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What AI coding costs you

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Re: What AI coding costs you

#31

Post by grayhatter »

docheinestages wrote: post #17

I think it's important to be conscious of skill atrophy, but I don't see a problem with it if what you're offloading to AI isn't your area of focus. For instance, I don't necessarily want to always know what tricks the compiler is using to compile my program, even if they are pretty smart.

I doubt it's possible to draw a concrete line between in domain, and out of domain. Would you mind trying with a specific example? Because so much of engineering is understanding the interactions between systems. While I cant enumerate the exact asm codes, I do need to understand how the compiler is going to rewrite my function if I want to understand if a cast is safe, or if this function call order needs to be rewritten, or if I'm need a mutex to protect this from a torn read.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#32

Post by marginalia_nu »

noduerme wrote: post #21

The hell with with whatever speed boost I might get. I still write all my code by hand every day, and own what it does. I know it. And I don't have to worry about atrophy. Could've outsourced a long time ago to humans, if I wanted to deal with reading code most of the time instead of writing it.

If programmer speed and efficiency was truly such a significant competitive factor, we wouldn't be packing them like sardines them in noisy and stuffy open floor plan offices.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#35

Post by jnovek »

noduerme wrote: post #21

The hell with with whatever speed boost I might get. I still write all my code by hand every day, and own what it does. I know it. And I don't have to worry about atrophy. Could've outsourced a long time ago to humans, if I wanted to deal with reading code most of the time instead of writing it.

Do you have management pressure to use these tools? I don’t have any data but me and virtually every software engineer I talk to regularly is feeling or has felt pressure to use these tools.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#36

Post by skydhash »

heartbreak wrote: post #22
orphea wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The act of writing code by hand seems to be on a trajectory of irrelevance It does not. English (or any human language) is an awful language to write specifications in, because it is not as precise as code. Each time you "compile" your prompt into a program, LLMs spit up something a little bit different. How is it a good thing? > so as long as I maintain my ability to reason about code (both by continuing to read i…

> Each time you "compile" your prompt into a program, LLMs spit up something a little bit different. How is it a good thing? Because that’s not how it works. How can we have a discussion about this topic if we don’t have a mutual understanding of how the tools even work? The code is not replaced by English prompts. The code still exists.

> The code is not replaced by English prompts. The code still exists

If you can guarantee that it does what you say it does, then all is ok. The core issue since the advent of ChatGPT was always this reliability issue, whether the end result, the code, addresses the change request issued.

It turned out that you need to be an expert programmer to vet the code as well as supervise its evolution, whatever the tool used to write it.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#37

Post by adampunk »

It’s worth pointing out that as of February 2026 the costs here are still pretty speculative. We’ve got some small sample studies on developers, and we have some anecdotal transmission of certain skills falling away. But frankly, if these anecdotes and limited data were attached to some statement about Rust, for example, no one would give them any credence whatsoever.

What we’re working with -—unfortunately—-are vibes. It really seems as though AI coding will have this effect on people. Morally, it seems like it ought to have this effect on people. We should not be allowed to be at ease without some sort of cost. And if we can luridly suggest that you don’t pay with money all the better.

This allows for the piece to perform its function, even when it doesn’t fully commit to it. A work in the genre can say all sorts of nuanced things about agentic coding, while still keeping the core premise that those who resist or position themselves strategically will be the winners.

That’s possible! It’s entirely possible that we will see some skill atrophy that is broken down by AI usage AND materially impacts outcomes that matter. We for sure do not know whether or not that is the case. I suspect it is because we don’t ask what these predictions cost you, which is nothing.

If we look at the starting point for most people on this stuff, it’s basically last fall. The author points this out, but the necessary conclusion one was draw from this is that we don’t have enough information to tell what the cost will be. It may like moving to programming languages from assembly or moving to assembly from bespoke instructions—-fundamentally very little was lost in those transitions, despite there being a lot of carping about it. It could be like the introduction of the tablet in American schools, where what we lose is nearly everything. We really do not know. It might be prudent to be cautious in this situation, but we ought to respect the fact that this caution might be born out of an old paradigm.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#38

Post by mirsadm »

encomiast wrote: post #10
heartbreak wrote: post #6

It remains unclear to me why my ability to read and review code (the majority of my job for years now) will atrophy if I continue doing it while writing even less code than I was before. If my ability to write code somehow atrophies because I stop doing it, does that matter if I continue with the architecture and strategy around coding? The act of writing code by hand seems to be on a trajectory of irrelevance, so as…

"so as long as I maintain my ability to reason about code…what’s the issue?" It seems like that is the open question. The article suggests that people don't maintain this ability: "The AI group scored 17% lower on conceptual understanding, debugging, and code reading. The largest gap was in debugging, the exact skill you need to catch what AI gets wrong. One hour of passive AI-assisted work produced measurable skill…

This use to be the most embarrassing thing that could happen. A team member asks you why you did something a certain way during a PR and you can't provide an answer. This seems to be becoming the norm now.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#39

Post by lstodd »

noduerme wrote: post #21

The hell with with whatever speed boost I might get. I still write all my code by hand every day, and own what it does. I know it. And I don't have to worry about atrophy. Could've outsourced a long time ago to humans, if I wanted to deal with reading code most of the time instead of writing it.

yup. no effort - no bliss. and for rare bouts of wanting to shepherd cats I just got meself some actual cats. At least they don't pretend to be engineers.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#40

Post by levkk »

ryanmcl wrote: post #5

[dead]

Models don't learn. They retrain them periodically, but junior engineers learn much faster and constantly improve. If you stop learning, you will only be as good as the model.

I've been coding (software engineering, I guess) for close to 15 years. The models skill set is a comfortable L1 (intern), pushing L2 (junior). They are getting better, but at a snail pace compared to a human learning the same thing.

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