We can and did work without it. It just makes us many times faster.

Nothing about using an LLM removes skills and abilities you already had before it.

14123newsletter 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

>Nothing about using an LLM removes skills and abilities you already had before it.

Funny story: The widespread of Knorr soup stock already made people unable to cook their own stock soup, or even worse, the skill to season their soup from just basic, fresh ingredients.

Source: my mom.

	▲	windexh8er 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I'm always surprised when people buy vegetable stock. So many people I know cook "from scratch" with base ingredients like stock out of a box. And just as with cooking: most people won't care - and the same goes with LLMs. It can be good enough... Less efficient? Meh - cloud. AI slop image? Meh - cheaper than paying an artist. LLMs to get kids through school? Meh - something something school-of-life. I look around and see many poorly educated people leaning hard into LLMs. These people are confusing parroting their prompt output as knowledge, especially in the education realm. And while LLMs may not "remove skills and abilities you already had before it" - you damn sure will lose any edge you had over time. It's a slippery slope of trading a honed skill for convenience. And in some cases that may be a worthwhile trade. In others that is a disaster waiting to happen.

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3836293648 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For the industry as a whole it absolutely does. And for the individual it absolutely does kill your ability to do it unless you actually do practice.

And yes, the goal might be to only use it for boilerplate or first draft. But that's today, people are lazy, just wait for the you of tomorrow

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epolanski 4 days ago | parent [-]

> And for the individual it absolutely does kill your ability to do it unless you actually do practice.

Just because you state it, it doesn't make it true. I could tell you that taking buses or robotaxis doesn't change a bit your ability to drive.

	▲	forty 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Depends how often you do drive. I can guarantee you that not driving absolutely affected my ability to drive (I can still drive but certainly not nearly as well as if I drove daily)
	▲	3836293648 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Are you seriously claiming that not driving has no affect on your ability to drive? Taking a bus sometimes is fine, but that is missing literally the entire point that I made.

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umbra07 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you don't use a skill, it atrophies.

Now, maybe that is the future (no more/extremely little human-written code). Maybe that's a good thing in the same way that "x technological advancement means y skill is no longer necessary" - like how the advent of readily-accessible live maps means you don't need to memorize street intersections and directions or whatever. But it is true.

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brookst 4 days ago | parent [-]

I am terrible at computing sine and cosine, for sure. It doesn’t bother me.

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zelphirkalt 4 days ago | parent [-]

On the surface, this comparison might hold, but when you look at software development as a craft, and therefore containing aspects of creativity and art, the comparison no longer holds.

	▲	brookst 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Interesting take. So AI is the Ikea-ization of software, producing far cheaper / lower quality / less durable / more accessible product that is completely good enough for most people, but unacceptable to those who have the expertise to do it themselves, or the wealth to not care about price?

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hoppp 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

My experience was that reviewing generated code can take longer than writing it from scratch.

There was research about vibe coding that had similar conclusion. Feels productive but can take longer to review.

the moment you generate code you don't instantly understand you are better off reading the docs and writing it yourself