Hah, right, I mixed it up!

In fairness, 9 women can't make 9 babies in a month either

I’ve also seen along those lines “there is no compression algorithm for experience” - a nice summary of the hn posts from today.

Put differently: you get good at what you actually do, not what you think you're doing.

If you're not coding anymore, but using AI tools, you're developing skills in using those AI tools, and your code abilities will atrophy unless exercised elsewhere.

AI coding isn’t an abstraction, though. You can’t treat a prompt like source code because it will give you a different output every time you use it. An abstraction lets you offload cognitive capacity while retaining knowledge of “what you are doing”. With AI coding either you need to carefully review outputs and you aren’t saving any cognitive capacity, or you aren’t looking at the outputs and don’t know what you’re doing, in a very literal sense.

That's true, but I think it's beside the point. The flip side of that argument, which is equally true, goes something like, "not doing cognitive push-ups leads to cognitive atrophy."

There are skills we're losing that are probably ok to lose (e.g. spacial memory & reasoning vs GPS, mental arithmetic vs calculators), primarily because those are well bounded domains, so we understand the nature of the codependency we're signing up for. AI is an amorphous and still growing domain. It is not a specific rung in the abstraction hierarchy; it is every rung simultaneously, but at different fidelity levels.

I get your point, I just wonder how accurate it is. We basically never look at the output of the compiler, so I agree that tool allows one to operate at a higher level than assembly. But I always have to wade through the output from AI so I’m not sure I got to move to the next level of abstraction. But maybe that’s just me.

The idea that a tool intended to replace all human cognitive work is the next level of abstraction is so fundamentally flawed, that I'm not sure it's made in good faith anymore. The most charitable interpretation I can think of is that it's a coping mechanism for being made redundant.

Nevermind the fact that these tools are nowhere near as capable as their marketing suggests. Once companies and society start hitting the brick wall of inevitable consequences of the current hype cycle, there will be a great crash, followed by industry correction. Only then will actually useful applications of this technology surface, of which there are plenty. We've seen how this plays out a few times before already.