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AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

joshwcomeau.com

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Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#41

Post by muldvarp »

geraneum wrote: post #38
muldvarp wrote: post #28

The fact that AI currently requires some human supervision to produce valuable results is not a good predictor that it will stay this way sadly. LLMs were basically unable to reason two years ago. They are now better at many reasoning tasks than most people. If there is even a remote chance that LLMs will make your job obsolete I would pivot as fast as I could. This includes first and foremost software engineering.

The people you see in the TV are not actually in the TV box. It looks real until you try to shake one’s hand. It’s kind of the same thing with AI (reasoning and whatnot).

I don't think it matters if the reasoning is philosophically "real" if it can solve real problems.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#42

Post by worldsayshi »

zaphar wrote: post #34
worldsayshi wrote: post #9

I see two points: 1. AIs aren't yet good at architecture. 2. AIs aren't yet good at imagining technically exciting stuff to build. And I agree that there's still space there to build a career in the short to medium term (plus Jevons Paradox). When both those points are no longer true we are certainly much closer to, dear I say it, agi. I suspect that (1) will be solved for somewhat limited domains in the near future…

Nearly every argument that hinges on the word "yet" is just an example of over-extrapolation[0] at play. 0: https://www.fallacyfiles.org/overxtra.html

You're probably on point there.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#43

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

simmerup wrote: post #40
akersten wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly a maintenance dead end. In the Tailwind thread the other day I was explicitly told that the intended experience of many frameworks is "write-only code" so maybe this is just the way of the future that we have to learn to embrace. Don't worry how it's all hooked u…

The problem is it’s impossibly hard to test all the edge cases Which is probably why so many random buttons in microsoft/apple/spotify just stop working once you get off the beaten path or load the app in some state which is slightly off base

Yeah, the biggest thing I've noticed from LLMs is that large tech products now have even more bugs. Turns out the humans weren't so bad after all...

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#44

Post by jplusequalt »

>I think AI tools are more like Iron Man’s suit. It can do incredible things, but not on its own.

Seemingly every AI pilled programmer who writes a blog post on AI's impact on software engineering has the same philosophical argument, and it's wording changes slightly every 6-12 months to reflect the newest models capabilities.

In 2023 it was: "AI is just autocomplete. It can't code whole blocks on it's own."

In 2024 it was: "AI is only good for scaffolding new projects, or boiler plate code. It can't write the application whole sale."

Since November 2025 it's been: "AI is only writing the code for us. It can't manage architecture, or do the long term planning required for real world applications."

In 6-12 months when the AI is doing an increasing amount of the architecture and high level planning, what will AI pilled programmers fall back on then?

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#45

Post by user34283 »

Waterluvian wrote: post #25
snarf21 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same but the question I struggle most with is this: "Does it matter when the people who are going to come along and maintain this are just going to use AI to fix or adjust this maintenance nightmare?"

At that point the code becomes a compile target, and then you need a new source of truth. Which I think is perfectly worthy of exploration. Some people want to check in the prompts. Or even better, check in a plan.md or evenest betterest: some set of very well-defined specifications. I'm not sure what the answer will be. Probably some mix of things. But today it is absolutely imperative that the code I write for the…

I don't see the benefit of checking in either prompts or specs.

I never tried spec driven development for myself, but if I review other's MRs I am typically exhausted after the first 10 lines.

And there are hundreds of lines, nearly always with major inaccuracies.

For myself I always found the plan mode to work well. Once the implementation is done, the code is the source of truth. If it works, it works.

When I want to add more functionality or change it, I just tell the agent what I want changed.

I doubt walls of semi-accurate existing specs are going to be beneficial there, but maybe my work differs from yours.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#46

Post by zb3 »

AI just further increases inequality.. this is fine for the author for now, but might not be fine anymore when we end up with the eventual result - winner-take-all, where one will boast 2500000x productivity increase, while others have no job.

When you see rising inequality, don't just cheer because you happen to win for now.. maybe think about the future and also others..

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#47

Post by sonofhans »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #35
snide wrote: post #7

I mostly share Josh's opinion, but I think a lot of these posts that talk about Senior vs. Junior experience when working with AIs is kind of rubbish. Sure, you get better results as a Senior working with AI tooling and struggle more as a Junior. Nothing has changed in that equation except the amplification. What folks seem to avoid is that a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI…

> a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant I’m not seeing this. And based on what we’re seeing at the university level, I’m not expecting to.

Yes, I agree, the skills are orthogonal. Digital typesetting is vastly quicker than manually putting down metal type, and since you’re exposed to more type you have the opportunity to learn faster. But getting good at typography with digital tools will help you very little if you need to lay out type manually.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#48

Post by jvanderbot »

Waterluvian wrote: post #6

I had an Iron Man moment last week where I was “vibe coding” a UI design with component tests live on the other screen. Iterating by asking it to move things, reduce emphasis of an element, exploring layout options, etc. The loop was near realtime and felt amazing. The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly…

I wonder how much of this is momentum.

At the moment, we understand the basic tech, could reasonably DIY, but choose not to knowing full well there's a mess of understandable code somewhere we could go clean up but dont want to. We accept fast iterations because we know roughly the shape of how it "should be" and can guide an automated framework towards that. This is especially true on our own projects or something we built originally! Stark/Iron man knew/moved, the suit assisted by adding momentum.

We're riding our "knowledge momentum".

If companies can hold out long enough, that knowledge completely fades, and the tool is all you have. At that point, they are locked in. Then it's not Iron man, it's an Iron lung (couldn't resist!)

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#50

Post by sunir »

Humans have hard skills and abilities the ais can’t reproduce yet like real time learning, spatial reasoning, cheap parallelism, Qualia so we can identity QWAN (quality without a name) because we feel in real time what the code is.

AIs have skills humans aren’t good at like nerding out on technical details.

That’s not a perfect map because I’m spitballing. However there is a symbiosis.

I am not sure I am productive anymore with AI as I am up to 125 repos and agents most of which are tools for managing AIs and things break frequently that it feels like spinning plates.

I spent two months in November and December last year writing by hand a fundamental library to constrain how the AIs build clis. That did make things move a lot faster but for those two months I felt the slowness.

I think it will always be like this. It’s the nature of paradigm shift to shift.

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