You will not live enough to learn everything. Eventually you have to say "I could figure [something] out but I won't take that time." Most things are that way - I probably could learn brain surgery (I used this example because it has a reputation of being a very difficult course of study). I would like to make a lathe from scratch - but I don't have easy access to enough iron ore to get started - even if I start from scrap metal, I probably wouldn't spend months making my own surface plate (...) and so I own a factory made lathe instead.

That is why I'm content to delegate to agents - I have more code/features I want to write than I have time to debug (writing is the easy part).

For me (about halfway between you and dofm in my career by your own statements in this thread), it's a dream at the moment. I can delegate all the tedious stuff that I've done "the hard way" a thousand times already and feel I have very little of value remaining to learn, so that I can spend more time on all the things that are actually new and thus much more interesting.

> mainstream

What does "mainstream" refer to when we're talking about software development and LLMs? As opposed to "engineers".

I am not sure I disagree, and I certainly don't mean to disagree very fervently.

But I think if you want to really learn to ride well, understand horses well, there might be some benefit in learning how to shoe a horse. At some level it should never only be someone else's job.

If I worked with horses for 8 hours a day I imagine the answer would be "recently"

Having to shoe a horse never was a general skill.

Maybe a more apt analogy would be a skill like making fire without a lighter.

>When's the last time you shoed a horse?

That skill died too, so what's your point?

To me, this is just a question of specialization. Not everyone needs to be a "I understand how the system actually works" person. In fact, not many people need to be that person. But every system does need some of that person to exist!

And we happen to be discussing this on a forum where the type of people who will be the specialists for the kinda of systems we're discussing are likely to gather.

I'd be surprised if in my casual discussions out in the real world, I were to run into a lot of people who care exactly how all this works, to the extent that they want to invest significant money into hardware that allows them to run things themselves and dig into what's actually going on. But I'm not at all surprised to come across such people here! (Indeed, it would be very disappointed if I didn't!)