5 ms·

>we don't want a hard dependency on another multi-billion dollar company just to write software One of two main reasons why I'm wary of LLMs. The other is fear

>we don't want a hard dependency on another multi-billion dollar company just to write software One of two main reasons why I'm wary of LLMs. The other is fear of skill atrophy. These two problems compound. Skill atrophy is less bad if the replacement for the previous skill does not depend on a potentially less-than-friendly party.

tossandthrow 6mo ago
You can argu that you will have skill atrophy by not using LLMs. We have gone multi cloud disaster recovery on our infrastructure. Something I would not have done yet, had we not had LLMs. I am learning at an incredible rate with LLMs.
- mgambati 6mo ago
  I kind feel the same. I’m learning things and doing things in areas that would just skip due to lack of time or fear. But I’m so much more detached of the code, I don’t feel that ‘deep neural connection’ from actual spending days in locked in a refactor or debugging a really complex issue. I don’t know how a feel about it.
  - afzalive 6mo ago
    As someone who's switched from mobile to web dev professionally for the last 6 months now. If you care about code quality, you'll develop that neural connection after some time. But if you don't and there's no PR process (side projects), the motivation to form that connection is quite low.
    - hombre_fatal 6mo ago
      > If you care about code quality, you'll develop that neural connection after some time. No, because you can get LLMs to produce high quality code that has gone through an infinite number of refinement/polish cycles and is far more exhaustive than the code you would have written yourself. Once you hit that point, you find yourself in a directional/steering position divorced from the code since no matter what direction you take, you'll get high quality code.
      - afzalive 6mo ago
        Only if never find opportunities to simplify the code it's writing and you don't review the code at all. > no matter what direction you take, you'll get high quality code This is not the case today. You get medium-quality, sometimes over-engineered code 10x faster.
  - Fire-Dragon-DoL 6mo ago
    I strongly agree on the refactor, but for debugging I have another perspective: I think debugging is changing for the better, so it looks different. Sure, you don't know the code by heart, but people debugging code translated to assembly already do that. The big difference is being able to unleash scripts that invalidate enormous amount of hypothesis very fast and that can analyze the data. Used to do that by hand it took hours, so it would be a last resort approach. Now that's very cheap, so validating many hypothesis is way cheaper! I feel like my "debugging ability" in terms of value delivered has gone way up. For skill, it's changing. I cannot tell, but the value i am delivering for debugging sessions has gone way up
- jjallen 6mo ago
  Also AI could help you pick those skills up again faster, although you wouldn’t need to ever pick those skills up again unless AI ceased to exist. What an interesting paradox-like situation.
  - estetlinus 6mo ago
    I believe some professor warned us about being over reliant on Google/reddit etc: “how would you be productive if internet went down” dilemma. Well, if internet is down, so is our revenue buddy. Engineering throughput would be the last of our concerns.
- deadbabe 6mo ago
  Using LLMs as a learning tool isn’t what causes skill atrophy. It’s using them to solve entire problems without understanding what they’ve done. And not even just understanding, but verifying that they’ve implemented the optimal solution.
  - tehjoker 6mo ago
    It's partly that, but also reading and surface level understanding something vs generating yourself are different skills with different depths. If you're learning a language, you can get good at listening without getting good at speaking for example.
- bluefirebrand 6mo ago
  > I am learning at an incredible rate with LLMs Could you do it again without the help of an LLM? If no, then can you really claim to have learned anything?
  - tossandthrow 6mo ago
    I could definitely maintain the infrastructure without an llm. Albeit much slower. And yes. If LLMs disappear, then we need to hire a lot of people to maintain the infrastructure. Which naturally is a part of the risk modeling.
    - bluefirebrand 6mo ago
      > I could definitely maintain the infrastructure without an llm Not what I asked, but thanks for playing.
      - tossandthrow 6mo ago
        You literally asked that question > Could you do it again without the help of an LLM?
        bluefirebrand 6mo ago
        And the question you answered was "could you maintain it without the help of an LLM"
  - danw1979 6mo ago
    I think this is a bit dismissive. It’s quite possible to be deep into solving a problem with an LLM guiding you where you’re reading and learning from what it says. This is not really that different from googling random blogs and learning from Stack Overflow. Assuming everyone just sits there dribbling whilst Claude is in YOLO mode isn’t always correct.
  - _blk 6mo ago
    The challenge is not if you could do all of it without AI but any of it that you couldn't before. Not everyone learns at the same pace and not everyone has the same fault tolerance threshold. In my experiencd some people are what I call "Japanese learners" perfecting by watching. They will learn with AI but would never do it themselves out of fear of getting something wrong while they understand most of it, others that I call "western learners" will start right away and "get their hands dirty" without much knowledge and also get it wrong right away. Both are valid learning strategies fitting different personalities.
- ori_b 6mo ago
  Yes, you certainly can argue that, but you'd be wrong. The primary selling point of LLMs is that they solve the problem of needing skill to get things done.
  - tossandthrow 6mo ago
    That is not the entire selling point - so you are very wrong. You very much decide how you employ LLMs. Nobody are keeping a gun to your head to use them. In a certain way. Sonif you use them in a way that increase you inherent risk, then you are incredibly wrong.
    - ori_b 6mo ago
      I suggest you read the sales pitches that these products have been making. Again, when I say that this is the selling point, I mean it: This is why management is buying them.
      - SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
        I've read the sales pitches, and they're not about replacing the need for skill. The Claude Design announcement from yesterday (https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-design-anthropic-labs https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-design-anthropic-labs) is pretty typical in my experience. The pitch is that this is good for designers, because it will allow them to explore a much broader range of ideas and collaborate on them with counterparties more easily. The tool will give you cool little sliders to set the city size and arc width, but it doesn't explain why you would want to adjust these parameters or how to determine the correct values; that's your job. I understand why a designer might read this post and not be happy about it. If you don't think your management values or appreciates design skill, you'd worry they're going to glaze over the bullet points about design productivity, and jump straight to the one where PMs and marketers can build prototypes and ignore you. But that's not what the sales pitch is focused on.
        ori_b 6mo ago
- i_love_retros 6mo ago
  >I am learning at an incredible rate with LLMs. I don't believe it. Having something else do the work for you is not learning, no matter how much you tell yourself it is.
  - tossandthrow 6mo ago
    It is easy to not believe if you only apply an incredibly narrow world view. Open your eyes, and you might become a believer.
    - nothinkjustai 6mo ago
      What is this, some sort of cult?
      - tossandthrow 6mo ago
        No, it is an as snarky response to a person being snarky about usefulness of AI agents. It does seem like there is a cult of people who categorically see LLMs as being poor at anything without it being founded in anything experience other than their 2023 afternoon to play around with it.
        nothinkjustai 6mo ago
        Who cares? Why are people so invested in trying to “convert” others to see the light? Can’t you be satisfied with outcompeting “non believers”? What motivates you to argue on the internet about it? Deep down are you insecure about your reliance on these tools or something, and want everyone else to be as well?
        tossandthrow 6mo ago
        Why do people invest themselves so hard in interjecting themselves into conversations about Ai telling people it doesn't work? It feels so off rebuilding serious SaaS apps in days for production, only to be told it is not possible?
- weego 6mo ago
  You're learning at your standard rate of learning, you're just feeding yourself over-confidence on how much you're absorbing vs what the LLM is facilitating you rolling out.
  - tossandthrow 6mo ago
    This is such a weird statement in so many levels. The latent assumption here is that learning is zero sum. That you can take a 30 year old from 1856 bring them into present day and they will learn whatever subject as fast as a present day 20 year old. That teachers doesn't matter. That engagement doesn't matter. Learning is not zero sum. Some cultural background makes learning easier, some mentoring makes is easier, and some techniques increases engagement in ways that increase learning speed.
- Wowfunhappy 6mo ago
  > We have gone multi cloud disaster recovery on our infrastructure. Something I would not have done yet, had we not had LLMs. That’s product atrophy, not skill atrophy.
ljm 6mo ago
Not so much atrophy as apathy. I've worked with people who will look at code they don't understand, say "llm says this", and express zero intention of learning something. Might even push back. Be proud of their ignorance. It's like, why even review that PR in the first place if you don't even know what you're working with?
- psygn89 6mo ago
  I cringed when I saw a dev literally copy and paste an AI's response to a concern. The concern was one that had layers and implications to it, but instead of getting an answer as to why it was done a certain way and to allay any potential issues, that dev got a two paragraph lecture on how something worked on the surface of it, wrapped in em dashes and joviality. A good dev would've read deeper into the concern and maybe noticed potential flaws, and if he had his own doubts about what the concern was about, would have asked for more clarification. Not just feed a concern into AI and fling it back. Like please, in this day and age of AI, have the benefit of the doubt that someone with a concern would have checked with AI himself if he had any doubts of his own concern...
- kilroy123 6mo ago
  We've had such developers around, long before LLMs.
  - ohazi 6mo ago
    They're so much louder now, though.
- monkpit 6mo ago
  If I wanted to know what the LLM says, I would have asked it myself, thanks…
- redanddead 6mo ago
  What is it in the broader culture that's causing this?
  - 6mo ago
post-it 6mo ago
I was worried about skill atrophy. I recently started a new job, and from day 1 I've been using Claude. 90+% of the code I've written has been with Claude. One of the earlier tickets I was given was to update the documentation for one of our pipelines. I used Claude entirely, starting with having it generate a very long and thorough document, then opening up new contexts and getting it to fact check until it stopped finding issues, and then having it cut out anything that was granular/one query away. And then I read what it had produced. It was an experiment to see if I could enter a mature codebase I had zero knowledge of, look at it entirely through an AI, and come to understand it. And it worked! Even though I've only worked on the codebase through Claude, whenever I pick up a ticket nowadays I know what file I'll be editing and how it relates to the rest of the code. If anything, I have a significantly better understanding of the codebase than I would without AI at this point in my onboarding.
- estetlinus 6mo ago
  Yeah, +1. I will never be working on unsolved problems anyhow. Skill atrophy is not happening if you stay curious and responsible.
  - stringfood 6mo ago
    I have never learned so quickly in my entire life than to post a forum thread in its entirety into a extended think LLM and then be allowed to ask free form questions for 2 hours straight if I want to. Having my questions answered NOW is so important for me to learn. Back in the day by the time I found the answer online I forgot the question
    - lobf 6mo ago
      Same. I work in the film industry, but I’ve always been interested in computers and have enjoyed tinkering with them since I was about 5. However, coding has always been this insurmountably complicated thing- every time I make an effort to learn, I’m confronted with concepts that are difficult for me to understand and process. I’ve been 90% vibe coding for a year or so now, and I’ve learned so much about networking just from spinning up a bunch of docker containers and helping GPT or Claude fix niggling issues. I essentially have an expert (well, maybe not an expert but an entity far more capable than I am on my own) who’s shoulder I can look over and ask as many questions I want to, and who will explain every step of the process to me if I want. I’m finally able to create things on my computer that I’ve been dreaming about for years.
boxingdog 6mo ago
[dead]
solarengineer 6mo ago
https://hex.ooo/library/power.html https://hex.ooo/library/power.html When future humans rediscover mathematics.
IgorPartola 6mo ago
Yeah I am worried about skill atrophy too. Everyone uses a compiler these days instead of writing assembly. Like who the heck is going to do all the work when people forget how to use the low level tools and a compiler has a bug or something? And don’t get me started on memory management. Nobody even knows how to use malloc(), let alone brk()/mmap(). Everything is relying on automatic memory management. I mean when was the last time you actually used your magnetized needle? I know I am pretty rusty with mine.
- otabdeveloper4 6mo ago
  > an LLM is exactly like a compiler if a compiler was a black box hosted in a proprietary cloud and metered per symbol Yeah, exactly.
- techpression 6mo ago
  Snark aside, this is an actual problem for a lot of developers in varying degrees, not understand anything about the layers below make for terrible layers above in very many situations.

tossandthrow 6mo ago

You can argu that you will have skill atrophy by not using LLMs. We have gone multi cloud disaster recovery on our infrastructure. Something I would not have done yet, had we not had LLMs. I am learning at an incredible rate with LLMs.

mgambati 6mo ago
I kind feel the same. I’m learning things and doing things in areas that would just skip due to lack of time or fear. But I’m so much more detached of the code, I don’t feel that ‘deep neural connection’ from actual spending days in locked in a refactor or debugging a really complex issue. I don’t know how a feel about it.
- afzalive 6mo ago
  As someone who's switched from mobile to web dev professionally for the last 6 months now. If you care about code quality, you'll develop that neural connection after some time. But if you don't and there's no PR process (side projects), the motivation to form that connection is quite low.
  - hombre_fatal 6mo ago
    > If you care about code quality, you'll develop that neural connection after some time. No, because you can get LLMs to produce high quality code that has gone through an infinite number of refinement/polish cycles and is far more exhaustive than the code you would have written yourself. Once you hit that point, you find yourself in a directional/steering position divorced from the code since no matter what direction you take, you'll get high quality code.
    - afzalive 6mo ago
      Only if never find opportunities to simplify the code it's writing and you don't review the code at all. > no matter what direction you take, you'll get high quality code This is not the case today. You get medium-quality, sometimes over-engineered code 10x faster.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 6mo ago
  I strongly agree on the refactor, but for debugging I have another perspective: I think debugging is changing for the better, so it looks different. Sure, you don't know the code by heart, but people debugging code translated to assembly already do that. The big difference is being able to unleash scripts that invalidate enormous amount of hypothesis very fast and that can analyze the data. Used to do that by hand it took hours, so it would be a last resort approach. Now that's very cheap, so validating many hypothesis is way cheaper! I feel like my "debugging ability" in terms of value delivered has gone way up. For skill, it's changing. I cannot tell, but the value i am delivering for debugging sessions has gone way up
jjallen 6mo ago
Also AI could help you pick those skills up again faster, although you wouldn’t need to ever pick those skills up again unless AI ceased to exist. What an interesting paradox-like situation.
- estetlinus 6mo ago
  I believe some professor warned us about being over reliant on Google/reddit etc: “how would you be productive if internet went down” dilemma. Well, if internet is down, so is our revenue buddy. Engineering throughput would be the last of our concerns.
deadbabe 6mo ago
Using LLMs as a learning tool isn’t what causes skill atrophy. It’s using them to solve entire problems without understanding what they’ve done. And not even just understanding, but verifying that they’ve implemented the optimal solution.
- tehjoker 6mo ago
  It's partly that, but also reading and surface level understanding something vs generating yourself are different skills with different depths. If you're learning a language, you can get good at listening without getting good at speaking for example.
bluefirebrand 6mo ago
> I am learning at an incredible rate with LLMs Could you do it again without the help of an LLM? If no, then can you really claim to have learned anything?
- tossandthrow 6mo ago
  I could definitely maintain the infrastructure without an llm. Albeit much slower. And yes. If LLMs disappear, then we need to hire a lot of people to maintain the infrastructure. Which naturally is a part of the risk modeling.
  - bluefirebrand 6mo ago
    > I could definitely maintain the infrastructure without an llm Not what I asked, but thanks for playing.
    - tossandthrow 6mo ago
      You literally asked that question > Could you do it again without the help of an LLM?
      - bluefirebrand 6mo ago
        And the question you answered was "could you maintain it without the help of an LLM"
- danw1979 6mo ago
  I think this is a bit dismissive. It’s quite possible to be deep into solving a problem with an LLM guiding you where you’re reading and learning from what it says. This is not really that different from googling random blogs and learning from Stack Overflow. Assuming everyone just sits there dribbling whilst Claude is in YOLO mode isn’t always correct.
- _blk 6mo ago
  The challenge is not if you could do all of it without AI but any of it that you couldn't before. Not everyone learns at the same pace and not everyone has the same fault tolerance threshold. In my experiencd some people are what I call "Japanese learners" perfecting by watching. They will learn with AI but would never do it themselves out of fear of getting something wrong while they understand most of it, others that I call "western learners" will start right away and "get their hands dirty" without much knowledge and also get it wrong right away. Both are valid learning strategies fitting different personalities.
ori_b 6mo ago
Yes, you certainly can argue that, but you'd be wrong. The primary selling point of LLMs is that they solve the problem of needing skill to get things done.
- tossandthrow 6mo ago
  That is not the entire selling point - so you are very wrong. You very much decide how you employ LLMs. Nobody are keeping a gun to your head to use them. In a certain way. Sonif you use them in a way that increase you inherent risk, then you are incredibly wrong.
  - ori_b 6mo ago
    I suggest you read the sales pitches that these products have been making. Again, when I say that this is the selling point, I mean it: This is why management is buying them.
    - SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
      I've read the sales pitches, and they're not about replacing the need for skill. The Claude Design announcement from yesterday (https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-design-anthropic-labs https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-design-anthropic-labs) is pretty typical in my experience. The pitch is that this is good for designers, because it will allow them to explore a much broader range of ideas and collaborate on them with counterparties more easily. The tool will give you cool little sliders to set the city size and arc width, but it doesn't explain why you would want to adjust these parameters or how to determine the correct values; that's your job. I understand why a designer might read this post and not be happy about it. If you don't think your management values or appreciates design skill, you'd worry they're going to glaze over the bullet points about design productivity, and jump straight to the one where PMs and marketers can build prototypes and ignore you. But that's not what the sales pitch is focused on.
      - ori_b 6mo ago
i_love_retros 6mo ago
>I am learning at an incredible rate with LLMs. I don't believe it. Having something else do the work for you is not learning, no matter how much you tell yourself it is.
- tossandthrow 6mo ago
  It is easy to not believe if you only apply an incredibly narrow world view. Open your eyes, and you might become a believer.
  - nothinkjustai 6mo ago
    What is this, some sort of cult?
    - tossandthrow 6mo ago
      No, it is an as snarky response to a person being snarky about usefulness of AI agents. It does seem like there is a cult of people who categorically see LLMs as being poor at anything without it being founded in anything experience other than their 2023 afternoon to play around with it.
      - nothinkjustai 6mo ago
        Who cares? Why are people so invested in trying to “convert” others to see the light? Can’t you be satisfied with outcompeting “non believers”? What motivates you to argue on the internet about it? Deep down are you insecure about your reliance on these tools or something, and want everyone else to be as well?
        tossandthrow 6mo ago
        Why do people invest themselves so hard in interjecting themselves into conversations about Ai telling people it doesn't work? It feels so off rebuilding serious SaaS apps in days for production, only to be told it is not possible?
weego 6mo ago
You're learning at your standard rate of learning, you're just feeding yourself over-confidence on how much you're absorbing vs what the LLM is facilitating you rolling out.
- tossandthrow 6mo ago
  This is such a weird statement in so many levels. The latent assumption here is that learning is zero sum. That you can take a 30 year old from 1856 bring them into present day and they will learn whatever subject as fast as a present day 20 year old. That teachers doesn't matter. That engagement doesn't matter. Learning is not zero sum. Some cultural background makes learning easier, some mentoring makes is easier, and some techniques increases engagement in ways that increase learning speed.
Wowfunhappy 6mo ago
> We have gone multi cloud disaster recovery on our infrastructure. Something I would not have done yet, had we not had LLMs. That’s product atrophy, not skill atrophy.

ljm 6mo ago

Not so much atrophy as apathy. I've worked with people who will look at code they don't understand, say "llm says this", and express zero intention of learning something. Might even push back. Be proud of their ignorance. It's like, why even review that PR in the first place if you don't even know what you're working with?

psygn89 6mo ago
I cringed when I saw a dev literally copy and paste an AI's response to a concern. The concern was one that had layers and implications to it, but instead of getting an answer as to why it was done a certain way and to allay any potential issues, that dev got a two paragraph lecture on how something worked on the surface of it, wrapped in em dashes and joviality. A good dev would've read deeper into the concern and maybe noticed potential flaws, and if he had his own doubts about what the concern was about, would have asked for more clarification. Not just feed a concern into AI and fling it back. Like please, in this day and age of AI, have the benefit of the doubt that someone with a concern would have checked with AI himself if he had any doubts of his own concern...
kilroy123 6mo ago
We've had such developers around, long before LLMs.
- ohazi 6mo ago
  They're so much louder now, though.
monkpit 6mo ago
If I wanted to know what the LLM says, I would have asked it myself, thanks…
redanddead 6mo ago
What is it in the broader culture that's causing this?
- 6mo ago

post-it 6mo ago

I was worried about skill atrophy. I recently started a new job, and from day 1 I've been using Claude. 90+% of the code I've written has been with Claude. One of the earlier tickets I was given was to update the documentation for one of our pipelines. I used Claude entirely, starting with having it generate a very long and thorough document, then opening up new contexts and getting it to fact check until it stopped finding issues, and then having it cut out anything that was granular/one query away. And then I read what it had produced. It was an experiment to see if I could enter a mature codebase I had zero knowledge of, look at it entirely through an AI, and come to understand it. And it worked! Even though I've only worked on the codebase through Claude, whenever I pick up a ticket nowadays I know what file I'll be editing and how it relates to the rest of the code. If anything, I have a significantly better understanding of the codebase than I would without AI at this point in my onboarding.

estetlinus 6mo ago
Yeah, +1. I will never be working on unsolved problems anyhow. Skill atrophy is not happening if you stay curious and responsible.
- stringfood 6mo ago
  I have never learned so quickly in my entire life than to post a forum thread in its entirety into a extended think LLM and then be allowed to ask free form questions for 2 hours straight if I want to. Having my questions answered NOW is so important for me to learn. Back in the day by the time I found the answer online I forgot the question
  - lobf 6mo ago
    Same. I work in the film industry, but I’ve always been interested in computers and have enjoyed tinkering with them since I was about 5. However, coding has always been this insurmountably complicated thing- every time I make an effort to learn, I’m confronted with concepts that are difficult for me to understand and process. I’ve been 90% vibe coding for a year or so now, and I’ve learned so much about networking just from spinning up a bunch of docker containers and helping GPT or Claude fix niggling issues. I essentially have an expert (well, maybe not an expert but an entity far more capable than I am on my own) who’s shoulder I can look over and ask as many questions I want to, and who will explain every step of the process to me if I want. I’m finally able to create things on my computer that I’ve been dreaming about for years.

boxingdog 6mo ago

[dead]

solarengineer 6mo ago

https://hex.ooo/library/power.html https://hex.ooo/library/power.html When future humans rediscover mathematics.

IgorPartola 6mo ago

Yeah I am worried about skill atrophy too. Everyone uses a compiler these days instead of writing assembly. Like who the heck is going to do all the work when people forget how to use the low level tools and a compiler has a bug or something? And don’t get me started on memory management. Nobody even knows how to use malloc(), let alone brk()/mmap(). Everything is relying on automatic memory management. I mean when was the last time you actually used your magnetized needle? I know I am pretty rusty with mine.

otabdeveloper4 6mo ago
> an LLM is exactly like a compiler if a compiler was a black box hosted in a proprietary cloud and metered per symbol Yeah, exactly.
techpression 6mo ago
Snark aside, this is an actual problem for a lot of developers in varying degrees, not understand anything about the layers below make for terrible layers above in very many situations.