Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 328 posts

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

#181

Post by nilirl »

DrewADesign wrote: post #79
nilirl wrote: post #60

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? N…

I’m curious if someone coming into that fresh, without having had the mental exercise of, for example, grappling with data structures and (lower-level) algorithms in practical applications by hand, could achieve a mindset that useful and productive? When I was in design school, as much of our work was in physical media — graphite, cut paper, paint, vine charcoal — as was practicing great kerning and getting experienc…

Yes, and I struggle to give junior developers feedback because of this.

The code they submit for review no longer represents their thinking or their skill. The feedback loop for beginners is a bit broken.

What is their skill now? How is it displayed? How and where do we provide valuable feedback? I find myself just approving large PRs because I don't have the time to read it all.

I feel like I've let down a lot of developers this year.

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

#182

Post by paytonjjones »

lelanthran wrote: post #115
hodder wrote: post #61

Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old. New sports, new businesses, new academic pursuits. Technology is a lever and AI is the biggest lever we've ever had. It enables laziness or incredible productivity. Choose your own path forward.

> Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old. You aren't learning anything. Learning involves doing . We've known this for ages: simply reading a maths book without drilling on the problems will not get a student to pass. Best case scenario, you're reading stuff. For users of coding agents, they're not even doing that.

Learning by doing is often more effective because it naturally involves forced recall.

But it's not the only way to learn and not even the only way to do a lot of forced recall.

It's downright crazy to say you aren't learning anything by reading. You likely won't retain that high a % of the content without repeated drilling, but it's not like nonfiction exists for no reason!

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

#183

Post by hodder »

Jensson wrote: post #174
hodder wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. Absolute nonsense. Ive crafted LLMs to create drills and practice exams etc. Im not just reading about new sport activities, or videography/photography or linear algebra or physics. I'm putting it into action. As I said above, technology is a lever. Maybe you are just reading stuff and not drilling problems. That isnt me.

Not sure how good LLM are at that given they are so biased towards the user being right. You would need an LLM trained to disagree with the user to properly grade your results of those drills.

Once more, you are making massively blanketed biased assumptions about me.

You seem to believe LLMs cannot even produce simple exams and rubrics is that right?

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

#184

Post by u8 »

We were so spoiled. We got fat salaries to sit in air conditioned Herman Millers all day learning about computers. Now we discover a way to synthesis intelligence and the only thing we can think to do with it is ruin the most fun career most of us could have ever hoped for.

Sure, we're all more productive now, but how much of that is because we leverage AI on top of the intelligence we gained from all of that manual work? Who is to say that in 36 months you're not a worse developer over all because that systems knowledge starts to atrophy too?

This isn't me saying you shouldn't use AI. I use it all of the time to do useful side tasks like to setup GitHub Workflows while I write a feature, or with my agent on a VPS to do internet tasks for me. It's nice to have a little synthesized intelligence.

What isn't nice is to supplement your own intelligence. I think the gains are in the work there--similar to how you can be absolutely ripped from taking steroids while destroying your body. Often it's the shortcuts that are the most treacherous path.

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

#185

Post by oooyay »

cortesoft wrote: post #77

I wonder if this same effect happens for very wealthy and/or very senior executives? Those sorts of people have always had numerous people they could 'outsource' their thinking to; delegating work, asking for research/summaries, assigning tasks. Does handing off that sort of work to people also ruin your skills in the same way? Or are AIs fundamentally different, and if so, why? Because we have no moral or social pre…

Yes, but what happens to the professions and classes you've mentioned that wasn't looked at in this study is that new skills developed. For instance, something was assuredly lost as programming on average deviated from low level programming, but new skills and optimizations were gained. Fewer people knew how to construct a real-time bitmap from scratch, but more advanced software was being built on average as people were armed with greater and more manageable abstractions.

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

#186

Post by physix »

For me personally, holding a dialogue with several agentic dev streams in parallel keeps me very much on my toes mentally. It's quite exhausting, and certainly not letting my brain atrophy.

I'm probably losing some coding skills, but replacing them with different ones, and honing some others.

I used to manage dev teams of 20+ people inside high pressure, high stakes projects.

I've been coding all my adult life, on big things and small.

To me, agentic engineering is a deja vue of managing teams, except in real time.

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

#187

Post by [deleted] »

nilirl wrote: post #60

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? N…

[deleted]

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

#188

Post by spongebobism »

drawnwren wrote: post #143
dofm wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It even happens to e.g. professors and the deans of universities. This is why I think even the fuss about Noam Shazeer joining OpenAI needs to be seen within a context; as good as this hire is, there is no inherent reason to believe he still brings some secret undiscovered magic that others do not have in a more current form.

This is why senior swes are known to provide so much more value than principals.

I find this hard to parse, maybe because English is not my first language. Do senior SWEs provide more value than they provide principles, or do they provide more value than principles do?

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

#189

Post by risyachka »

lelanthran wrote: post #115
hodder wrote: post #61

Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old. New sports, new businesses, new academic pursuits. Technology is a lever and AI is the biggest lever we've ever had. It enables laziness or incredible productivity. Choose your own path forward.

> Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old. You aren't learning anything. Learning involves doing . We've known this for ages: simply reading a maths book without drilling on the problems will not get a student to pass. Best case scenario, you're reading stuff. For users of coding agents, they're not even doing that.

This.

Without doing you may as well read some fiction. The result is mostly the same.

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

#190

Post by FeteCommuniste »

alpinisme wrote: post #67
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.

One of the challenges here is that the skillset we are in danger of letting atrophy is essentially unbounded. It’s not a specialized tool like a calculator, where you have a well scoped domain of problems you are offloading. granted, in practice many people are using ai for specialized domains (like coding or producing visual designs). But whatever level of abstraction they are currently working at is not, in princip…

The instinct of many people (myself included, a lot of the time) is "feed the AI the problems from the domains I'm least good at / familiar with" because those ones are the most frustrating and where I'm the most likely to spin my wheels. It's easy to imagine how this feeds into a cycle of "only put forth effort at things I'm already good at" and a consequent narrowing of professional / intellectual development.
Post reply on HN