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| ▲ | bumblehean 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >Hours + Hours of reading and a lot of trial-and-error. The loop was so long and sooo slow. But that's how you learn... | | |
| ▲ | marssaxman 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I lost my desire to learn anything about web development twenty years ago and specialized my career in a completely different direction. I had not touched HTML at all since then until earlier this year, when I discovered that AI robots could do it for me. Now I am happy to whip up HTML/CSS/JavaScript visualizers, explorers, and even one-off interactive report presentations whenever they might be useful, precisely because I don't have to learn any of that crap to do it. My time & attention are far more productively spent focused on the work I am actually good at and interested in doing. | |
| ▲ | jonahx 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There was some learning, but also a lot of waste. As a self-learner, I've never been able to learn so fast as I can now with an LLM to instantly answer my specific questions, and incrementally correct and grow my mental model. And while with some subjects you need to worry about accuracy, LLMs are generally very good with programming questions, and (for most types of questions) you can verify their claims yourself. | |
| ▲ | suzzer99 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The problem with CSS is it's a) all broad and no depth and b) constantly adding major new paradigms. If you don't get up to speed and stay there, you lose it. Pre-AI I'd say I've gotten over the hump 3 times with CSS, only to lose it again by the next time I had to use it in volume. | |
| ▲ | petcat 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | We don't need to learn CSS anymore. Just like we don't need to learn ASM since GCC does a great job generating it from higher-level code. | | |
| ▲ | limitedmage 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I am a frontend engineer and I see so many bugs from vibe-coded CSS from people who think just like you. CSS is very powerful and easy to get wrong if you don't understand it. Since most CSS code on the internet is not good, LLMs do not generate good CSS code and create a lot of bugs ranging from bad performance to completely broken reflow. | | |
| ▲ | ericd 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Funnily enough, I seem to remember some people saying that compiler generated assembly wasn’t as good as handmade assembly. | | |
| ▲ | jazzyb 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | For early compilers in certain contexts, this was once true. |
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| ▲ | willsmith72 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | the question is, what's the business cost of some amount of css bugs vs paying specialists or people to learn these details. the generalists win overall, except of course for specific cases where specialists are great |
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| ▲ | cure_42 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Define "we". The people who make the tools that generate your assembly instructions need to learn it. Just like the people who make the browser rendering engine and push CSS forward still need to learn it. The people who don't need to learn asm never needed to learn it. If you wouldn't code in asm now, you wouldn't have ever. This " logic" is so irrational. | |
| ▲ | _carbyau_ 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I just want to point out the exception - the person who the AI learns from. Someone has to know it. And to advance it to the next level requires domain level expertise. Or are we allowing LLM's to determine the next CSS snapshot/version/level/whatever? | | | |
| ▲ | GPerson 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Learning ASM will actually teach you a lot about how the computer works, and I doubt learning CSS deeply teaches you much about design fundamentals. | |
| ▲ | kibwen 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I want to believe this is sarcasm, but it's so hard to tell these days. | | |
| ▲ | nonethewiser 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | For many cases like the one described, its true. | | |
| ▲ | kibwen an hour ago | parent [-] | | It's not. The majority of people regularly using GCC to develop C code (IOW, the primary use case of GCC) are familiar with assembly. | | |
| ▲ | fragmede an hour ago | parent [-] | | How familiar? Do they ever look at the .S files? know what ar and nm do? Deal with objdump? How important are those details for day-to-day compiling of C code for regular programmers? | | |
| ▲ | kibwen 39 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Yes, they know what ar and nm do. Whether these things are relevant for day-to-day compiling of C code is watching the goalposts sail over the horizon; the original statement being mocked here is "we don't need to learn ASM because GCC is so good", which completely betrays ignorance of why people learn still learn and deal with ASM to this day. Even if LLMs were comparable to compilers either in predictability (they're not) or code quality (they're not), the people who know what they're doing still take pains to understand how their tech stacks work, because that makes them better programmers, and this will continue to be true. |
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| ▲ | petcat 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's not sarcasm. We've all accepted that code-generation has been required and accepted for decades. | | |
| ▲ | __d 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Code generation (by compiler) has one major difference: it's deterministic. | | |
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| ▲ | a2ff6eeb0 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Honestly, we don't really need to learn any more. These days, I mostly copy and paste from tickets to the LLM, and then rubber stamp the output. I have people in my team that try to care about what they're making, but they're generating less code, and filling tickets more slowly, than I am. Even when it comes to system design and architecture, the LLMs aren't great at it, but honestly, they're better than my coworkers (I'd say system architecture is probably at the same readiness level that coding was last year). Expertise wouldn't really help you get things done faster. You could probably replace me with a minimum wage worker to do some manual testing and copy-paste errors from the console into the LLM, and still be fine. Let's see how long it is before the next round of layoffs, I guess. For now, the money's fine and the work's boring but ok. But, no, the LLMs rewarding expertise line is pure cope. Software is not really skilled labor any more. (obviously, throwaway -- I'm not interested in potentially advertising this to my employer) | | |
| ▲ | JSR_FDED 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Honestly, we don't really need to learn any more. Perhaps for your task of closing Jira tickets that’s true - but the you have a decision to make: wait until you’re eliminated or try to anticipate where future competitiveness comes from. | | |
| ▲ | a2ff6eeb0 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, that's the thing; future competitiveness isn't going to come from learning, at least not from learning about software. The LLMs have that covered, and software is becoming low status work anyways. It's largely going to come from interpersonal skills and being likeable enough to be the face of the projects and companies. Technical skill is rapidly dropping in value. | | |
| ▲ | miyoji 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | This claim can only be true if LLMs have completely mastered all intellectual aspects of creating and shipping software. That's so far from being true it's like saying that humans are currently an interplanetary, post-scarcity species. | | |
| ▲ | a2ff6eeb0 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | All? obviously not, but enough that I can ship more than my colleagues while not really paying attention to the output or fully understanding it. Technical skills aren't unnecessary, they're just becoming something that nobody will pay for. LLMs debug extremely well, generate code well enough, and do high level design acceptably, but fail in weird ways, so my actual work these days (outside of delegating to the LLM) is mostly manual testing. I need to give them nudges sometimes, but a year ago they needed constant nudges. In another year, I expect that it'll be good enough that pasting in a bug report with the right jargon will be all the nudging I need to get something that customers will accept if it gets shipped. They're already close. It's obviously going to remain pretty manual without some breakthroughs, but it's largely not work that needs a ton of intelligence or skill. The world hasn't caught up with software development being a few steps up from burger flipping, so I'm still getting paid well to do it, and I'll keep collecting that paycheck as long as it lasts. But learning about code is rapidly becoming relatively valueless. I wish it was different, I actually enjoyed getting paid to learn, but I play with the cards I'm dealt. |
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| ▲ | david-gpu 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It is not the only way to learn. | |
| ▲ | nonethewiser 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Why do you think thats worth learning? Doing a few times manually sure… but to force yourself to solely rely on it is foolish. Just use the calculator. | |
| ▲ | sega_sai 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes, but sometimes I don't need and want to learn. One example from my recent experience in research -- building custom dashboard pages for results of scientific analyses. Each analysis is bespoke, and building interactive webpages is simply not the skill many researchers have (and it's boring IMO). But here with LLM you could easily explore the results visually/share them with collaborators etc. There are plenty examples like that.
But certainly there are cases where learning is required. |
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| ▲ | lionkor 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This "instant" loop is so fast because it doesn't involve the part where you learn | | |
| ▲ | petcat 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You seem to be hung up on the part about "learning". Do you know how x86 registers work? Or atomic instructions available on ARM, SPARC, or POWER architectures? No, of course not. Because all of that got abstracted to higher-level instructions decades ago. | | |
| ▲ | hvs 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes, I do. And it wouldn't take you that long to learn, either. | | |
| ▲ | petcat 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Well that's great for you. That's some knowledge that you will possess for the rest of your life. I want a green lawn and big bushy shrubs in front of my house. Do I need to know the intricate biology of my soil and habitat? No, of course not. I just do the surface-level things that make the lawn and shrubs thrive. | | |
| ▲ | Johnny555 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | >No, of course not. I just do the surface-level things that make the lawn and shrubs thrive. And others want the green lawn and big bushy shrubs, but don't want to learn all of the surface level things to make their lawn thrive so they hire a service to do it for them. And there's nothing wrong with that - not everyone enjoys the yard work, but they still want the thriving lawn and shrubs... and they are happy to write a check to OpenAI... err...Lawn Doctor every month to get that result since the time they save by not dealing with their lawn, they can pursue things they do want to do. Not everyone wants to (or needs to) learn every detail along the way of getting the results they want. |
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| ▲ | NegativeLatency 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I understand your point, but also imagine applying that across the whole spectrum of computing. It's very useful that there's an intermediary that knows how that stuff works so I can build things without thinking about it in excruciating detail the whole time, I can dip down lower and learn stuff when it's relevant (like cache access and nested arrays) but I can also not do that in many situations. There's also the argument that you can do engineering without understanding the underlying science as seen in th pyramids, the beautiful old european churches, etc | |
| ▲ | nonethewiser 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Who is more productive? A python dev who learns about x86 registers in his free time or one that uses AI at work? | | |
| ▲ | JSR_FDED 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | The one who uses AI at work will eventually be replaced by someone cheaper who uses AI at work. The one who learns about x86 registers is much more likely to continue to evolve |
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| ▲ | vouaobrasil 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | But maybe there's a limit to the usefulness of this abstraction. Perhaps forgetting too many basic skills lower down isn't always as useful as going from Assembly to C. I'd argue that there's a law of diminishing returns there, and it's not an endless series of benefits. | |
| ▲ | yyyyyyyyyyzyyyy an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | nonethewiser 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Learn what? The thing the tool can do instantly? Take the win and spend your energy on bigger problems. | |
| ▲ | hgoel 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | In a world where there are endless things to do and only limited time to get them done, not every issue needs to be a learning matter. | | |
| ▲ | Jtarii 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | If you are making something that you care about you should probably understand how it works. I didn't know this was such a hot take. | | |
| ▲ | hgoel 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | So, since you care so much and caring requires knowing everything about everything that even remotely intersects with your project, as (presumably) a software developer presumably you understand in detail how every bit of the CPUs you're targeting, plus the lithography, chemistry, and how solid state physics, and the underlying quantum mechanics work? | | |
| ▲ | dbalatero 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | You seem to be massively exaggerating here for effect. I think the main point is, if you're building frontend web apps, you should probably know how HTML, CSS, and JavaScript interact to some decently high level. Can you look stuff up on the margins via AI, or StackOverflow, or whatever? Sure. If you're building <something else>, you should probably know the core tools and concepts at the appropriate level to build them. No we do not need to know every aspect of CPU branch prediction and whatnot to make a webpage. | | |
| ▲ | hgoel 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think it's pretty obvious from the context of "if you had technical gaps (say, you couldn’t write CSS)" that this isn't about someone that regularly works on frontend web apps, it's about someone that is having to do something that is not normal for them. E.g. I mainly work on HPC code, maybe once in a year or two I need to throw together an animated poster to accompany a printed one. It's obviously ridiculous to claim that this means I have to learn frontend web dev. |
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| ▲ | Jtarii 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | All the boring stuff you skipped to get right to the answer you want was just as important whether you want to admit it or not. Having to read through a structured resource describing something to figure something out has intrinsic value that an LLM is not going to provide you with. | | |
| ▲ | daishi55 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > All the boring stuff you skipped to get right to the answer you want was just as important This is obviously not the case. There are mountains and mountains of boring, unimportant stuff that LLMs can do for us now. For example, at work I can now make a nestJS dashboard without having any idea what nestJS is. I can just tell the LLM what I want, and it makes it so. This allows me to make my tool useful to people without having to become an expert on something unimportant. | | | |
| ▲ | dymk 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Well, no, it might not be important. Maybe you won't use that knowledge about CSS grids and flexbox for another year or two, or maybe ever. |
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