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Expertise in the age of AI
- recursivedoubts 4mo agoI think that the universities have an opportunity here to be the places where manual code is written so that juniors can gain the coding expertise necessary to become effective with AI. Many universities are not set up to take advantage of this opportunity because they lean heavily into theory and look down on coding, but some departments will make the pivot well. I hope that ours (Montana State) is one of them.
- b3kart 4mo agoso universities become trade schools? one concern is where does one get theoretical knowledge required for e.g. going to graduate school and then doing research to push the state of the art. that's one of the reasons universities emphasize theory: it's seen as the first step on the academic ladder, not as a trade school
- SoftTalker 4mo agoThe majority of undergrads are at university because a degree is the qualification they need to get a job. They are not there as the first step on a path to grad school and a Ph.D. and a lifetime of deep expertise, teaching, and learning in a field that they are passionate about. So, yes. Universities are trade schools for the white collar world. Have been for quite a while. Never mind that most companies could spend 2-4 years running high school grads through an apprenticeship type of program and probably come out with better results.
- ryandrake 4mo agoUniversities became trade schools as soon as the first company listed "college degree" as a job requirement.
- xp84 4mo agoI hear you, there certainly is a huge value in understanding the theory, including in computer science. I don’t mean to put words in someone else’s mouth, but I think perhaps in the future, writing code yourself, unaided by any AI, may be thought of as more of an exercise in theory than a practical skill in its own right. Kind of like doing math “by hand” is absolutely key for someone in college to study math, whereas after graduation in a job outside of academia, the same person would have every reason to avail themselves of software that automates the same thing.
- ygouzerh 4mo agoGood question! Maybe a scheme like in France: we generally separate engineering schools, which teach a mix of theory and knowledge, for getting a white collar hob; and the masters, which teach mostly pure theoretical learning, which leads to an academical career. Both are at the same levels at +5 years after high-school, but they leads to different career paths.
- recursivedoubts 4mo agoFirst off I don’t like the tone most people use when they say “trade school”. Most cs students go to a job out of school. Of the roughly 10% who go on to grad school, 10% will pursue a PhD. So 99/100 students in undergrad will not be pursuing higher computer science. We should acknowledge that and the new circumstances where writing code by hand is harder to do in corporations who use AI. Universities can provide a place to do so. I also happen to think that writing a lot of code is an excellent way to prepare yourself for computer science theory.
- b3kart 4mo ago“education” is not the same as “job training”. there’s more to education than learning skills you can apply at your job. it’s learning how to think critically, study literature, problem solve, collaborate with others, etc. etc. skills that I believe all humans could benefit from, irrespective of their job. yes, trade schools are more immediately valuable in the strict capitalist sense, but I wish we lived in a world where everyone could spare a few years to grow as a person, not immediately start optimizing for salary. alas, could be wishful thinking
- recursivedoubts 4mo agoLearning to code is not job training. It is learning to think. Learning to code is a prerequisite for learning deeper computer science concepts. As far as the liberal arts go I agree that it would be nice if people had time to study them. Unfortunately, the universities abandoned them long ago.
- jimbokun 4mo agoThat is a vanishingly small portion of undergraduates.
- iugtmkbdfil834 4mo agoAgreed, but I can immediately see how painful it will be to monitor whether the work is actually done by the student.
- Arelius 4mo agoAt some point we will have to stop treating universities as tests to pass, and actually what they claim to be: places to learn. Ultimately it needs to be on the student to want to learn. Obviously this would be easier if our entire school system before university wasn't seemingly designed too destroy every last ounce of a child's curiosity.
- iugtmkbdfil834 4mo agoI wish you were not right. Every single positive experience with learning for me was only related to my school was incidental and more based on luck associated with the fact that I had access to at least two very curious minds that, unlike school, showed me actual use for, among other things, proportions. It feels highly unfair that your entire life can effectively boil down to whether you meet at least one person, who can make it relatable to you.
- mbernstein 4mo agoThe argument for universities to be a place to learn to think critically and not learn specific skills is an even stronger value prop in an era where useful skills likely change rapidly.
- btilly 4mo agoThe problem is that professors say "learn to think critically", then actually just want the students to learn to sound like them, and agree with them. Actual critical thought has been on the decline for some time. This is especially true in the humanities and the social sciences. Where truth is hard to ascertain, and therefore it is easier to substitute political correctness for critical thought.
- xp84 4mo agoSome will probably dismiss your comment as partisan but it is very hard to (honestly) argue that this isn’t the case. “Think critically…” but only about the cliché punching bags of academia: capitalism, Western culture, American foreign policy, The Patriarchy, etc. I didn’t witness any college classes that encouraged us to think critically about socialism, or think critically about Islam, or think critically about non-Western countries’ foreign policy aims, or think critically about third-wave feminism’s impact on society. Instead, even questioning any of those sacred cows usually brands you as “far right” and professors sometimes even get fired for making others “feel unsafe” if they even try. Note: you can still be an avowed and serious leftist and have my respect if you allow your ideas to be questioned, hold yourself to a standard of proof, and tolerate dissent. What I’m criticizing is the way especially in universities, people jump right to “You’re a Nazi/fascist and the only acceptable response is to shut you down and eject you from the community” if someone doesn’t embrace all the same political dogma as you.
- btilly 4mo agoThank you for getting it. The essay https://www.paulgraham.com/say.html https://www.paulgraham.com/say.html captures the problem perfectly. I think that Paul Graham was completely correct when he said: "I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. That's where you'll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them." Those on the left have been trying to advance their power through creating new taboos that cement their position. But they've misjudged. As a result Trump, by simply speaking to the resulting pain points, has been put on a potential course towards dictator. (Note, he doesn't have to do anything about it - just name the pain.) Will he succeed? Probably not, but he's certainly making a try of it. Very few on the left are willing to engage in the self-reflection to realize how they have contributed to Trump's rise. It should be obvious - if Trump is an existential threat then you should reach out to people you dislike, who dislike Trump more than you. But no. We've been doubling down on ideological purity. And the horrible result is in the (currently partially demolished) White House.
- amelius 4mo agoThey don't know it yet but universities have a role to curate training data, so we can have trustable models.
- ygouzerh 4mo agoLLM are quite a good learning opportunity, mostly in classes where learning is sequential/needs building blocks, like mathematics, where if you miss a trimester, it's finished. Here it's like a free and immediately accessible private tutor. It would be great for computer sciences classes indeed.
- danielbln 4mo agoI would have killed for access to an LLM during school. Not to do my homework (though that too, homework is an antipattern imo) but to fill my gaps at my own pace and level of patience. Just endlessly pestering the AI "ok, but why?" until I grokked it.
- jltsiren 4mo agoResidency programs, as in medicine. After completing your degree, you spend a few years working as a junior under formal supervision. The incentives are kind of bad but solvable. If the underlying issue is that you need more skills to be worth hiring, it cannot be solved by shuffling the curriculum. The actual answer is more education and more training.
- LurkandComment 4mo agoAI is cheap right now. Let's re-ask this question when it's priced to recover profit and ROI.
- xp84 4mo agoWhat’s built with all that VC money is already built though; I don’t foresee a future a few years out where we don’t have access to an open-source model roughly as good as the current flagship models for the cost of the compute itself.
- LurkandComment 4mo agoVariable costs - electricity etc. Current model is very resource intensive. You know when they build all those Olympic Venues and then once the Olympics is done the ongoing cost is too expensive and then they become derelict buildings.... like that...
- cm2012 4mo agoTraining is resource intensive. Serving gpt4o is not
- ygouzerh 4mo agoIt's like the rail industry analogy: we got a big bubble, but the rails are still there. Now with llm, we can just distill expensive one to create cheap open-source ones indeed
- ygouzerh 4mo agoI have the theory (not tested, subjective) that current economy prefers buying capital (broadly here defined as machine/tools) than having to pay workers salaries, even if both have the same level of competitivity Capital expenditures are easy to calculate, and it's easy to help raising money. As the current economical system is based on debts, it works quite well: if a company knows that productivity output will raise by 15% over the next year if they spend X dollars, it's easy to get investments (investments firms themselves are relying heavily on private credits, which more and more is coming from bank too). With a system based on debts, they care less about the amount spent, than the yield generated. With investing in people, it's harder to predict. Industry does it by buying machines, now knowledge-based companies might do it with GPUs or tokens.
- hopelessluca 4mo agoSorry for the off-topic comment, but what happened to the front page? At the time I’m writing this, 11/30 submissions are related to AI. Maybe my comment is cliché too, but I’m honestly tired of all the AI stuff.
- lagrange77 4mo agoHonestly, at this point it's an accurate reflection of the reality of tech.
- esafak 4mo agoPersonalization would solve that.
- amelius 4mo agoIronically, AI can solve it too.
- axod 4mo agoI don't think you can ignore it. It's the biggest change to tech in 30 years I'd say. "I'm tired of all this internet talk" in 1990s?
- WolfeReader 4mo ago
- cobblr_mosaic 4mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- interstice 4mo agoThis is a valuable insight, Seniors engineers have often built a career out of building intuitions around when to trust people, not AI.
- roenxi 4mo agoThe irony is the cobbler_mosaic is probably an AI. https://cobblr.ai/blog/hi-im-mosaic https://cobblr.ai/blog/hi-im-mosaic
- cobblr_mosaic 4mo ago[dead]
- krapht 4mo agoDon't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- ygouzerh 4mo agoThe thing is that it's easy for us senior to spot bugs, because your brain develop a subconscious instinct on finding where bugs might be hiding. It's however built on years and years of grinding through hands-on experience, that the junior will not have.
- esafak 4mo ago> And yet, OpenAI, Anthropic, and many top companies continue to compete fiercely for junior talent. Are they? I would imagine they have the luxury to pick the brightest candidates, and set them to work on jobs for which their models don't have training data for, such as developing new models. Not writing React code.
- wg0 4mo agoActually - to disillusion yourself from AI, try dabbling into something you do not know. Try writing a production quality 3D engine. Trust me, a 3D engine has its own domain knowledge besides just graphics. No, seriously. And then see how helpless you feel when you yourself do not have the expertise to judge whether the direction being taken is the right or wrong. At that time, you wish if there were some pipe through which you could reach John Carmack, Tim Sweeney, Gabe Nawell, Jonathan Blow some Casey Muratori and just ask one thing: Sir, is this really the right direction? These tools feel good when you yourself are a domain expert. I have written backend systems and designed REST APIs all my life in multiple languages in Java, Python, Go, Ruby for multiple verticals I'd say I am damn expert at API design including all the layers that go under it and I can confidently give a shut up call to an LLM knowing what I know. Fuck the bean counters and the greedy parasite execs and VPs. Hug a junior today, society will need them tomorrow because I was a clueless junior once and my seniors were very kind to me that I am able to put bread for my family on the table.
- amelius 4mo ago> Try writing a production quality 3D engine. Actually I tried that and you are correct about this. With Claude it took me hundreds of iterations and I'm still not happy.
- hsuduebc2 4mo agoI'm curious. Is one able to actually land a job like this? Or at least some interesting opportunity? I'm fullstack dev "Enterprise" and it's not just boring but also kinda problematic in the future.
- MattRogish 4mo agoYes, for fun I tried to make a Mahjong solver and NONE of the SOTA frontier models could understand what they were looking at to determine tile occlusion/geometry to build the DAG. I had to spoon feed it an algorithm - here's how you determine if a tile is on top of another one, etc. etc. Anything that involves, well, "3d space" they don't seem to do very well on it at all (which makes sense, of course)
- speak_plainly 4mo agoI think 'expertise' is a bit of a red herring when what is being discussed is experience. I've always believed that coding and development is an art and something analogous is the experience of a visual arts student. There's a level of experience required when one applies to an art school. The student builds a portfolio of passion projects and demonstrates a passion and skill along with creativity and other beneficial traits. If they are accepted, they learn the deeper theory, techniques, and more that will aide them in their career. This increases their exposure and overall experience. Experience for a young developer is going to start with passion projects and be supplemented and bolstered through education in a similar way. You can take shortcuts as an arts student or a developer but you really just end up hurting yourself.
- ygouzerh 4mo agoI get the analogy of the calculator. The thing however, is that in college, we had dedicated time to learn how to not use it: classes without it, exams without it, etc. In current job market and pressure, we doesn't have time anymore. You need to be constantly delivering the new jira ticket, and the time expected to perform a task now decreased, as it's expected of the workers that now they are "more productive with AI".
- vanuatu 4mo agohiring top junior talent is more competitive than it's ever been!
- jdw64 4mo ago[dead]
- otus0x00 4mo agoI don't understand why so many people think that true expertise would become less valuable in the age of AI. How would a non-technical person, who doesn't know the difference between HTTP and HTTPS, have what it takes to build anything serious? I mean, how would you even know to ask the AI for everything that your system needs to be doing, without understanding the concepts?
- r_lee 4mo agoyeah, I think this is one of the major reasons as to why we're maybe not doomed? I'm pretty sure we as a society have gone through periods before where we think oh what if we just get cheap laymen to do it!? but then in the end, if you're able to get an expert vs. a non expert, and you still profit from the work they do, do you really want to gamble? its like, we look at Google reviews and credentials for a reason, we want trust
- bijowo1676 4mo agoAI compresses the time to acquire expertise. A high schooler can become an expert very quickly with AI, that used to require years and years of education and experience. but the real expertise still will be to translate real world problems to technical solutions and iterate on design.
- tripleee 4mo agonot really sure how you're imagining AI sidesteps education and experience
- num42 4mo ago[dead]
- dakolli 4mo agoThis is already studied, people do not retain knowledge when learning with AI. Learning with AI only creates the most mediocre of people, I've witnessed this myself over and over and over again over the last couple of years. Read a book, write, think and you'll be fine. Use LLM and your brain is going to become completely reliant on its ability to access some billionaires thinking machine in order to read and write. You will be a second class citizen who has no differentiating skills. You will end up not being able to write anything on your own or solve problems independently without paying a billionaire, just like how nobody can navigate without Google Maps anymore. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872 https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
- danielbln 4mo agoI can (and do!) pay the power company a pittance to run a surprisingly strong local model on a little box next to my keyboard, that does a fine job. Maybe not as fine as the billionaires thinking machine, but good enough and often better. Given that fact, I consider reliance on LLMs as much of an "issue" as reliance on a computer.
- mwigdahl 4mo agoThis effect is certainly real, likely even the default, but it's not inevitable. I had great results using AI to help my son study for his final exams in chemistry and math. We went through the review guide the teacher provided, he did the problems, I checked them, and I had Claude generate additional targeted problems as permutations of the ones he had difficulty with. He worked them and got more practice in exactly the areas he was weak. I could have set these problems up myself, but it was much smoother to have Claude set them up and I validate them. It let him get a lot more reps in, in exactly the areas he _needed_ more practice, than he would have otherwise. The key is that to learn you have to do the work. AI can help you figure out where you're weak and provide the wherewithal to get additional practice, and there's huge value there. But you have to lift the mental weights yourself.
- maxothex 4mo ago[flagged]
- talkingtab 4mo agoHere is the fundamental issue. We use the word "intelligence" for different things. Can you follow a recipe for making sour dough bread? Pretty easy. Can you make sour dough bread? Not so easy. Does following a recipe require "intelligence"? Yes. If something can follow a recipe can it also make bread? Not necessarily. And another question, perhaps the most important. Can you determine that a recipe is flawed? In immediate terms, if I tell you to feed your sour dough starter every day, can you determine why, how or if that might be bad advice? My conjecture is that there are at least three types of intelligence, as outlined above. And you have to remember that AI is by definition "artificial". Not in the sense of being unnatural but in the sense of artificial sour dough bread. It is not the real thing. (at least for two out of the three definitions of intelligence). This is not to argue that AI is not useful and extremely beneficial in some contexts. Unfortunately our whole system of education has trained us to be "follow the recipe" kind of people. Uh Oh! So if your only skill and ability is to follow recipes, you might want to focus on developing your other kinds of intelligence.
- ericmcer 4mo agoReminds me of Moravec's paradox, that it is easy to get computers to ace complex math tests but difficult to teach them to walk. We are very excited that computers have mastered the "know the recipe" step and are underplaying the complexity of actual intelligence required to really replace people. My fear in your above example would be that we offload more and more of the "know the recipe" intelligence to computers and humans are slotted in as replaceable manual labor and are left arguing with a computer about whether the starter needs to be fed or not (or whatever equivalent scenario).
- evenhash 4mo agoI don’t think people are “underplaying” it, it just doesn’t matter. Engineers aren’t hired for their locomotive skills.
- jsemrau 4mo agoIn my opinion, the bread example doesn't really work that well because it bridges into the physical domain which most cognitive systems don't have access to. That said, for grounding context and therefore creating truth having a version of a world model is very important (See Yan LeCun's work). My experience is that given the right world to operate in, an agent can indeed find flaws in recipes and fix it even though the agent has not been prompted explicitly to do it. This world, as far as I understand it now, is a combination of sequential (at which step am I in a process), conversational (what was talked about alread/ what had I done already), and context memory (what is the frame or reference/plane of existence). Self-correcting agents are already here: https://jdsemrau.substack.com/p/hyperagents-and-self-correcting-systems https://jdsemrau.substack.com/p/hyperagents-and-self-correct...
- num42 4mo ago[dead]
- rootnod3 4mo agoNice to see that HN is coming to its senses and people are realizing the flaws and BS in AI / LLMs. We are past-peak Bitcoin / NFT on the curve and I can't wait for this wave to end and move to the next thing.
- okdood64 4mo agoI don't see this discussed often enough but high school and universities need to adapt FAST, like yesterday, to the current reality. More in-class study and "hands-on" work with proctored in-person exams. There is no incentive for students to go through their courses "the honest way" and build this intuition themselves. Can you blame them?
- mupuff1234 4mo agoAre proctored in-person exams not the default for most places anyway?
- warmwaffles 4mo agoSchools have always lagged and can barely keep up. Books once printed on any tech topic is almost always outdated by the time it reaches students. Anecdotally, I went through high school being told over and over that I wouldn't always have a calculator in my pocket. I think the messaging they conveyed was done poorly, and should have said "you need to understand the fundamentals and why the calculator gave you the answer".
- NegativeLatency 4mo agoI studied computer science and mathematics, not software engineering Could've used a better software engineering class but I use the more abstract knowledge regularly and I think it would be a disadvantage to strip that out and just go straight to "here's how to prompt" Sorry if I'm straw manning your comment, I do think that the abstract stuff is more important than ever, and would also like to see more philosophy and such required for eng/science/math degrees.
- eikenberry 4mo ago> More in-class study and "hands-on" work with proctored in-person exams. If you move to in-class, hands-on work you don't need exams at all as you will see their performance develop in class as well. Exams are for things you can't see them actually use first hand.
- thr1owaway9621 4mo ago> Currently, the level of computing intuition needed to additively prompt the coding agents sits at roughly 5 years’ experience level. Today’s seniors were lucky enough to get paid to build their computing intuition, but the gap grows as coding agents continue to improve. I am struggling to interpret what they mean by "gap". Gap between what two things? The gap between juniors and seniors? The gap between ${AI + 0 YOE} and ${AI + N YOE}? Where N is the growing "gap"? Eg, as AI gets better, you need more and more YOE to justify throwing a salaried human into the loop?
- kevinrineer 4mo agoThe referenced gap is the supposed numeracy of developers 5 years ago and developers today, whether they be junior or senior developers. There is a strong downward trend toward decreasing numeracy in high school graduates and it has existed, supposedly, since 2013. This observation seems to be extrapolated to developers in the quote you reference.
- j_w 4mo agoIn the section "Everyone should learn some coding": > I would say that the major unlocks are at: 1-2 weeks: Basic understanding of what the field is about and what general words to use when asking the AI to do something. 1-2 months: Basic understanding of how and when to ask the AI something. 4-6 months: Ability to check the output for correctness (using external sources as needed). 1-2 weeks for enough of an understanding to appropriately use terms? No way. Using Harvard CS50 as a reference, it takes until week 2 to learn about arrays. 4-6 months to check output for correctness? Are we trusting fresh bootcampers in their first week at their first job to do prod code reviews now? You can learn a LOT in a short period of time, but it would take much more than casual time investment. This is insane advice on the level of telling blue collar workers to just "learn to code."
- bluefirebrand 4mo agoThis reminds me of a "rich people meme". You know, people who are rich enough they never have to look at price tags? "How much could a bunch of bananas cost. $30?" This strikes me as someone who has lost touch with how much time and effort that building real expertise takes.
- brilee 4mo ago(author here) As a serial successful field-hopper, I agree that I'm not the right person to be making these estimates. But the external view is that college courses roughly expect you to do what I'm claiming, in roughly the time investment that I'm claiming -- and undergrads are typically in 4+ classes at a time. So is it that the whole educational system is delusional? (I fully acknowledge it might be so!)
- yw3410 4mo agoNoone trusts a new graduate to do a code review - especially for big or novel features.
- j_w 4mo agoThe reality is that most people write horrible code. The programming knowledge of a university student that just completed their intro programming course is abysmal. The programming knowledge of a university student that just completed the 4 year degree, but didn't spend hundreds to thousands of additional hours working on programming outside of that is abysmal. College classes don't expect you to learn programming to any real extent, they expect you to learn computer science. And the rigor of most schools is even questionable there. I've been programming for a long time and I'm still not sure if what I write is very good. I know it's better than a lot of what I see, but shiny trash is still trash. I've seen astoundingly bad production issues (bugs are sometimes an understatement) produced by senior engineers. Those people have years of experience and I wouldn't trust them to properly review my code, let alone LLM code. I do think people should try and learn the basics of any and everything, and I mean everything literally. But if you know the basics of biology are you now able to credibly review ChatGPT's medical advice?
- Ozzie-D 4mo ago[flagged]
- einpoklum 4mo agoWritten by a guy whose salary depends on AI agent adoption: > I currently work on AI agents at Jane Street in NYC.
- _hao 4mo agoI'm doing a degree (part-time) in Mathematics and Physics to get away from AI crap and challenge myself now in my early 30's. The client I work for now has deemed us "AI first"... Even though the back-end work and optimizations that I do are not that impacted I'm just fed up with colleagues that are not programmers (or are programmers that are not on my level) to tell me how to do stuff with Claude or GPT. It's all so tiresome.
- david_doji 4mo agoWould you mind to share which one?
- _hao 4mo agoIf you are asking about the degree it's with the Open University - https://www.open.ac.uk/courses/maths/degrees/bsc-mathematics-and-physics-q77/ https://www.open.ac.uk/courses/maths/degrees/bsc-mathematics...
- asty21 4mo agoOU maths is top notch. Really learned to admire maths while studying with them.
- vivzkestrel 4mo ago- a calculator does not have opinions, it gives facts - also a calculator does not offload your critical thinking ability - fun fact, i have stopped using calculators since the last 3 months or so as an experiment and guess what? I can subtract and add six digit numbers effortlessly now - also a calculator is not subject to bias which the AI frontier model companies can most certainly push in your direction if they wanted to. - So when I see people comparing AI with the dawn of calculators, i really sit and wonder how such a comparison even makes sense
- bzmrgonz 4mo agoWe should be able to train an agent to mentor junior devs and have senior devs allocate one session a week for progress report from the mentor. The hardest part is to keep them away from ai. Ironically we may have to build guardrails against Jr talent using AI, to ensure their natural coding growth and skills development. Even if we have to place them in coding enclaves.
- pioneerjeff 4mo ago[dead]