9 ms·

Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

• devolving-dev 4mo ago
  Is this a situation where AI will go away and we will regret the loss of skills? At worse, we will be forced to use open weight models instead of the cutting edge, so I don't think it's a big deal. I'm sure people got worse at arithmetic after the invention of the calculator.
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  • hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 4mo ago
    At worse you suffer from cognitive atrophy. Become more dumb and lazy.
  • georgemcbay 4mo ago
    I don't think the real threat is at the individual level, but at the societal level. Building skills over time leads to insights that lead to innovation. AI does many interesting things, but it doesn't innovate (yet). The real threat isn't that we'll all lose our skills (possibly) and then lose access to AI (unlikely), it is that AI will remain at roughly currently levels and we'll dull our skills due to reliance on it and innovation will stall because we've offloaded too much of the thinking to the non-innovative machine. I'm not saying this is what definitely will happen, but it does seem like a very possible outcome.
    • bwhiting2356 4mo ago
      The number of people now involved in software development has now increased because of a lower barrier to entry. I know many people who would previously use a no-code tool or hire offshore devs, or simply not have their problem solved, who are now vibe coding. Many of these people couldn't write very much code manually if they had to, but they're closer to understanding software than they were previously.
      • georgemcbay 4mo ago
        > The number of people now involved in software development has now increased because of a lower barrier to entry. I don't see what this has to do with what I posted. Yes, AI lowers the floor on software development, and there are positive aspects of that, but that doesn't change the possibility of an innovation stall.
        • bwhiting2356 4mo ago
          re: concerns at a societal level. More people are making software than before. People who have been coding for a long time have moved up an abstraction layer and are further from the code. But many people are actually closer to the code than before.
          • georgemcbay 4mo ago
            > But many people are actually closer to the code than before. More people are coding, I wouldn't say they are closer to the code if they are vibe coding. Are any of them going to produce the next breakthrough in computer language/framework/method of development/etc? The risk of AI is that we dull the skills of enough people at the high end of the state of the art of the nuts and bolts of software development that we slow down innovation on that end. That's the concern. Previously-non-programmers vibe coding CRUD apps they never could have before is all well and good but really has nothing to do with this concern. They may create wonderful and successful businesses but they are irrelevant to computer science related innovation.
            • eecc1 4mo ago
              Congrats you’re the only poster in this whole thread who gets it. The standard response is ‘Dw AI will recursively improve and that’ll take care of all the emerging issues”. Lmao ok bro
      • kristofferR 4mo ago
        Yeah, this describes me perfectly. I can't really program, but I'm now building a bunch of different projects and submitting PRs that people seem to appreciate. https://github.com/kristofferR https://github.com/kristofferR One of them, a Home Assistant integration for controlling adjustable beds, would be borderline impossible to do well manually - I've vibe-reverse engineered the Bluetooth protocols of more than a 100 Android apps.
  • bluefirebrand 4mo ago
    > I'm sure people got worse at arithmetic after the invention of the calculator For LLMs, we can see this sentence but replace "arithmetic" with a variable X I'm sure people got worse at X after the invention of LLMs" The problem isn't that X skills atrophy necessarily The problem is that for LLMs, X is "basically all knowledge and communication skills" Can we really tolerate a society where "basically all knowledge and communication skills" are atrophying?
  • xantronix 4mo ago
    Did the entire history of computing prior to 2023 disappear? Are we really that boned?
• iLoveOncall 4mo ago
  https://archive.ph/NS4Ae https://archive.ph/NS4Ae
• iLoveOncall 4mo ago
  The two senior engineers in my org (in a FAANG) who vibe-code the most have lost literally all of their skills. Their code has become terrible and their judgment even worse. A very similar topic was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48392004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48392004 and I make the exact same conclusion: All of this makes me selfishly excited for my own future. It's glaringly obvious that anyone who's a heavy user of LLMs is atrophying their skills in real-time. I have yet to meet a single person for whom it's not the case. But I essentially completely stopped using them for software engineering (why isn't really relevant, but it's not because od this skill atrophy). So as the skills of everyone else is diminishing, mine is proportionally raising. It has never been easier to get better than others. You don't need to put in more effort, just the same effort as you always have, and others will do the job of losing their skills for your own benefit.
  • specproc 4mo ago
    You're making the right call there. I've felt it, seen it around me personally. That study is terrifying. I'm no code ninja at the best of times. It's scary to hear that's happening to top engineers. I need an exit strategy. Anyone else come off AI?
    • rf15 4mo ago
      Yes, feeling like I had to relearn to walk. The first week was rough, everything was wired for LLM usage and autocomplete. Couldn't even type right anymore.
    • dgellow 4mo ago
      Yeah, I had the same and decided to cancel all my subscriptions and remove all my local models ~1 months ago ago. So far I’m very happy with my decision. I wrote about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48083162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48083162 > I had the same experience over the past year with early coding harness at the beginning of the year, then Claude code since its release date. But after 1+year going that direction I really don’t want to continue. The novelty is gone, dealing with AI now feels frustrating and boring, I miss engaging deeply with the actual lower level technical challenges. I do not want to manage fleets of agents. I do not want to rediscover for the hundredth time that in fact all this time an agent took shortcuts for acceptance tests I rely upon and didn’t catch. Or once again get the agent to understand why and what I want it to do after its context got bloated and it start to drift completely. While I got artifacts I can use (libraries, tools, docs), including some things that I’m pretty confident are SoA I do not feel satisfied anymore knowing that I used a model to generate them, even if I was the one designing every part of it. I do feel that I’m lying anytime I come to a colleague to share a new cool tool I have made. > YMMV but I’m personally feeling burnt out with AI coding agents and ready to go back to the old ways for my next personal project And also here (specifically to human communication): https://sam.elborai.me/articles/no-more-llm-comms/ https://sam.elborai.me/articles/no-more-llm-comms/.
• ianbutler 4mo ago
  Tool use typically follows this curve. If you want to preserve a skill you have to actually preserve it. This isn't inherently bad by itself, tools enable us to do much more than we can without them and its a point of contention whether or not any skill is inherently important when a tool comes along that does it for us.
  • contingencies 4mo ago
    Sure. But if you don't own the tool and it is held by a cabal of centralist (even political state-adjacent) parties, you're having a bad day when computer says no.
    • ianbutler 4mo ago
      We love our open source models. GLM 5.2 came out recently and the timeline for closing the gap to closed source shrank to something like 2 weeks by popular measurements. Edit: Mis remembered the timeline I saw not 2 weeks, 3 months, but still I think my point stands.
      • aix1 4mo ago
        Just to make sure I understand your argument. Are you saying that today's open source models are on par with frontier closed models of two weeks ago? By what criteria?
        • nostrademons 4mo ago
          HN thread from 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48567759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48567759 Commenters there were saying GLM 5.2 was roughly equivalent to Opus 4.8 in coding prowess, based on personal experience of the people commenting. Opus 4.8 came out on May 28 this year (so more like 3 weeks ago), GLM 5.2 came out 2 days ago.
          • Capricorn2481 4mo ago
• antonvs 4mo ago
  Are employees ruining managers' skills? Late results are in - and they're not good.
  • whatshisface 4mo ago
    That's a great analogy - everybody knows you forget pretty much everything after a few years away from the line. It should be seen like one of those studies that proves smiling is correlated with happiness. :-)
• largbae 4mo ago
  My compiler writing skills atrophied with the advent of high-level languages, but in exchange I got more done. There is still a very well paid market for compiler writers, but the fact that not everyone needs to be one has made the world richer overall.
  • jatins 4mo ago
    Comparison never made sense to me 1/ When dealing with High level language I am not seeing assembly or the language it compiles to. It's not a leaky abstraction 2/ It's deterministic The day my markdown file is the thing I deploy on AWS your analogy will stand
    • aix1 4mo ago
      You also don't need to directly maintain or evolve the generated machine code to fix bug or add new features.
  • pydry 4mo ago
    I like it when AI metaphors presume determinism.
  • witx 4mo ago
    You clearly don't know what you're talking about if you think compilers are a good analogy.
    • ragequittah 4mo ago
      They really are though. There seems to be some confusion about "determinism" as if everyone writes perfect code and every compiler interprets that code perfectly. There's bugs and nondeterminism in every step of the chain with human coders and, say, a .NET compiler too. The idea that we've got coding down to a pristine and exact science and AI is some random chaos element that muddies it makes no sense to me after seeing how most human created code works.
      • 4mo ago
• beebmam 4mo ago
  A skill which is now done better by a machine is no longer a skill, it is technology. It is just a matter of time before most of our logical and language reasoning skills are replaced by frontier model-agents, which will at some point be far superior (if not already) to human capability. So I totally disagree with this premise that human skills are being ruined by the use of AI technology. No, many human skills are being made obsolete. That's a good thing for economic productivity as a whole, but for those who only have skills that are being automated, their labor value decreases (which is usually bad for them as individuals).
  • pixel_popping 4mo ago
    You miss the point, the point is that by using AI, our skills (let say "coding in Rust") are diminishing and even without reading this article, we can feel it to some extent already if we aren't lying to ourselves, especially very heavy AI users. We do however create new skills, skills that might be more relevant for the future, but still, it is controversial.
    • beebmam 4mo ago
      I think you missed the core point of my post. Writing software, like most sorts of logical and language reasoning, is diminishing in value as a skill in this world. Technology is making these skills obsolete. For example, being able to efficiently plow a field, or harvest crops by hand, or use a scythe to trim grass all used to be skills. These skills are no longer useful to society because we do them much faster and efficient with modern technology. Is it bad that people's skills in being able to perform these manual agricultural tasks diminished? I'd argue no, it isn't bad; it's extremely good for almost everyone that we have the knowledge and means through which this labor can be automated.
• idopmstuff 4mo ago
  > To investigate whether skills are being lost in the field of computer science, researchers at the AI firm Anthropic in San Francisco, California, designed a randomized controlled trial in which 52 software engineers were asked to perform a basic coding task3. During the exercise, all 52 participants could search the web and access instructions on how to do the task. Half of the participants were prompted to use an AI assistant as well. > Afterwards, all of the software engineers were asked to complete a quiz about what they had learnt from the task. The participants who had used an AI assistant did significantly worse on the quiz than those who hadn’t: the average score was 50% in the AI group versus 67% in the non-AI group. This doesn't strike me as a great test? Most engineers aren't going to learn anything from a basic coding task anyway, so I do wonder exactly what they were testing there. If it was just recall about what the issue was, then it doesn't really strike me as a problem - using AI to handle simple problems that it's clearly capable of dealing with is the right way to use it, and of course you're not going to spend time poring over the details because then you haven't saved any time by using AI. There are other examples that don't strike me as particularly problematic, like GPS eroding people's sense of direction. It's totally reasonable to let a skill atrophy that you no longer really need because you have an ever-present tool to handle it. I'm a lot worse at doing long division than I was when I was <whatever grade one learns long division in>. The whole skill atrophy thing seems like much less of a problem than it's made out to be. We've been letting skills atrophy for good reason long before the advent of AI. If you start at McDonald's as a fry cook and work your way up to regional manager, if you suddenly have to work a shift on the fry station you're going to be worse than you were when you were doing it all the time. MDs at investment banks almost certainly can't put together a pitch deck as well as the junior bankers who are doing that task regularly. These things are fine - part of moving up in the world and having a broader impact is being able to successfully delegate tasks, and when you delegate tasks your skill at those tasks will atrophy. No real difference whether you're delegating them to AI or not. To be clear, there are of course cases where skill atrophy is bad. iLoveOncall posted about senior engineers in their org who have lost all of those skills and their judgment along with them. That's definitely bad! If you delegate so much that you lose the ability to even judge good work, now you can't even delegate effectively any more. I think the real lesson with AI is that you need to be self-aware about what skills you should practice and retain vs. what skills you can let atrophy, since it's easier than ever to hand things off. I've lost most of my ability to write a SQL query, but that's fine because it was only a skill I used intermittently and AI can always do the job fine at the level of complexity I need. I have not let my skill of writing product specs atrophy (I am a PM, in case you haven't read my username), because that's critical to using AI correctly in the first place.
• paul7986 4mo ago
  AI/AR Glasses that show you every piece of knowledge about whatever your looking at might not help, especially if the AI is wrong. Otherwise everyones a know it all?
  • AlexandrB 4mo ago
    It's going to get a lot worse than AI being unintentionally wrong. We're only at the start of the curve for this, but it's obvious that controlling what LLMs show in response to politically-charged topics is huge lever of power for those in charge. So now imagine you're using Chineses AI/AR glasses that you've come to rely on for "knowledge" and you look at the famous picture from Tianemen square: "Doesn't look like anything to me".
• flyinglizard 4mo ago
  AI has allowed me to keep shipping features and system even when holding a normally managerial position, so if anything it preserved some of my coding skills. I'd not have seen any code otherwise (writing code is a huge time sink compared to managing things around an org). I pity those who need to contend with that as ICs, though.
  • yoz-y 4mo ago
    Hopefully this is not your case but as an IC the “manager, who didn’t write code for a couple of years” that decides to come back and “help” is one of the worst experiences. Code is usually subpar, uses old idioms, and comes with added pressure. With AI this can become much worse, because of the sheer volume of code that can be thrown at the IC.
    • flyinglizard 4mo ago
      Nothing like that. My current position is more on the operational side and AI allowed me to create a pretty significant software system for our technical ops, that the wider org liked and given me the resources to recruit flesh-made engineers to support. A rare case of AI creating jobs.
• keiferski 4mo ago
  At least for writing, I think AI is mostly useful for the types of writing that aren’t particularly interesting or worthwhile in having to begin with. In concrete terms, AI isn’t all that useful for writing a personal blog, because no one wants to read obvious AI slop. But it is useful for creating boilerplate product pages, FAQs, and other types of writing that weren’t very interesting pre-AI. So it’s not really a huge deal to me that my skill for writing descriptive product page text or FAQs is atrophying, assuming that it is.
  • idopmstuff 4mo ago
    Not worthwhile feels a bit strong (a good FAQ is definitely worthwhile!), but I definitely agree that there is a big difference between any kind of art (writing, playing music, creation of images/videos/etc.) for its own sake and for commercial purposes. AI is terrible for the former but perfectly fine for the latter. There will always be value in a human writing fiction or a memoir or even a Substack. The human perspective is inherently valuable there. Much less so with ad copy that's just going to get A/B tested ad infinitum until a winner is picked out based entirely on data. Same with visual art. Art painters aren't going to lose their jobs to AI, but once you've got a robot that can paint a house reliably, house painters are done for.
• wolttam 4mo ago
  Humans will become individually and independently less skilled while having access to tools that allow them to do far more than even the most skilled human could, before having access to these tools. I'm not sure if we'll become less intelligent. I think our sacks of neurons are gonna keep on making associations, just across a different set of topics.
  • daveguy 4mo ago
    You overestimate the value of these tools to someone who couldn't already do the work or at the very least identify a good result.
• mellosouls 4mo ago
  This is new, the scope of it, its not just about individual "skills" because its all of them; we are being challenged at the very fundamentals of our ability to think deeply and widely and persistently. That has never happened before like this. It is quite extraordinary and breath-taking at times to see the agents in action; the flipside is that very power renders us both vulnerable to its seduction and enfeeblement on an equal scope - its almost hard-drug like in its potential long-term psychological effects.
  • kakacik 4mo ago
    Human mind as much as body needs challenge. That's the only way for growth, heck even sustaining some higher cognitive levels. Nurses, doctors and family members know damn well how life trajectory nosedives for somebody ie suddenly bound to bed, when stimulus and doable challenges are reduced to minimum. llms remove challenges, or minimize them. I can't image any added value for any engineer apart from cost cutting for employer. Sure, next come folks who are doing 10x compared to before, and some actually do. Even there, I have my doubts. For rest of us, its not good and won't get better unless they price it out of most markets.
  • hombre_fatal 4mo ago
    > we are being challenged at the very fundamentals of our ability to think deeply and widely and persistently. That has never happened before like this. Social media and content algorithms come to mind as an early wave that changed the landscape here that defines the horrible status quo leading into the AI era. These days it's trivial to slide into an echo chamber and very hard to break out of the silo. There might be a double-edged sword here where AI, trusted by most people as an omniscient oracle, can offer the only pushback we encounter on positions we picked up passively by scrolling social media, Youtube, TikTok. For example, ask Claude, ChatGPT, and even Grok about the "space lasers" that started wildfires in Hawaii in 2018, something people like Marjorie Taylor Greene floated on social media. It quickly debunks it as bullshit. Now, maybe it will pan out such that everyone will have their own AI that tells them what they want to hear. But so far I've watched people abandon arguments on Twitter because Grok rejected their claim. So it feels like there's a glimmer of hope.
  • 4mo ago
• jimt1234 4mo ago
  Back in the mid-90s I was doing desktop support. It was a lot of work because PCs were relatively new (and they were garbage!), and people broke shit all the time. Sometime around '96 a disk-cloning utility called Ghost was released. It was great - one could provision a fully working PC with all required apps and config settings in minutes! Sounds lame now, but back then it was revolutionary. It had a dark side, though. After about a year most people I worked with had lost the ability to troubleshoot even the most basic problems. The solution to every problem was to just re-apply the standard Ghost disk image (we called it 'Ghosting' back then) ... Can't print? Ghost it! Not receiving emails? Ghost it! Word is too slow? Ghost it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_(disk_utility) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_(disk_utility)
  • probably_wrong 4mo ago
    Happened with all of tech support, really, or at least in my corner of the world: you take your PC to a technician and you receive in return a fresh Windows install, a folder with most of your files (including a copy of "C:\Windows"), and none of the programs or shortcuts you had before.
• nilirl 4mo ago
  I haven't written a full function of code in over a year. That being said, I've been spending a lot more time thinking about architecture and system properties. So, yes, I do feel like I've lost some of that very low-level skill. But maybe I've also been able to spend more time on a higher level skill? Maybe the doctors got worse with the images but had more cognitive resources to think about the patient's context? Not sure. But yes, I can't physically get myself to write code without an AI anymore. It feels so much slower, almost painful.
  • isubkhankulov 4mo ago
    We never learned how to use IBM punch cards. Writing functions by hand for modern languages is fast becoming anachronistic.
    • orphea 4mo ago
      Absolutely not, not until LLMs stop being unreliable bullshit generators, and I believe that the current generation of AI is simply not capable of it. Even the best available (lol) model, Fable/Mythos, is still a bullshit generator, just one that's a bit more powerful.
  • tossandthrow 4mo ago
    The question is what higher level skills there will be to focus on? I am not convinced that there are tasks, like project management or architecture, that the Ai is inherently worse at.
    • ai_slop_hater 4mo ago
      Managing AI context.
    • tychez 4mo ago
      I think the main aspect is that a human can be held responsible. A human can be fired. Then we are pretending agents have agency when that is also what the human has. It seems like the meaning of economy of scale should almost flip to mean the economy of very small, highly specialized companies. It seems hard to see that the person in charge of cybersecurity is going to also be in charge of marketing. I think there is also this aspect that if you told me in high school I was someday going to be a project manager, I would have thought you were insane. You mean like Oppenheimer? No one is ever going to put me in charge of the Manhattan Project. I think you can also see the vague outlines that someone is going to have to be in charge of token cost.
• hodder 4mo ago
  Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old. New sports, new businesses, new academic pursuits. Technology is a lever and AI is the biggest lever we've ever had. It enables laziness or incredible productivity. Choose your own path forward.
  • ForHackernews 4mo ago
    Are you actually learning them or are you just letting the AI kinda do them for you? There was a time I knew how to take a path integral, but kinda-sorta knowing what something is and how to ask a calculator for it is different than knowing yourself.
    • ixsploit 4mo ago
      It's kinda easy to measure if you've learned something. You can test yourself if you can do what you've learned without AI.
    • arbitrary_name 4mo ago
      I'm using it to learn coding. i could not get through the hurdles of installing an IDE and js/python modules before. now i am learning basic scripting and data modeling etc. it is phenomenal for learning languages. i built a chicken coop and some furniture. the skills and confidence i gained are real. am i failing to learn certain skills in the process? of course. but I'm getting further then i would on my own, and that is truly meaningful. you can keep dismissing it; but I'm genuinely using it to break down barriers, give me confidence, and highlight my ignorance in very productive ways. i find it bizarre how unwilling some people are to recognize that.
      • bluefirebrand 4mo ago
        > i could not get through the hurdles of installing an IDE and js/python modules before You want us to believe you couldn't overcome the puddle-deep challenge of installing an IDE and using Pip or Node in the past, but now you're actually learning how to write functions? Cool for you if true I guess but I'm pretty seriously skeptical
• balgaly 4mo ago
  Is C ruining our memory allocation skills? Early results are in - and they're not good
• simonw 4mo ago
  The bit about computer science (behind the paywall) starts: > To investigate whether skills are being lost in the field of computer science, researchers at the AI firm Anthropic in San Francisco, California, designed a randomized controlled trial in which 52 software engineers were asked to perform a basic coding task That's this study here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20245 https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20245 - also written about on the Anthropic research site here: https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skills https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skil...
• adi_kurian 4mo ago
  Colonoscopy detection has gotten modestly better with AI assistance. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39216648/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39216648/ https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2023/colonoscopy-cad-artificial-intelligence https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2023... https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1309086 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1309086 https://info.asge.org/083024-colon-asge/acg-quality-task-force-updates-quality-indicators-for-colonoscopy https://info.asge.org/083024-colon-asge/acg-quality-task-for... New tool that does task better than worker leads to workers being less good at task. Net outcome for patient is positive. Next? Programming: "for a given task, if you take a shortcut then you will not have the familiarity and expertise that someone who took the veritable and righteous path would have". The question is then, what did you do with the extra time. If it's fuck all, then yes, that's a liability. Like any technology, it comes down to the disposition of any given person in how they plan on applying it. Not trying to say it's all going to be awesome. Definitely maybe the opposite. These arguments are weak tho.
  • jplusequalt 4mo ago
    If your argument boils down to "individuals just need to use it the right way" then I ask you to kindly use that same framing for driving cars, owning guns, etc. and then rethink your position. It turns out that when the use of a tool has external consequences for misusing it, it's important that there are structures in place for penalizing the misuse of that tool.
    • adi_kurian 4mo ago
      Not my argument. I agree that we need structures in place to penalize misuse of the tool.
• frollogaston 4mo ago
  There are a lot of mundane coding skills I consciously put off learning in case they'd ever become obsolete, and now I'm glad I did. Like sure learning React was good, but Angular? That boilerplate is Claude's job now. Ruby? Forget that.
• m0llusk 4mo ago
  What is most troubling for me is seeing kids just switch off when LLMs are available. Doing homework they will have zero interpretation or contemplation, just enter the question as a prompt and record the result. LLMs appear to have the ability to interfere with the most basic aspects of attention and executive function.
  • eecc1 4mo ago
    That’s got nothing to do with llm’s and it’s got nothing go do with ‘how technology is used’. I’m not even sure why this has to be said. Universal fact 1) most people lack the self discipline to choose what really benefits them and takes care of their well being. We already know this - obesity rates, excessive screen time etc. The solution is to control the actions of people. But most of you ain’t ready for that conversation.
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• cortesoft 4mo ago
  I wonder if this same effect happens for very wealthy and/or very senior executives? Those sorts of people have always had numerous people they could 'outsource' their thinking to; delegating work, asking for research/summaries, assigning tasks. Does handing off that sort of work to people also ruin your skills in the same way? Or are AIs fundamentally different, and if so, why? Because we have no moral or social pressure to not delegate everything?
  • _bypa 4mo ago
    The main skill you need to reach that level is the one they always keep practicing: shmoozing. Thinking is not required as an executive, so you cannot lose what you never had. And being born wealthy requires zero skill or practice.
    • cortesoft 4mo ago
      This seems to assume that a skill is only important if you need it for your job. If that is the case, then wouldn't this whole thing be a non-issue? We lose all the skills we used to have, but we don't need them because our entire job now is interacting with AI, and that skill we will continue to develop because it is what we do all day. I don't know if I fully agree with that. Some skills are important even if you don't need them for your day job.
  • ilaksh 4mo ago
    The ownership class does not really do work. What they delegate (high level plans) is generally easier to do for AI agents than things like software engineering because it does not need to be as precise or executable. However, there the work has very broad scope scope and the roles are very high risk, so it might need a Fable 5 or Fable 6 level vision language model to remove the jaggedness to make it 'safe' enough to drop the humans But what is going to blow up in 2027 are Automated AI Companies. Human CEOs and owners will not be able to compete with these AI-run companies.
    • bee_rider 4mo ago
      It will be interesting to see how AI and company leadership/ownership stuff shakes out. In some sense I would expect it to be quite different than what exists currently, because an AI can’t be responsible for anything legally, and (arguably?) can’t own anything. But then, C-levels don’t actually seem to have much personal legal liability toward their company’s decisions, or maybe it won’t be so big of a deal. I’d be curious to see alternatives ownerships structures. Like an AI-coordinated collection of guilds, unions, or co-ops. If it can’t accumulate upwards, maybe the fundamental unit of ownership will stay with the workers.
• w10-1 4mo ago
  Some effect is real, but it's likely overstated by poor metrics. "Currency" in all fields relates to the recency and frequency with which you dealt with a particular issue. Whether flying on auto-pilot or coding with AI, automated reduces some currency. But is that a reduction in capability? Measuring concrete tasks makes currency the operative skill; that's why it works to cram for standardized and mid-level tests. (Indeed, the 2010's interviewing "wisdom" about people being quick to answer simple questions veered into measuring currency, not skill.) I think this effect is strongest in time-impacted professionals. Doctors doing dozens of endoscopies a week and developers churning out code will use what tool leverage they can, and forget as much as possible to focus on what they need to. I suspect the effect is weaker in personal or research projects. People riding bikes won't be able to run long distances - because they won't have to, and will be able to outdo any runners. That's only a problem if the supply of bikes is someone constrained. So the risk is not skill loss, but losing control of the means of production.
  • mpalmer 4mo ago
    How do you measure the bundle of "skills" that comprises critical thinking? And if that's your analogy's distance running, what's the "riding a bike" analogue?
• roamerz 4mo ago
  Of course. If you don’t use something it atrophies not only in non use but in losing interest in keeping up with the state of the art in said tech. What we gain though is for people don’t possess that knowledge in the first place, now have this superpower. I know several individuals who have vast experience in specific disciplines and they are now able to solve real problems where there were previously struggling and having to make existing solutions work. In the context of software engineering it allows people that have great institutional knowledge bypass the software market and construct stuff on their own - or at least prototype something and turn it over to an SE if the situation dictates. I’ve been using CC for several months now and have noticed an increasing quality of output - Fable 5 I think was 85% there. At 95% SE’s are going to be increasingly looking for work to do. To the title though, I’ve noticed while my desire to actually write code is decreasing CC is forcing me to improve my high level thought processes in the context of overarching goals in a project through discussion with CC. The software often introduces things that had escaped me or just think more outside the box. My concerns are that this technology will be restricted at some point and the people making the restrictions will have a lot of control - and we know how that works out. But I believe they are inevitable, first obvious example being Fable 5. Are guardrails needed - yeah sure. Common sense says that I don’t want someone able to concoct an easily transmittable Ebola virus that has a 90 day incubation period in their kitchen but I do want an entrepreneur to be able to build a competitor to MS Office, or a cure for Ebola, for example.
  • mpalmer 4mo ago
    All the benefits you're describing apply to the present moment; people with knowledge, self-discipline and expertise can leverage LLMs to great effect. How many people like this will exist in a decade? Two?
    • vkou 4mo ago
      Meanwhile the people with mountains of money can leverage them to enough effect to make even bigger mountains of money, by hiring less-than-skilled people who will do way more with it than they could without it.
• ilaksh 4mo ago
  No, AI isn't doing anything. When someone gets stabbed, do you say "are knives stabbing people?" No, just like you don't give credit to the knife for cutting up your vegetables. "Just being aware that this phenomenon exists hopefully provokes some self-reflection about which skills people want to maintain and which they’re willing to outsource” to AI tools. Right. Obviously. So we need to be teaching that core lesson to children -- they don't retain skills that they don't practice. And we need to be careful to decide what skills and verify they are learning them. We also should absolutely be using AI to provide personalized instruction to every single student. Blaming the tools for things that humans do is incredibly stupid and dangerously misguided. Because it shirks responsibility onto the technology, when technology is the best lever humans and society have to improve things! It just happens to also be the best lever available to make things worse. This negative view of improving technology starts from a warped and very unrealistic concept of the state of the world, where it has been, and the role technology has played. 1. Technologies, starting with fire, the printing press, etc. have been critical in raising life expectancy, standard of living, etc. 2. The world is still a profoundly unequal and exploitive place. 3. AI and robotics have the potential to provide everyone on earth who wants it with extremely inexpensive labor to help them with anything they need or can imagine. This will be a dramatic shift in quality of living. Human society is the source of our problems, not technology. Part of this is that I think deep down people believe that any tools or developments that arise will just be used to exploit and suppress them more, and there is no alternative. In this case, I guess people think the best outcome is to go back to feudalism or some nonsense because technology just makes things worse. But why stop there? Why not go back to, I don't know.. fire? Or maybe no one should ever eat any red fruit?
  • tgv 4mo ago
    Why are you comparing it to technologies with a positive outcome? Why not to opium, tobacco, or alcohol? > So we need to be teaching that core lesson to children Yeah, that has always worked out well.
• SoftTalker 4mo ago
  I suppose tractors and cars ruined our skills at feeding and caring for horses. Losing a specific skill to automation isn't necessarily a bad thing. Losing the ability to learn things would be however, and that would be my fear with AI, but I'm not sure it's well-founded. Humans learn naturally by interacting with the world.
• beej71 4mo ago
  How many of you feel this, anecdotally? I had to come up with a class hierarchy for a roguelike game the other day. This should be something that's dead simple, off the top of my head, no problem. And suddenly I was stuck! It was like thoughts weren't forming properly. My instinct was to use Claude to help brainstorm, but I resisted. 5 minutes later, I finally broke free and instantly came up with the plan. What the hell? I realized I'd offloaded my planning onto AI. I would ask it for plans and then choose the best one, but that's a different skill than coming up with the plans in the first place. My skills were rotting.
  • aerhardt 4mo ago
    I don't know what to tell you bro. I type much less code but I haven't stopped thinking altogether. I still write to myself and to others. I read longform. I walk and introspect. I think about high level problems. Any general cognitive decline I ever notice, I attribute to having a bad day or getting old...
  • goodluckchuck 4mo ago
    I think it’s like shoes. Shoes are generally better than callouses at protecting your feet, providing traction, etc. Almost everyone accepts the trade-off and wears shoes as opposed to going barefoot. To be sure, your feet lose some of their toughness. You may become reliant to some degree on the tool. I know that when my kid started wearing shoes, walking became actually a bit harder and be fell a few times. The shoes were a little clunky and lacked the same sensation. He changed he gait to accommodate, but over-compensated. They took a while to get used to wearing. AI also often feels a bit clunky and lacks the same feel. However, I think some people are confusing the shoes for the feet. The shoes don’t do the walking. The LLM is the words, but not really the ideas. If you stand or pose in shoes, move your legs around and wait for the shoes to take you somewhere… that’s not going to work.
• _bypa 4mo ago
  For the people peddling LLMs this is actually good news: 1. Force AI down everyone's throats claiming it's going to boost productivity 2. See people lose valuable skills because they rely too much on AI 3. Peddle more AI to make up for the lack of skills in professionals
  • leptons 4mo ago
    It's not good news if the AI companies have to raise their prices 10x to deliver the same service while paying down the crippling debt they've incurred getting everyone hooked on AI. If my mechanic started charging 10x more to fix my car, I'd learn to fix my car.
• hirvi74 4mo ago
  Luckily for me, I was never truly that intelligent nor skilled to begin with.
• mberning 4mo ago
  It’s absolutely atrocious in the Fortune 500 tech sector. Multiple times a day I see people debating each other on teams about things they know nothing about and it’s obvious that it is just copilot v copilot. Crazy.
• warumdarum 4mo ago
  AI should demand tokens of attention from proffesionals little challenges to continue, turn the toolise into an adventure. The gold standard would be the primer from diamond age
• pelorat 4mo ago
  Personally? Yes (and I hate it). Autocomplete of entire functions and methods. Nice, but also really boring. Takes the fun out it. It's all about fixing sup-par code now, a line here or there. It's just boring. I tried writing some code by hand today after a few months hardly thinking about things and it was really hard to do even the simplest stuff.
• rvz 4mo ago
  It is not said here much given the AI psychosis, but firms like Anthropic do not allow you to use AI in their interviews for a reason. They know that this is one of the biggest de-skilling programmes they have seen. So expect the return of in person Leetcodes and whiteboard challenges.
• devin 4mo ago
  The biggest negative I'm seeing is that people are moving _too fast_ to evaluate the stuff they're slinging. When you move too fast, you do not take the time to build up your taste or appreciate the nuances of different approaches to the same problem. I am using LLMs quite a lot, but the amount of time I spend sitting on some slopped out code is I think on average much longer than a lot of my peers. What I've found is that while the original thing "works", it usually winds up being another 2-3 cycles of iterating on the original idea after I've let it settle in my head before I actually feel confident about merging. As a result, when I add it all up, for actual "this is important" design-level concerns, I do not feel significantly more productive.
• j45 4mo ago
  Technology like many things is about _how_ you use it. If social media is consuming first, or primarily consuming, anyone can scroll their way to a negative rabbit hole that never ends. If creation is the use it's something else entirely. AI in the form of interactive chats, can be a novel kind of consumption. You can have passive conversations in terms of asking a magic genie, or more active ones.
• akomtu 4mo ago
  I call it Alien Slop Intelligence (ASI) that gradually turns your mind into slop. AI is sloppy on details, so at first you polish its slop by hand, then you start ignoring small imperfections, and eventually you lose taste and skills to evaluate AI output. At that point your mind has become slop.
• larsfaye 4mo ago
  Oh ho ho....looks like I'll need to update my essay! The evidence is mounting higher and higher. https://larsfaye.com/articles/agentic-coding-is-a-trap https://larsfaye.com/articles/agentic-coding-is-a-trap
• anjel 4mo ago
  MDs NPs and PAs currently are offered free access to a medical AI app called Open Evedidence. Was just discussing this with our chief medical officer and while he is quite enthusiastic about it, he could already see this same dumbing down effect emerging among his providers. The solution I think, is 5 or 10 ten year re-certification exams for MDs, currently reqd for "Physician Extenders" but not the Physicians who supervise them. Continuing compulsory education and re-certification works, I suspect, in all highly skilled fields that are both augmented by AI but also degraded by it.
• u8 4mo ago
  We were so spoiled. We got fat salaries to sit in air conditioned Herman Millers all day learning about computers. Now we discover a way to synthesis intelligence and the only thing we can think to do with it is ruin the most fun career most of us could have ever hoped for. Sure, we're all more productive now, but how much of that is because we leverage AI on top of the intelligence we gained from all of that manual work? Who is to say that in 36 months you're not a worse developer over all because that systems knowledge starts to atrophy too? This isn't me saying you shouldn't use AI. I use it all of the time to do useful side tasks like to setup GitHub Workflows while I write a feature, or with my agent on a VPS to do internet tasks for me. It's nice to have a little synthesized intelligence. What isn't nice is to supplement your own intelligence. I think the gains are in the work there--similar to how you can be absolutely ripped from taking steroids while destroying your body. Often it's the shortcuts that are the most treacherous path.
  • BobbyJo 4mo ago
    You're either using it wrong, or work somewhere that sucks. I'm having a ton of fun coding with AI. I feel like I am learning a whole new branch of the programming skill tree. LLMs and their harnesses are like a mew set of constraints to work around when designing systems, but if you get them right you can build bigger, better things than ever before. I say all of this as someone who spent the last two days rebuilding RBAC for my application after Claude royally messed it up.
    • sublinear 4mo ago
      What's an example of "bigger and better" and what projects did you have before?
      • BobbyJo 4mo ago
        I attempted to build a K8s based image catalog and management system a few years ago, and progress was very slow. Took 2 months to get the first vaporware demo put together. This year I'm building and IoT data management platform and I've already built two demos of the product and am adding a bunch of features for a third. Nothing is vaporware about it. All in about 4 months. The big wins have been system config, debugging, and exploration. I was able to build an Arrow Flight SQL backend to use as an interface and try it out with some use cases, decide it wasn't going to work, and replace it with something else, all in about two weeks. Would have taken far longer before, if I would have been able to do it at all. I knew nothing about Flight SQL before trying it out.
• physix 4mo ago
  For me personally, holding a dialogue with several agentic dev streams in parallel keeps me very much on my toes mentally. It's quite exhausting, and certainly not letting my brain atrophy. I'm probably losing some coding skills, but replacing them with different ones, and honing some others. I used to manage dev teams of 20+ people inside high pressure, high stakes projects. I've been coding all my adult life, on big things and small. To me, agentic engineering is a deja vue of managing teams, except in real time.
• burnto 4mo ago
  Wow so technology doing tasks for people has an effect of diminishing their skill at those tasks. Truly unprecedented.
• tarruda 4mo ago
  I don't feel like AI coding has ruined my skills, and I could go back to manual coding any time. However, I cannot build a good mental model of a software component that I didn't write myself, and that can affect future maintenance if that component is not properly decoupled from the rest of the system.
• AngryData 4mo ago
  Welcome software engineers to the world of automated production. Your skills will drop, the usefulness of your skills will drop, the pay for your skills will drop, the quality of output you produce will drop, everything will be worse for everybody except for the person that legally claims ownership over the machine and what it produces. 100 years from now people will wonder at how anybody did anything manually writing all their code, but at the same time will have their mind boggled that a game like Roller Coaster Tycoon is possible without 1024 CPU cores running a few terabytes of memory in order to control every single person walking around the park.
• thrixton 4mo ago
  One thing I have found out immensely useful for is exploring new niche areas. One example is I got it to setup a new terminal (wezterm) and configure it quickly to my liking. This would have been a lot of googling and reading before, generally too much time for me to invest. I don't think it's valuable knowledge for me to have apart from a high level to evaluate the possibilities.
• iainctduncan 4mo ago
  Of course it's ruining skills. Anyone who has a really well honed mental skill knows that we get rusty really damned fast (e.g. musician at a professional musician level, which happens to be my reference point). You keep shedding, you stay sharp. You take more than a week off, it's going downhill. There's no way this isn't happening with other skills. No goddamned way. Anyone who tells you otherwise is grifting.
• hintymad 4mo ago
  This is hardly surprising. Think about Staff+ engineers: their work is a lot like commanding AI. Most climb the corporate ladder through hard work, excellent engineering skills, soft skills, and a bit of luck. But as their companies grow, they gradually spend less time coding, debugging, or doing deep design. Instead, they act more like highly technical product managers. They help VPs plan and write high-level product requirements sprinkled with technical terms. They draw boxes on whiteboards and create pretty slides. They write polished documents that keep their leadership happy, and they are either in meetings or on their way to the next one. When they have a technical idea, they dispatch a team to test it out. Naturally, they still feel deeply technical, until the day they have to resolve a production issue, pass a technical interview, or write extensive code. That is when they realize their skills have grown rusty. I point this out not to criticize, but to highlight a genuine career challenge. As an engineer, I would rather hone my technical skills. Yet, if you want to climb the corporate ladder, you have to take on more organizational work. The only solution I can think of is to become more like a researcher or a professor. Over the years, good professors spend less time writing papers or deriving formulas. However, their insights are so deep that they still produce amazing results by advising PhD students. But that path is much easier said than done.
• drunken_thor 4mo ago
  I’m watching those around me forget even the simplest command line commands for every day tasks in favour of AI. So not only are they letting hard earned skills slip away, they are paying for the privilege. Suddenly software development is a profession requiring a monthly subscription to participate in. It puts AI companies in a perfect position. This is the same business model as drug dealers. I am being told that I am going to be left behind but I’m the only one able to still be productive when Anthropic goes down. Don’t get me wrong either, I love that it writes tests and is able to do large tedious refactors for me but I also have a respect for my profession as a skill like a carpenter. It is only ever improved and maintained by active and deliberate work. Ai is killing daily practice, book clubs, community support, community development and we are all paying for the privilege.
• jreynar 4mo ago
  First, I wonder about the value of the study about endoscopies. Comparing number of adenomas found before and after potential "de-skilling" with AI assumes the rate of adenomas is constant, which doesn't necessarily seem safe. Not sure if the issue is with the study or the summary, but measuring how well the population did compared to reference analyses seems like a much better study design and would give me more confidence that there had actually been a change in skill. I also wonder if the time allotted for reading was reduced or people felt more pressure when reading scans the old fashioned way since they were probably read quickly by the AI, that's a potential confounding factor. Second, I'm not surprised you can find measurable de-skilling due to AI. But I bet you could find de-skilling related to spell checkers and calculators back in the day, but no one I know today suggests we shouldn't use word processors and ought to count on our fingers and toes or do long division. There's always a tradeoff around what skills and knowledge is genuinely important to be a domain expert and what we can outsource to technology. We're in a transitional phase right now not only because the tech is new but because it's changing so fast. In a few years, once we're further up the adoption curve and the pace has settled down in some domains, I bet we'll land on a way to use AI for coding and doctoring (or in some domain where AI progress has stabilized) that requires a combination of knowledge and skills but that we'll have gotten comfortable with people no longer needing to know or do things that today are considered core to the job.
• sarbanharble 4mo ago
  We have a serious accountability problem. We all know and see what is happening, but there’s zero accountability for the offenders.
• eudamoniac 4mo ago
  I've managed to avoid using AI at work entirely, somehow. From everything I'm reading this means I'm going to be the best engineer around pretty soon just by doing the same work as always. What are the implications of this?
• aplomb1026 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• shymasen 4mo ago
  YES. I WHOLE HEARTEDLY AGREE WITH YOU