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Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

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Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#51

Post by idopmstuff »

keiferski wrote: post #32

At least for writing, I think AI is mostly useful for the types of writing that aren’t particularly interesting or worthwhile in having to begin with. In concrete terms, AI isn’t all that useful for writing a personal blog, because no one wants to read obvious AI slop. But it is useful for creating boilerplate product pages, FAQs, and other types of writing that weren’t very interesting pre-AI. So it’s not really a h…

Not worthwhile feels a bit strong (a good FAQ is definitely worthwhile!), but I definitely agree that there is a big difference between any kind of art (writing, playing music, creation of images/videos/etc.) for its own sake and for commercial purposes. AI is terrible for the former but perfectly fine for the latter.

There will always be value in a human writing fiction or a memoir or even a Substack. The human perspective is inherently valuable there. Much less so with ad copy that's just going to get A/B tested ad infinitum until a winner is picked out based entirely on data.

Same with visual art. Art painters aren't going to lose their jobs to AI, but once you've got a robot that can paint a house reliably, house painters are done for.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#52

Post by whatshisface »

antonvs wrote: post #7

Are employees ruining managers' skills? Late results are in - and they're not good.

That's a great analogy - everybody knows you forget pretty much everything after a few years away from the line. It should be seen like one of those studies that proves smiling is correlated with happiness. :-)

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#53

Post by flyinglizard »

yoz-y wrote: post #41
flyinglizard wrote: post #31

AI has allowed me to keep shipping features and system even when holding a normally managerial position, so if anything it preserved some of my coding skills. I'd not have seen any code otherwise (writing code is a huge time sink compared to managing things around an org). I pity those who need to contend with that as ICs, though.

Hopefully this is not your case but as an IC the “manager, who didn’t write code for a couple of years” that decides to come back and “help” is one of the worst experiences. Code is usually subpar, uses old idioms, and comes with added pressure. With AI this can become much worse, because of the sheer volume of code that can be thrown at the IC.

Nothing like that.

My current position is more on the operational side and AI allowed me to create a pretty significant software system for our technical ops, that the wider org liked and given me the resources to recruit flesh-made engineers to support.

A rare case of AI creating jobs.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#54

Post by mellosouls »

This is new, the scope of it, its not just about individual "skills" because its all of them; we are being challenged at the very fundamentals of our ability to think deeply and widely and persistently. That has never happened before like this.

It is quite extraordinary and breath-taking at times to see the agents in action; the flipside is that very power renders us both vulnerable to its seduction and enfeeblement on an equal scope - its almost hard-drug like in its potential long-term psychological effects.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#55

Post by kristofferR »

bwhiting2356 wrote: post #34
georgemcbay wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the real threat is at the individual level, but at the societal level. Building skills over time leads to insights that lead to innovation. AI does many interesting things, but it doesn't innovate (yet). The real threat isn't that we'll all lose our skills (possibly) and then lose access to AI (unlikely), it is that AI will remain at roughly currently levels and we'll dull our skills due to reliance on…

The number of people now involved in software development has now increased because of a lower barrier to entry. I know many people who would previously use a no-code tool or hire offshore devs, or simply not have their problem solved, who are now vibe coding. Many of these people couldn't write very much code manually if they had to, but they're closer to understanding software than they were previously.

Yeah, this describes me perfectly. I can't really program, but I'm now building a bunch of different projects and submitting PRs that people seem to appreciate.

https://github.com/kristofferR

One of them, a Home Assistant integration for controlling adjustable beds, would be borderline impossible to do well manually - I've vibe-reverse engineered the Bluetooth protocols of more than a 100 Android apps.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#56

Post by Lwerewolf »

ianbutler wrote: post #10
iLoveOncall wrote: post #4

The two senior engineers in my org (in a FAANG) who vibe-code the most have lost literally all of their skills. Their code has become terrible and their judgment even worse. A very similar topic was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48392004 and I make the exact same conclusion: All of this makes me selfishly excited for my own future. It's glaringly obvious that anyone who's a heavy user of LLMs i…

Idk man my system design game is better than its ever been because I put in the effort to use these tools and recognize they can't do software design better than I can and because I've increased the scope of what I'm building I often have to think more deeply about the problem up front. A typical speccing sessions lasts a few hours for me on big work before I have AI start writing that work where I'm just going back…

+100 on this. In addition, if you don't outsource your thinking and you're willing to go through all this, you absolutely don't need the top tier models.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#57

Post by jimt1234 »

Back in the mid-90s I was doing desktop support. It was a lot of work because PCs were relatively new (and they were garbage!), and people broke shit all the time. Sometime around '96 a disk-cloning utility called Ghost was released. It was great - one could provision a fully working PC with all required apps and config settings in minutes! Sounds lame now, but back then it was revolutionary. It had a dark side, though. After about a year most people I worked with had lost the ability to troubleshoot even the most basic problems. The solution to every problem was to just re-apply the standard Ghost disk image (we called it 'Ghosting' back then) ... Can't print? Ghost it! Not receiving emails? Ghost it! Word is too slow? Ghost it!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_(disk_utility)

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#58

Post by bwhiting2356 »

georgemcbay wrote: post #48
bwhiting2356 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of people now involved in software development has now increased because of a lower barrier to entry. I know many people who would previously use a no-code tool or hire offshore devs, or simply not have their problem solved, who are now vibe coding. Many of these people couldn't write very much code manually if they had to, but they're closer to understanding software than they were previously.

> The number of people now involved in software development has now increased because of a lower barrier to entry. I don't see what this has to do with what I posted. Yes, AI lowers the floor on software development, and there are positive aspects of that, but that doesn't change the possibility of an innovation stall.

re: concerns at a societal level. More people are making software than before. People who have been coding for a long time have moved up an abstraction layer and are further from the code. But many people are actually closer to the code than before.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#59

Post by Mezzie »

tripleee wrote: post #46
ianbutler wrote: post #5

Tool use typically follows this curve. If you want to preserve a skill you have to actually preserve it. This isn't inherently bad by itself, tools enable us to do much more than we can without them and its a point of contention whether or not any skill is inherently important when a tool comes along that does it for us.

The huge problem in this specific case is that to use this tool well you also need the underlying skill to be developed and preserved. It's very different from a power drill.

This is true of most tools, it's just that we generally consider the skills simple.

I'm very bad at using power drills.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#60

Post by nilirl »

I haven't written a full function of code in over a year. That being said, I've been spending a lot more time thinking about architecture and system properties.

So, yes, I do feel like I've lost some of that very low-level skill. But maybe I've also been able to spend more time on a higher level skill? Maybe the doctors got worse with the images but had more cognitive resources to think about the patient's context?

Not sure.

But yes, I can't physically get myself to write code without an AI anymore. It feels so much slower, almost painful.

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