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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

#271

Post by nunez »

bpavuk wrote: post #208
u8 wrote: post #184

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…

if computers themselves are bicycles for the mind, LLMs are cars. or even motorcycles, if we talk smaller models. - they require specific roads being paved for them. for example, if your tooling is proprietary and not accessible from the CLI, your agent is pretty much fucked. if your tool is not represented in training data (think, `jj` VCS or your proprietary/tailor-made tooling), you require duct tapes such as "ski…

And, like cars, our federal/state governments are lighting astronomical amounts of cash to subsidize the infrastructure that makes them operate at the scale they currently operate at.

Just one more ~~lane~~ datacenter, bro. That'll fix it; trust. Please. One more ~~lane~~ datacenter. It'll be so good.

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

#272

Post by xantronix »

devolving-dev wrote: post #2

Is this a situation where AI will go away and we will regret the loss of skills? At worse, we will be forced to use open weight models instead of the cutting edge, so I don't think it's a big deal. I'm sure people got worse at arithmetic after the invention of the calculator.

Did the entire history of computing prior to 2023 disappear? Are we really that boned?

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

#273

Post by skjfjnflw »

ianbutler wrote: post #244
iLoveOncall wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my understanding is the best people leave faang when they get the itch to do something better with their time. Your understanding is wrong. The extreme majority of people who leave FAANGs don't leave willingly, and are not the best, unless it's to go to even better companies like Jane Street and the like, but those are rare. Turns out for most people, there's not much better to do during your 9 to 5 than solving pr…

> Turns out for most people, there's not much better to do during your 9 to 5 than solving problems for half a million a year. Lol. I don't know I was talking with a guy yesterday who left a FAANG clearing 1.4 million / yr who's now running his own successful startup. My sample is successful founders backed by top tier VCs or exited founders who have done much better than FAANG. If you can't do more you stick around…

You're talking about what happens to engineers who decide they want to be small business owners rather than engineers. That's orthogonal to this thread about where engineers with the best technical skills end up.

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

#274

Post by iainctduncan »

Of course it's ruining skills. Anyone who has a really well honed mental skill knows that we get rusty really damned fast (e.g. musician at a professional musician level, which happens to be my reference point). You keep shedding, you stay sharp. You take more than a week off, it's going downhill.

There's no way this isn't happening with other skills. No goddamned way. Anyone who tells you otherwise is grifting.

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

#275

Post by hintymad »

This is hardly surprising. Think about Staff+ engineers: their work is a lot like commanding AI. Most climb the corporate ladder through hard work, excellent engineering skills, soft skills, and a bit of luck. But as their companies grow, they gradually spend less time coding, debugging, or doing deep design.

Instead, they act more like highly technical product managers. They help VPs plan and write high-level product requirements sprinkled with technical terms. They draw boxes on whiteboards and create pretty slides. They write polished documents that keep their leadership happy, and they are either in meetings or on their way to the next one. When they have a technical idea, they dispatch a team to test it out.

Naturally, they still feel deeply technical, until the day they have to resolve a production issue, pass a technical interview, or write extensive code. That is when they realize their skills have grown rusty.

I point this out not to criticize, but to highlight a genuine career challenge. As an engineer, I would rather hone my technical skills. Yet, if you want to climb the corporate ladder, you have to take on more organizational work. The only solution I can think of is to become more like a researcher or a professor. Over the years, good professors spend less time writing papers or deriving formulas. However, their insights are so deep that they still produce amazing results by advising PhD students. But that path is much easier said than done.

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

#276

Post by wvenable »

cryo32 wrote: post #266
wvenable wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your point? I could just not ask an LLM and not do anything. Is that better somehow?

Yes. You could not do it. Doing stuff isn’t essential. Especially when you have no idea what you are doing.

I think you might have reached a nonsensical level of AI contrarianism when it leads you to the statement "doing stuff isn't essential"

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

#277

Post by timmytokyo »

dodu_ wrote: post #255
u8 wrote: post #184

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…

I shit you not I have been told to "stop trying to understand it, just make sure it works" when mandated to use LLMs at work, like the absurdity of that statement isn't self-evident. Needless to say I have been looking for a way out of this job (and likely career) ever since. What's going to happen is people who give a shit are going to get filtered and self-select out of the job, and then the entire field is going t…

You (and many others) have become a "reverse centaur" [0]. AI has been forced on you and reduced you to little more than a button pusher.

[0] https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washin...

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

#278

Post by timmytokyo »

nilirl wrote: post #216
deadbabe wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re fucked once you have to start getting AI to produce code for languages you’ve never actually worked in. You will have to write code to understand deeply what goes on at the low level. Without a solid understanding of the low level, you won’t truly know what optimal solutions look like on a high level. You will be flying by the seat of your pants, churning out code that works but has bad low level quirks sprink…

Your argument has many, many leaps but I infer your point. The lack of attention does reduce the overall correctness of the system. But, and unfortunately, in most situations the loss of correctness is more than made up for by the speed gains. Unless you're building software that could kill someone, it's hard to reject the improved speed. The cost of delay is usually more damaging than the cost of incorrectness.

>But, and unfortunately, in most situations the loss of correctness is more than made up for by the speed gains.

Welcome to the future, where we can create buggy, broken software at a higher velocity than ever before!

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

#279

Post by therealdrag0 »

tossandthrow wrote: post #78
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…

The question is what higher level skills there will be to focus on? I am not convinced that there are tasks, like project management or architecture, that the Ai is inherently worse at.

Ai is decent at it but it still struggles to find and balance and choose the right context. This will of course improve but I’m starting to think it’ll be like the self-driving car history where the last 10% needed is a long slow road.

10-20 years ago we had such high hopes for data and IoT, but it’s still just banal and mildly useful, full of walled gardens and property formats. General purpose AI may end up similar. My company has like 10 different MCPs to enterprise software we use that has context, but AI still needs lots of guidance.

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

#280

Post by fzeroracer »

wvenable wrote: post #261
fzeroracer wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I see people say this, that they've built a house but what they've built is something that structurally collapses immediately and fails due to problems that even an average person would've avoided had they learned how to build a house. So did you build a house, or did you build a house?

How can I argue about such a hypothetical?!? If I ask an LLM or my mother-in-law about how to get wine out of the carpet, and I get wine out of the carpet, maybe I have done it wrong and my house will burn down! Who knows?! Your argument is meaningless; there's nothing anyone can say to that.

And if you ask an LLM about an effective cure for cancer and it spits out to drink bleach, are you going to follow it?

When you ask 'who knows' that's the point of research which was my original comment here. The same goes true for some random asshole telling you to drink bleach as it does an LLM, except people seemingly have hyped themselves into believing the LLM is more right somehow instead of being trained on every random asshole ever.

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