Yeah but, you can't make a judgement in these technical areas without the technical skill... No?
The rise of judgement over technical skill
51–60 of 176 posts
Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill
#52AI enables me to gold plate _everything_ I do, which feels exhilarating, if a bit exhausting. Having decent taste and being able to continuously test and verify my work allows me to smooth over the occasional hallucinations and elicit towering, mind-bending solutions. AI's no replacement for experience; garbage in-garbage out. When AI gets too good, I figure people will cloister to stop feeding the beast. It can only…
Can you elaborate? What kinds of things are you doing, maybe something related to programming? What part of the job do you delegate?
Not delegating, just tricking everything I develop out far more than I would have in the past. I'm on yet another hodgepodge project in a looong, decades long series of hodge and podge. AI is letting me begin to answer to my own satisfaction, "what does it look like to do everything to the best of my ability?"
In my current gig, I have an on-prem database and legacy application that is human-powered software, where parts of the business process never touch the computer and a human does the work (mostly support stuff), (and for no good reason other than this system never had real engineering support.) So, I joined the team, and started to wrangle the system.
First thing I was asked to do was get their database code and schema into source control with managed releases. The gold plating process that I never would have entertained in the past led me to get a migration tool installed, get a unit test engine installed in the database and writing new code with tests, figure out even how to refactor the big ball of mud and coming up with patterns there, doing github workflows to run the tests and deploy to multiple environments, linters, Slack alerts.
It's not that I wasn't aware of all these things, I just never would have done all of them _to the extent_ that I did because the time needed to research it all traditionally and spike the solutions would have been too great. And I documented it all!
After the databases were basically under control and I had gained the team's trust, I moved the team to start automating the human-powered parts of the software. We started an admin console webapp project. Again, I was heavy into AI all along the way, even during requirements elicitation. Our data is a rube goldberg machine of cloud and on-prem, but the majority of what we need to get under control is legacy/on-prem. We want the webapp to eventually be hosted in the cloud, but to be close to our databases and not have to fuss with private links, we decided for starters to deploy the webapp on-prem next to them.
So, that meant figuring out how to get our github builds deployed on-prem. There was this huge saga in figuring out how to provision an on-prem GitHub Runner and use Powershell Remoting to fan out our deployments from there to all of the on-prem servers. Never EVER would I have been able to figure out the permissions and powershell provisioning steps needed to pull that off. It's all very gross, Windows is gross, but what we've built works dependably and is secure. I probably would have just used Samba or some other cheesy way to move files around and trigger deployments if I didn't have AI to bounce all these ideas off of.
Another example: we wanted our BFF microservices to eventually deploy as Azure Functions, so gold plating meant we had to figure out how to build and deploy functions on-prem. It ended up being very productive, but again I would have never entertained doing such a thing unless I could bounce my ideas off AI and get credible directions on how to proceed. Instead, I would have written the service as trusty/crusty old Express 4.x and ported the code to Functions once we made the jump to cloud. I am saving future me a ton of work and heartburn!
At every step AI is giving me the latitude to ask, given whatever nasty situation I'm in, what would be the best code/most secure/nicest architecture in that case? It's arduous to continually pepper it with questions and spend many days zeroing in on a final solution with it. But, it beats the guessing game of searching DuckDuckGo, StackOverflow, and software vendors' documentation - those are now the _last_ places I look for answers. (For ill, I'm sure.)
Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill
#53Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill
#54[deleted]
Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill
#55And what is that judgement based on? Jobs that an AI can't do yet, like designing a system architecture and drawing boundaries (which features go in the same service), need someone with experience.
We can apply this to all points in the Future of Work section. Even the conclusion "What should you do, and why?" is basically a disguised "What domain-specific knowledge do you have to make an informed opinion on the 'why' anyway?"
Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill
#56Music was never an issue of skill. You might have needed skill in order to get to the point where you could use your judgement, but skill was never the deciding factor. So, I don't agree with Brian Eno's point that there has been some kind of seismic shift when it comes to this. Rather, it's just a matter of a shift in the type of skill that you need to have. The same is probably true when it comes to AI tools within…
Getting a seat in a symphony involves skill. Brian Eno didn't just do rock.
Ever seen a photoshop expert at work? Every human endeavor has a skill distribution. Hammering in a nail takes skill.
Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill
#57Music was never an issue of skill. You might have needed skill in order to get to the point where you could use your judgement, but skill was never the deciding factor. So, I don't agree with Brian Eno's point that there has been some kind of seismic shift when it comes to this. Rather, it's just a matter of a shift in the type of skill that you need to have. The same is probably true when it comes to AI tools within…
Getting a seat in a symphony involves skill. Brian Eno didn't just do rock.
I'm just arguing that there has been no qualitative shift. The skills you need to produce pop music today are different than the skills that you needed before. Now you need to be able to operate a MIDI sequencer or a program like Ableton, which is not necessarily easier in and off itself, than for instance learning how to play a guitar. I think it's the same with AI tools and programming. We're just talking about a different set of skills that you need in order to be competitive. I don't think there has been any real shift from "skill needed" to "judgement needed". I think this relationship remains the same, both for pop music and programming, but also for the example of playing an instrument in a symphony orchestra.
Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill
#58The tooling problem is 90% solved. The new technical bottleneck is human judgment.
Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill
#59I think, the argument would make more sense if software like Cubase came with unlicenced samples from all songs out of the box. Artists sued and won when someone used their samples without permission. If you use AI to create art, it's like that.
There's a difference between a sample and something inspired by something but also significantly different. The copyright laws around music are kind of draconian so it's not a good analogy for code anyhow, imagine a world where a fundamental do while loop had 90 year copyright protection, and that's the sort of world we'd be living in if code copyright was like music copyright.
If you see the generated content as "the music that's created with unlicenced samples" that's true.
However, if you see the trained models as "the music that's created with unlicenced samples" it isn't true.
Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill
#60This echoes my experience with Claude Code. The bottleneck isn't the code generation itself—it's two critical judgment tasks: 1. Problem decomposition: Taking a vague idea and breaking it down into well-defined, context-bounded issues that I can effectively communicate to the AI 2. Code review: Carefully evaluating the generated code to ensure it meets quality standards and integrates properly Both of these require d…
What the heck, the code generation _is_ absolutely still a bottle-neck.
I dare anyone who making these arguments that LLMs have removed the need for actual programming skill, for example, to share in a virtual pair programming session with me, and I will demonstrate their basic inability to do _any_ moderately complex coding in short order. Yes, I think that's the only way to resolve this controversy. If they have some magic sauce for prompting, they should post a session or chat that can be verified by other (even if not exactly repeatable).
Yesterday almost my whole day was wasted because I chose to attack a problem primarily by using Claude 4 Sonnet. Having to hand hold it every step of the way, continually keep correcting basic type and logic errors (even ones I had corrected previously in the same session), and in the end it just could solve the challenge I gave it.
I have to be cynical and believe those shouting about LLMs taking over technical skill must have lots of stock in the AI companies.