But there's a new skill blossoming there, right? That's what I'm noticing. The atrophying skill is one you don't need anymore. The new one - prompting, routing the output, spotting the hallucinations, managing singal/noise etc. - is now where you can add tremendous value.

To say nothing of being bold enough to run systems like that in the first place. I know some of engineers that are still folding their arms and refusing to engage with AI!

▲

stackskipton 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>spotting the hallucinations

SRE here, spotting the hallucinations requires you to have the knowledge to know when it's wrong. Best way to gain knowledge on systems is actually working on them. If AI do all the work, then you don't get the knowledge.

▲

thewhitetulip 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Exactly. How hard is it to understand for people?

If you don't ride your bicycle for years and years because you can just write "drive yourself"

Then your skills are atrophying. Typing isn't a skill

	▲	loopmonster 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't know that that analogy fits for this comment. The argument is that the old skill is genuinely no longer needed in favour of the new skill, but the new skill requires experience from the old skill. I don't think being a good driver needs you to have already been a good cyclist.

▲

apitman 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How do technical managers solve this problem? I've never been a real manager.

▲

jeremyjh 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Good ones force themselves to do technical work hands on regularly, but will generally reach a level where they can't actually do that anymore unless they are really good at building management systems and delegating. For me it has happened in cycles over the last 25 years; after 4-6 years in management I refresh skills and go back to an IC role because I can't stand it anymore. I've done that cycle three times but I won't do it quite the same way again because its probably impossible to do without a pay cut now, and because IC don't write code anymore anyway.

This is both like forcing all IC to develop management skills but its also like the shift to cloud infrastructure or 4GL languages - we are never going back to the old ways and will be building everything at a different level of abstraction with a different span of control.

▲

NeOchenHorosho 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I guess humans don't hallucinate that much

▲

delecti 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Humans don't literally hallucinate much, but we do lie, or are wrong.

▲

yubblegum 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Humans are deterministic and have personality traits. The first couple of times getting bs’d and that person is now a known quality.

Agents fail randomly. One day a stellar dev and next a bs artist.

So this idea that LLM hallucination is not unlike human failings is without merit.

	▲	yen223 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Humans are deterministic what

▲

raincole 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Humans hallucinate much more, but they're not that good at making the hallucinations convincing.

	▲	customguy 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Not even that Proton CEO claimed that. This is another one of those "no u" knee-jerk reactions littered all over this site, and I wonder when we'll first see stuff like "but humans also sometimes fail to load because of network issues", because there is no real distance between "humans hallucinate even more" and something like that.
	▲	krapp 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		No they don't. Any human who hallucinated as much as an LLM does would be committed.

▲

macintux 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't know how to spot hallucinations, manage signal/noise, without having a pretty good understanding of the problem space. It's a tough balancing act.

▲

timacles 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The atrophying skill is one you don't need anymore.

of course. who needs to walk when we have cars

▲

mattmanser 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Every new model and you might as well chuck 90% of that knowledge in the bin.

Last Claude major version they released a blog post basically telling you to chuck away your Claude.md file and start again.

It was only 18 months ago when people were telling you to use ultrathink:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43739997

And then that went away about a year ago, and now it’s sort of back again but not quite as it was.

	▲	memjay 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I really don’t want to see code generated by Claude without some constraint like rules in a Claude.md file. Even Fable on high is lazy enough to forget a ton of things that a senior engineer would not. For example tracing and handling all unhappy paths, not repeating code, not writing terrible doc strings, etc. We are using quite a big list of rules and the output is significantly more aligned with what we interpret as “good” code.

▲

archagon 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A company comprised entirely of management. I'm sure only great things will come of this.