Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

My job improved significantly since I managed to get into their (managers) thick skulls to tell Claude to not be verbose. I'm tired of 1200-word tickets for "put the totals in the automated emails".

// The need for ongoing friction in long-term skill formation.

The subtitle of the story tells it all.

There are some people who seek out friction. Think about an athlete or a hardcore nerd.

The best engineers are ones who were fascinated with computers and learning as kids and persued it at every opportunity. Found their own friction in other words.

For those kinds of people, friction-seeking is the constant and what LLMs did is moved the point of where the friction occurs.

For example - the best engineers I've worked with didn't necessarily have lots of experience coding in assembly because that kind of friction was no longer necessary. But they could solve hard problems (and if a problem really required assembly they could go learn it)

What I think will be hit much harder by AI is the low tier engineer. Someone who was never truly curious and committed to it, for whom it was just a job. For example a typical offshore ticket pusher kind of person. That kind of person never went out to find friction and that's the kind of thing that's never going to fly again - if I want mediocre or average, the LLMs are sufficient

> That sounds great until you realize that "hey Claude, read this Jira ticket and implement the feature in this code base" isn't really worth $200K/year.

Nor even €50k/year.

Two things are true:

1) The coding part of my career is over. LLMs are capable of doing everything I've ever been paid to *write*.

2) My actual job also included non-coding work: Does this attempted solution even work at all? Is this solving the right problem? Even if it's a valid solution to the right problem, is it the best solution given the time constraints?

That last one, "given the time constraints", is a place where my experience is still useful. The AI is as lazy (or as optimised for fast wins) as the humans whose examples it was trained upon; but an LLM costs so little that the answer is always "do it right" rather than "do it fast". A lot of people don't know what "do it right" even looks like, having only ever known e.g. websites that take 5 seconds to load because of all the adverts and analytics, and never the world where machines with 1% of the CPU and no GPU at all could fit a fully playable first person shooter in the same memory footprint as that page.

At least, I hope this "is a place where my experience is still useful"; I may just be telling myself a nice story, same as all the other people through history who have found themselves obsoleted when the automation came for them.

> And math skills are going to collapse from calculator reliance.

People can no longer drive a stick-shift car, whereas it used to be that a valet would always be able to drive one to park it.

I strongly agree with the concept that cognitive friction is the engine of learning.

First and foremost, it's an issue of "dependency": if you stop training the "muscle" of logic and reasoning, it gradually atrophies, just like unused physical muscles. You become dependent on external tools that replace a capability you once had yourself.

A historical example that brought about a similar shift is this: when the production process moved from the craftsman's mind and hands to the Fordist factory (and the assembly line), the skill of building things shifted from human craftsmanship to anonymous, structured processes.

Bit by bit, traditional artisans lost their knowledge and "know-how." Today, having a piece of furniture in our home depends on a massive production and supply chain; the "average" person no longer has the ability to build it themselves.

The exact same thing is happening to software.

We are the (now "former") software craftsmen.