4 ms·

I can feel the skill atrophy creeping in. My very first instinct is go use the LLM. I think much like forcing yourself to exercise, eat right, and avoid social

I can feel the skill atrophy creeping in. My very first instinct is go use the LLM. I think much like forcing yourself to exercise, eat right, and avoid social media / distractions, this will be a new modern skillset; do you have the discipline to avoid becoming useless without an LLM? A small few will be great at this, the middle of the bell curve will do "well enough," and you know the story for the rest.

andy99 10mo ago
I’ve been using LLMs to code for some time and I look at it differently. I ask myself if I need to understand the code, and if the answer is yes I don’t use an LLM. It’s not a matter of discipline, it’s a sober view of what the minimal amount of work for me is.
- layer8 10mo ago
  The only time one doesn’t need to understand the code is when it doesn’t matter if the code is correct, or when it can be tested exhaustively for all possible inputs. Both are pretty rare for me.
  - kaffekaka 10mo ago
    I largely agree. But sometimes the program is not destructive and you only need to test for inputs that may/will actually occur. The LLM wrote a script to do some processing? Just test it, if the processing is fine, done. I have many LLM-written scripts and tools to do some semi simple jobs where I have barely even looked at the code because I could see immediately that the job I wanted to do got done.
delaminator 10mo ago
I haven't written any code in 6 months. But I can still remember how to code in 6502 machine code from the 1980s.
- zeroonetwothree 10mo ago
  How can you be sure you remember if you aren’t actually doing it?
  - kaffekaka 10mo ago
    This is an important question I think. Gradually losing a skill to atrophy is not something you notice consciously.
    - delaminator 10mo ago
      Come on, I've been coding for 45 years. I don't forget so quickly.
      - kaffekaka 10mo ago
        I am sure you can still code, but there is no question that there are certain small bits that you no longer remember as well (or at all) as just 6 months ago. I believe - but cannot prove - that the atrophy follows an S curve (decreasing with time), so that in the beginning not much happens but with time the rate of forgetting things increases.
        delaminator 10mo ago
        There's a difference between forgetting the minutiae and still having the skills. One doesn't forget how to learn. It's just that you've switched to learning something else.
vips7L 10mo ago
This just sounds like addiction to the dopamine of instant gratification.
jason_oster 10mo ago
I have wasted too much time wishing I could find the motivation to work on coding projects. And there are times that I was able to force myself to just get started. Spin up the flywheel and let momentum carry me. But I'm talking about a consistent problem for more than 25 years. AI agents didn't do this to me. At least in my anecdotal case, this isn't atrophy. It's just the way it has always been. Now I actually have much less friction in getting a project going. I can just type a few of my thoughts at an agent and away it goes. The momentum is almost free, now.

andy99 10mo ago

I’ve been using LLMs to code for some time and I look at it differently. I ask myself if I need to understand the code, and if the answer is yes I don’t use an LLM. It’s not a matter of discipline, it’s a sober view of what the minimal amount of work for me is.

layer8 10mo ago
The only time one doesn’t need to understand the code is when it doesn’t matter if the code is correct, or when it can be tested exhaustively for all possible inputs. Both are pretty rare for me.
- kaffekaka 10mo ago
  I largely agree. But sometimes the program is not destructive and you only need to test for inputs that may/will actually occur. The LLM wrote a script to do some processing? Just test it, if the processing is fine, done. I have many LLM-written scripts and tools to do some semi simple jobs where I have barely even looked at the code because I could see immediately that the job I wanted to do got done.

delaminator 10mo ago

I haven't written any code in 6 months. But I can still remember how to code in 6502 machine code from the 1980s.

zeroonetwothree 10mo ago
How can you be sure you remember if you aren’t actually doing it?
- kaffekaka 10mo ago
  This is an important question I think. Gradually losing a skill to atrophy is not something you notice consciously.
  - delaminator 10mo ago
    Come on, I've been coding for 45 years. I don't forget so quickly.
    - kaffekaka 10mo ago
      I am sure you can still code, but there is no question that there are certain small bits that you no longer remember as well (or at all) as just 6 months ago. I believe - but cannot prove - that the atrophy follows an S curve (decreasing with time), so that in the beginning not much happens but with time the rate of forgetting things increases.
      - delaminator 10mo ago
        There's a difference between forgetting the minutiae and still having the skills. One doesn't forget how to learn. It's just that you've switched to learning something else.

vips7L 10mo ago

This just sounds like addiction to the dopamine of instant gratification.

jason_oster 10mo ago

I have wasted too much time wishing I could find the motivation to work on coding projects. And there are times that I was able to force myself to just get started. Spin up the flywheel and let momentum carry me. But I'm talking about a consistent problem for more than 25 years. AI agents didn't do this to me. At least in my anecdotal case, this isn't atrophy. It's just the way it has always been. Now I actually have much less friction in getting a project going. I can just type a few of my thoughts at an agent and away it goes. The momentum is almost free, now.