AI Is Making Developers Dumb

Leaky abstractions is a really appropriate term for LLM-assisted coding.

The original "law of leaky abstractions" talked about how the challenge with abstractions is that when they break you now have to develop a mental model of what they were hiding from you in order to fix the problem.

(Absolutely classic Joel Spolsky essay from 22 years ago which still feels relevant today: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a... )

Having LLMs write code for you has a similar effect: the moment you run into problems, you're going to have to make sure you deeply understand exactly what they have done.

Just a generic rant. How many people can sew; fell a tree; or skin an animal? Yeah, I thought so.

And no data or link to data either. Just a waves hand "I think it happened to me"

Fundamentally nothing, but everybody already knows that you shouldn't teach young kids to rely on calculators during the basic "four-function" stage of their mathematics education.

Calculators for the most part don't solve novel problems. They automate repetitive basic operations which are well-defined and have very few special cases. Your calculator isn't going to do your algebra for you, it's going to give you more time to focus on the algebraic principles instead of material you should have retained from elementary school. Algebra and calculus classes are primarily concerned with symbolic manipulation, once the problem is solved symbolically coming to a numerical answer is time-consuming and uninteresting.

Of course, if you have access to the calculator throughout elementary school then you're never going to learn the basics and that's why schoolchildren don't get to use calculators until the tail-end of middle school. At least that's how it worked in the early 2000s when i was a kid; from what i understand kids today get to use their phones and even laptops in class so maybe i'm wrong here.

Previously I stated that calculators are allowed in later stages of education because they only automate the more basic tasks; Matlab can arguably be considered a calculator which does automate complicated tasks and even when i was growing up the higher-end TI-89 series was available which actually could solve algebra and even simple forms of calculus problems symbolically; we weren't allowed access to these when i was in high school because we wouldn't learn the material if there was a computer to do it for us.

So anyways, my point (which is halfway an agreement with the OP and halfway an agreement with you) is that AI and calculators are fundamentally the same. It needs to be a tool to enhance productivity, not a crutch to compensate for your own inadequacies[1]. This is already well-understood in the case of calculators, and it needs to be well-understood in the case of AI.

[1] actually now that i think of it, there is an interesting possibility of AI being able to give mentally-impaired people an opportunity to do jobs they might never be capable of unassisted, but anybody who doesn't have a significant intellectual disability needs to be wary of over-dependence on machines.

This entire line of reasoning is worker propaganda. Like the boss is some buffoon and the employees constantly have to skirt his nonsensical requirements to make create a reasonable product.

It's a cartoon mentality. Real products have more requirements than any human can fathom, correctness is just one of the uncountable tradeoffs you can make. Understanding, or some kind of scientific value is another.

If anything but a single minded focus on your pet requirement is dumb, then call me dumb idc. Why YOU got into software development is not why anyone else did.

Not all of those abstractions are equally leaky though. Automatic memory management for example is leaky only for a very narrow set of problems, in many situations the abstraction works extremely well. It remains to be seen whether AI can be made to leak so rarely (which does not meant that it's not useful even in its current leaky state).