courses. It would involve using a real drafter, real calculations and making real drawings. Isometric projects and all. I remember it took me like 4 nights of standing to make Isometric projections of a landing gear strut. I wondered if pursuing an Engineering degree was even worth it. Some of my classmates did quit, as years went by. These days they just let you use CAD software to make things work, and based on what I hear kids just Copy paste files and are done with the assignments. I mean we all have these Kids these days talk, but somethings do matter. Making all these tasks easy has allowed lots of people who would have other wise failed in the previous generations pass. There is now an unemployment and low pay crisis all over India due to so many Engineers passing. Sometimes when I hear the newer generations complain about how hard it is to buy a home, or get a good job. Im inclined to think, perhaps hard things should have been kept hard for a reason.
Eawrig05 1y ago
I think this is a fun problem: Say LLMs really do allow people to be 2X or 3X more productive. Then those people that understand concepts and rely on LLMs should be more successful and productive. But if those people slowly decline in ability they will become less successful in the long term. But how much societal damage is done in the meantime? Such as creating insecure software or laying off/not hiring junior developers.
rewgs 1y ago
100%. I'm _very_ hesitant to use LLMs _at all_ when programming, as the speed/learning trade-off so far hasn't proved itself to be worth it (especially given that it often _isn't_ faster on balance). However, one place where LLMs have proved to be incredibly helpful is with build tools, dependency hell, etc. Lately I've been trying to update a decade-old Node/Electron project to modern packages and best-practices, and holy hell I simply was not making any meaningful progress until I turned to Claude. The JS world simply moves too fast (especially back when this project was written) to make updating a project like that even remotely possible in any reasonable amount of time. I was tearing my hair out for days, but yesterday I was finally able to achieve what I was wanting in a few hours with Claude. I still had to work slowly and methodically, and Claude made more than a few stupid errors along the way, but dealing with the delicate version balancing that coincided with API and import/export style changes, all the changes in the bundler world, etc simply could not have been done without it. It's the first time that I was 100% glad I relied on an LLM and felt that it was precisely the right tool for the job at hand.
senectus1 1y ago
I think there is a third split as well, those that use the tool to learn. No vibe coding, asking it questions to explain things to you. Then switching to manual tasks, cutting back to help decipher error messages etc. Its like having a your own personal on tap tutor (for free in most cases!).

mrits 1y ago

I suppose the question is if we need to understand the concepts deeply. I'm not sure many of us did to begin with and we have shipped a lot of code.

tmcb 1y ago
Well, cargo cult programming is definitely a thing, and has been for a long time. It may “deliver value”, but it is not guaranteed. I believe entrepreneurs have an easier time having AI do the work for them because their value assessment framework is decoupled from code generation proper.
MobiusHorizons 1y ago
I see a lot of junior engineers, or more senior engineers who are outside their areas of expertise try to prioritize making progress without taking the time to understand. They will copy examples very closely, following best practices blindly, or get someone else to make the critical design decisions. This can get you surprisingly far, but it’s also dangerous because the further past your understanding you are operating, the more you might have to learn all at once in order to fix something when it breaks. Debugging challenges all your assumptions, and if you don’t have models of what the pieces are and how they interact, it’s incredibly hard to start building them when something is already broken. Even then, some engineers don’t learn the models when debugging and resort to defensive and superstitious behaviors based on whatever solution they stumbled on last time. This is a pretty normal part of the learning process, but some engineers don’t seem to get past this stage. Some don’t even want to.

CuriouslyC 1y ago

We're just moving up the abstraction ladder, like we did with compilers. I don't care about the individual lines of code, I care about architecture, code structure, rigorous automated e2e tests, contracts with comprehensive validation, etc. Rather than waste a bunch of time pouring over agent PRs I just make them jump over extremely high static/analytic hurdles that guarantee functionality, then my only job is to identify places where the current spec and the intended functionality differ and create a new spec to mitigate.

blibble 1y ago
I can count the amount of times in my 20 year career that I've had to look at compiler generated assembly on one finger and I've never looked at the machine code produced by an assembler (other than when I wrote my own as a toy project) is the same true of LLM usage? absolutely not and it never will be, because it's not an abstraction
- elAhmo 1y ago
  It is an abstraction. Just because you end up looking at what the prompt looks like “under the hood” in whichever language it produced the output, doesn’t mean every user does. Similar as with assembly, you might have not taken a look at it, but there are people that do and could argue the same thing as you. The lines will be very blurry in the near future.
  - card_zero 1y ago
    I can fart in the general direction of the code and that's a kind of abstraction too. It distills my intent down to a simple raspberry noise which could then be interpreted by sufficiently intelligent software.
    - joenot443 1y ago
      Sort of like when people argue about "what is art?", some folks find it clever to come up with the most bizarre of examples to point to, as if the entire concept rests on the existence of its members at the fringe. Personally, I think if your farts are an abstraction that you can derive useful meaning from the mapping, who are we to tell you no?

andy99 1y ago

I think the bigger issue is outsourcing all or most thought to a LLM (data labeler really). Using tools you don't understand from first principles has always been commonplace and not really an issue. But not thinking anymore is new for most of us.

chaps 1y ago

> (1) people who are able to understand the concepts deeply, build a mental model of it and implement them in code at any level, and (2) people who outsource it to a machine and slowly, slowly loose that capability. ...is it really only going to be these two? No middle ground, gradient, or possibly even a trichotomous variation of your split? > loose that capability You mean "lose". ;)

benterix 1y ago
Well, in real life you always have a gradient (or, more usually, a normal distribution) - actually it would be interesting to understand what the actual distribution is and how it changes with time.
- chaps 1y ago
  It would! I'd be very interested in seeing the shape and outliers. Like, are there some folk who actually see improvements? Or who don't see any brain reprogramming at all? Do different methods of interacting with these systems have the same reprogramming effect? etc etc

el_benhameen 1y ago

What about people who use the machines to augment their learning process? I find that being able to ask questions, particularly “dumb” questions that I don’t want to bother someone else with and niche questions that might not be answered well in the corpus, helps me better understand new concepts. If you just take the answers and move on, then sure, you’re going to have a bad time. But if you critically interrogate the answers and synthesize the information, I don’t see how this isn’t a _better_ era for people who want to develop a deep understanding of something.

aprilthird2021 1y ago
> I don’t see how this isn’t a _better_ era for people who want to develop a deep understanding of something. Same way a phone in your pocket gives you the world's compiled information available in a moment. But that's generally led to loneliness, isolation, social upheaval, polarization, and huge spread of wrong information. If you can handle the negatives is a big if. Even the smartest of our professional class are addicted to doomscrolling these days. You think they will get the positives of AI use only and avoid the negatives?
- prewett 1y ago
  You conflated two things. Availability to the world's information did not produce loneliness, etc., that was availability of social networks designed for engagement^Waddiction on that same device that did. You don't need to install FB et all on your phone.
  - aprilthird2021 1y ago
    Again, most people have FB on their phone. The vast majority of people will not be like snowflake HN anecdotes who claim to only get the positives and not the negatives of technology
benterix 1y ago
I fully agree. Using LLMs for learning concepts is great if you combine it with actively using/testing your knowledge. But outsourcing your tasks to an LLM makes your inner muscles weaker.

squigz 1y ago

The loss of expertise does not mean the loss of a need for expertise. We'll still need experts. We'll also still need people who are... not experts. To that point... > For now the difference between these two populations is not that pronounced yet but give it a couple of years. There are lots and lots of programmers and other IT people who make a living that I wouldn't say fall into your first bucket.

noboostforyou 1y ago

And it's almost the same exact trend in skill atrophy we saw between millennial and gen z/alpha where most kids these days cannot do basic computer troubleshooting even if they've owned a computer/smartphone practically their entire lives.

pengaru 1y ago

> and (2) people who outsource it to a machine and slowly, slowly lose that capability. What I'm seeing is most of this group never really had the capability in the first place. These are the formerly unproductive slackers who now churn out GenAI slop with their name on it at an alarming rate.

InfamousRece 1y ago

> slowly, slowly lose that capability. Well, not so slowly it seems.

segmondy 1y ago

And 3, people who are about to use AI to build a mental model quickly and understand the concept deeper

mooreds 1y ago

I've posted this Asimov short story before, but this comment inspires me to post it again. http://employees.oneonta.edu/blechmjb/JBpages/m360/Profession%20I%20Asimov.pdf http://employees.oneonta.edu/blechmjb/JBpages/m360/Professio... "Somewhere there must be men and women with capacity for original thought." He wrote that in 1957. 1957!

ducttapecrown 1y ago
It turns out incremental thought is much better than original thought. I guess.
Terr_ 1y ago
The first sentence made me expect Asimov's "The Feeling of Power", which--avoiding spoilers--regards the (over-)use of calculators by a society. However, since I brought up calculators, I'd like to pre-emphasize something: They aren't analogous to today's LLMs. Most people don't offload their "what and why" executive decision-making to a calculator, calculators are orders of magnitude more trustworthy, and they don't emit plausible lies to cover their errors... Though that last does sound like another short-story premise.
zem 1y ago
perhaps my favourite of his short stories. there's also the more satirical "the feeling of power", which touches on the same theme https://ia800806.us.archive.org/20/items/TheFeelingOfPower/The%20Feeling%20of%20Power.pdf https://ia800806.us.archive.org/20/items/TheFeelingOfPower/T...

stocksinsmocks 1y ago

(3) people who never had that capability. Remember we aren’t all above average. You shouldn’t worry. Now that we have widespread literacy, nobody needs to and few even could recite Norse Sagas or the Illiad from memory. Basically nobody has useful skills for nomadic survival. We’re about to move on to more interesting problems, and our collective abilities and motivation will still be stratified as it always has been and must be.

rf15 1y ago
I don't think it's down to ability, I think it's down to the decision not to learn itself. And that scares me.
- stocksinsmocks 1y ago
  Let them. -Your Friend Mel (probably)
jplusequalt 1y ago
>We’re about to move on to more interesting problems, and our collective abilities and motivation will still be stratified as it always has been and must be Who is "we"? There are more people out there in the world doing hard physical labor, or data entry, than there are software engineers.

defgeneric 1y ago

A lot of the boosterism seems to come from those who never had the ability in the first place, and never really will, but can now hack a demo together a little faster than before. But I'm mostly concerned about those going through school who don't even realize they're undermining themselves by reaching for AI so quickly.

NoGravitas 1y ago
Perhaps more importantly, those boosters may never have had the ability to really model a problem in the first place, and didn't miss it, because muddling through worked well enough for them. Many such cases.

skissane 1y ago

The way I’ve been coding recently: I often ask the AI to write the function for me, because lazy. And then I don’t like the code it wrote, so I rewrite it. But still it is less mental effort to rewrite “mostly correct but slightly ugly code” than write the whole thing from scratch Also I even though I have Copilot extension in VSCode I rarely use it… because I find it interrupts my flow with constant useless or incorrect or unwanted suggestions. Instead, when I want AI help, I type out my request by hand into a Gemini gem which contains a prompt describing my preferred coding style - but even with extra guidance as to how I want it to write code, I still often don’t like what it does and end up rewriting it

keepamovin 1y ago

That reminds me of back when 12,500 years ago I could really shape a flint into a spear head in no time. Took me seasons to learn that skill from the Masters. Then Sky Gods came and taught people metal-fire. Nobody knows how to really chip and carve a point any more. They just cast them in moulds. We are seeing a literal split of skills in front of our eyes. People who know how to shape rocks deeply. And people who just know how to buy a metal tool with berries. I like berries as much as the next person, but give it a couple of years, they will be begging for flint tips back. I guarantee it. Those metal users will have no idea how to survive without a collective industry.

intended 1y ago
Ah you are an old one. I was born later, and missed this phase of our history. This reminds me of back 11,500 years ago, when people used to worship the sharper or bigger pieces of obsidian. They felt the biggest piece would win them the biggest hunt. They forgot that the size of the tool mattered less than mastery of the hunt. Why the best hunter could take down a moving mattress with just the right words, string and a cliff.
- kamaal 1y ago
  On a more serious note, here in India most millennials/boomers remember taking a Engineering Drawing class in second semester Engineering courses. It would involve using a real drafter, real calculations and making real drawings. Isometric projects and all. I remember it took me like 4 nights of standing to make Isometric projections of a landing gear strut. I wondered if pursuing an Engineering degree was even worth it. Some of my classmates did quit, as years went by. These days they just let you use CAD software to make things work, and based on what I hear kids just Copy paste files and are done with the assignments. I mean we all have these Kids these days talk, but somethings do matter. Making all these tasks easy has allowed lots of people who would have other wise failed in the previous generations pass. There is now an unemployment and low pay crisis all over India due to so many Engineers passing. Sometimes when I hear the newer generations complain about how hard it is to buy a home, or get a good job. Im inclined to think, perhaps hard things should have been kept hard for a reason.

Eawrig05 1y ago

I think this is a fun problem: Say LLMs really do allow people to be 2X or 3X more productive. Then those people that understand concepts and rely on LLMs should be more successful and productive. But if those people slowly decline in ability they will become less successful in the long term. But how much societal damage is done in the meantime? Such as creating insecure software or laying off/not hiring junior developers.

rewgs 1y ago

100%. I'm _very_ hesitant to use LLMs _at all_ when programming, as the speed/learning trade-off so far hasn't proved itself to be worth it (especially given that it often _isn't_ faster on balance). However, one place where LLMs have proved to be incredibly helpful is with build tools, dependency hell, etc. Lately I've been trying to update a decade-old Node/Electron project to modern packages and best-practices, and holy hell I simply was not making any meaningful progress until I turned to Claude. The JS world simply moves too fast (especially back when this project was written) to make updating a project like that even remotely possible in any reasonable amount of time. I was tearing my hair out for days, but yesterday I was finally able to achieve what I was wanting in a few hours with Claude. I still had to work slowly and methodically, and Claude made more than a few stupid errors along the way, but dealing with the delicate version balancing that coincided with API and import/export style changes, all the changes in the bundler world, etc simply could not have been done without it. It's the first time that I was 100% glad I relied on an LLM and felt that it was precisely the right tool for the job at hand.

senectus1 1y ago

I think there is a third split as well, those that use the tool to learn. No vibe coding, asking it questions to explain things to you. Then switching to manual tasks, cutting back to help decipher error messages etc. Its like having a your own personal on tap tutor (for free in most cases!).