This article tells me the author is not that creative. With LLMs, the number of projects I create increases by 1000%.
LLMs are making me lose my savviness
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Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness
#22While I also griefed the years spent mastering craft being automated.
I also had a lot of ideas that I wanted to execute and I'm finally able to do so. Some of them are wild and big, unthinkable last year. I also really enjoy building product/software that people are delighted to use. So from my perspective, the net positive outweighs the losses.
My work position is less certain, I grief the years spent mastering things just to see AI doing it, but I went to software engineering because I enjoyed building products, from ideas to something people can play with, and this has never been easier.
Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness
#23It is opposite for me than what the author describes. With AI I can explore new areas far more effectively. For example, I have never been great with front end web stuff, but asking LLMs to generate something and then looking at the code they built is pretty cool. Of course there are errors and gaffes and weird bits all over, but that helps keep me in the loop and understanding it better. I can now (more) boldly go w…
Same here. It really helps me get deep into things that would have been daunting to start due to the boring research work required. I have heavy ADHD and high intelligence (not to brag, it is often more of a burden than a blessing!) so I can understand things really quickly but I have no patience for painstaking research or planning and documentation. I just want to build, to create and make my vision come to life but I'm really one-sided about that. I don't care about how it fits in the organisation process, the governance or where it should be documented.
And when I need to learn something new I hate doing courses because they're always too slowly paced for me. All courses are paced for the slowest possible participant. Especially those from the US where trainers have this "training voice" where they speak slowly and articulated and usually non-skippable which makes me scream in agony. My brain can't slow down to that level, I just lose focus then. It's like driving a ferrari at 5km/hr. Especially the non-IT courses are so slow and constantly repeat everything, as if I didn't fully understand them the first time, argh. So I tend to spend my time on these awfully designed mandatory HR courses trying to fuck around in developer mode and re-enable the skip segment features :) The more boring the training the more I learn about moodle and its frameworks.
I just love to dive right in and just do something but I often skip that first analysis of what method would be best. And I tend to stick with what I know. Which is often not the best way in a greenfield project. And often the boring first steps are so awful for me that I just put it off. If I do start I often do it half-assed. Then I run into a wall, have to regroup etc. I learn from that (mistakes are always a learing experience), but it's slow going because I take the wrong direction first.
AI really helps me get past that first step meaning I actually start it instead of procrastinating the research forever and move onto the next thing. And I can do great things because I know what I want and how I want it. It's a real enabler for me especially something like cowork. It helps me widen my horizon efficiently instead of wasting my time and energy like online courses do. It picks up things that my weak points are (patience) and feeds me information in a highly dense format I can easily digest. Helped by custom prompts of course ("don't tell me I make great decisions, evaluate everything on its merits, just tell me the meat of the content, don't elaborate"). I still work along with it and take ownership of its output, I'm way too much of a control freak to let the AI do everything without understanding it. But it gets me there quicker and it avoids procrastination by skipping the boring steps. I ask it to suggest methods and techniques, compare their pros and cons so I fully understand what I'm selecting for.
I have to say this was not really the case with early simple question/answer LLMs. The hallucinations were too bad, the searches too limited. The knowledge too hit and miss. It would come up with wrong stuff or overlook the best options. But the new high-context agentic technologies like cowork that really investigate the source material for the purposes I provide, they really are a game changer for me.
For example, I recently asked it about an obscure error I'd been having. Previous simple LLMs would just collapse into a directionless troubleshooting mode, "Did you try...?". Cowork actually went and retrieved all the relevant code from github without being asked to do so, and evaluated what would have happened in the background for that message to appear. Really good to see because it's exactly what I would have done. But I would have taken much more time to do it.
So no, for me it's not making me lose savviness. It's helping me grow it in exactly the way that's efficient for me.
Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness
#24It is opposite for me than what the author describes. With AI I can explore new areas far more effectively. For example, I have never been great with front end web stuff, but asking LLMs to generate something and then looking at the code they built is pretty cool. Of course there are errors and gaffes and weird bits all over, but that helps keep me in the loop and understanding it better. I can now (more) boldly go w…
With all due respect, what you're describing doesn't quite spell learning in my opinion. Sure, its better to read the code of an application you envisioned to learn a programming language rather than an unrelated convulated program; but you're still offloading your thought process to the LLM. You're not quite seeing why it chose A instead of B, and why it uses that struct instead of the other. And honestly, the LLM doesn't quite know why it chose that either.
Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness
#25It is opposite for me than what the author describes. With AI I can explore new areas far more effectively. For example, I have never been great with front end web stuff, but asking LLMs to generate something and then looking at the code they built is pretty cool. Of course there are errors and gaffes and weird bits all over, but that helps keep me in the loop and understanding it better. I can now (more) boldly go w…
With all due respect, what you're describing doesn't quite spell learning in my opinion. Sure, its better to read the code of an application you envisioned to learn a programming language rather than an unrelated convulated program; but you're still offloading your thought process to the LLM. You're not quite seeing why it chose A instead of B, and why it uses that struct instead of the other. And honestly, the LLM d…
Nowhere did they say it’s learning. They said they can do more stuff now, it’s exploration.
Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness
#26Using AI can open up topics you couldn't work on before. I think you're blaming tools for what are other problems. No carpenter ever said "I used to plane wood by hand and carve magnificent pieces, now that I have an orbital sander and power tools, the love just isn't there". I don't buy this argument at all.
Maybe you’re partly right, maybe not, but I don’t think this is a good analogy. Let’s say output is the most important thing, which is the implication here. But why do I care about my output? Why does a woodworker care about their output?
For a woodworker, I think your analogy should be a “furniture factory,” not power tools. (Power tools in software would be like a great IDE and powerful language and framework tooling; AI is… way more than that.) I bet a “woodworker” in a furniture factory (if that even exists) doesn’t much care about their output, and doesn’t love the process anymore.
And getting paid for it doesn’t make you care about your work either, it just makes you care about money you can use on other things you do care about.
It would be foolish for anyone looking at the great change happening in software, and ignore the fact that we’re crossing a line where it’s less about craft, and where developers are just managing factory-like processes. Which is very different from what most signed up for.
And of course you can still do your craft, just like there are custom woodworkers as well as factories. But the space for that in AI-driven companies is vanishing as much as we might hate it or push back against it.
And of course there are also people like you who like the opportunity that more output provides, or who use it more like a tool and less like a factory. And that’s fine.
But no, the transition happening in the industry is not deliberately trying to keep the craft of it or even to keep developers interested in the job.
The transition is turning people who input stuff into a software factory and do QA on the output, or turning people into “factory automation engineers.” Those are both very different jobs from what people who like programming signed up for.
And yeah maybe no one “deserves” to have craft in their jobs. But let’s be honest, it is very natural, and very human, to be upset when the main motivation and reason for doing your work disappears. The same thing has happened in countless industries, and people have been talking about it for decades if not hundreds of years.
E.g. small-time farming replaced by exploitative big agriculture. A farmer might have a reason and identify in the work before, owning their own bit of land they tender. And now if they’re just hired to drive a tractor, they don’t. It’s a massive difference, and no wonder our society is increasingly depressed.
Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness
#27Using AI can open up topics you couldn't work on before. I think you're blaming tools for what are other problems. No carpenter ever said "I used to plane wood by hand and carve magnificent pieces, now that I have an orbital sander and power tools, the love just isn't there". I don't buy this argument at all.
The only problem with this analogy is that LLMs are not orbital sanders... Or if they are, they are orbital sanders that operate correctly only 95% of the time. The other 5% of the time they do the wrong thing and cause you to do more work and/or damage the wood (not a great analogy though).
Power tools aren’t exactly the paragon of determinism. It’s ways to make mistakes with them, easy for wood to get caught the wrong way, relatively easy to injure yourself.
Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness
#28Have mathematicians become "less savvy" since the invention of the abacus or calculator? The invention of logarithms or analysis? In some ways, the answer is trivially positive. In fact, number crunching was, for most of human history, a key element of being a maths researcher.
However, when we look at the claim with a more critical eye, it becomes obvious that this view is myopic. In fact, current progress is in fact indebted to the invention various tools, which has led us to grand theories and hypotheses: things the Ancient Greeks could only dream about.
Is coding about writing assembly? Is it about writing boilerplate? About writing endless if-then statements? I would argue that it is not: it's about coming up with ideas, building products, finding customers, iterating, producing code that's easy to read, easy to understand, easy to extend.
Coding (at least the kind LLMs do) was never really the hard part, and I'd like to know specific examples of savvyness the author is losing. They've made me more critical of code and able to create better patterns, simply because I can iterate so quickly.
Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness
#29Using AI can open up topics you couldn't work on before. I think you're blaming tools for what are other problems. No carpenter ever said "I used to plane wood by hand and carve magnificent pieces, now that I have an orbital sander and power tools, the love just isn't there". I don't buy this argument at all.
The only problem with this analogy is that LLMs are not orbital sanders... Or if they are, they are orbital sanders that operate correctly only 95% of the time. The other 5% of the time they do the wrong thing and cause you to do more work and/or damage the wood (not a great analogy though).
not a bad analogy imo. power tools vs hand tools. faster, but if you're not careful you can cause more damage before you notice. like a table saw, where you can cut too far or at an angle and the result will look bad. or an electric screwdriver, where you don't feel the torque as much, so it's easier to cross-thread.
and skills from building with hand tools help you judge the results, but not necessarily with actually using the tools.
Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness
#30Using AI can open up topics you couldn't work on before. I think you're blaming tools for what are other problems. No carpenter ever said "I used to plane wood by hand and carve magnificent pieces, now that I have an orbital sander and power tools, the love just isn't there". I don't buy this argument at all.
But that’s not the right analogy, in my opinion. It would be a carpenter saying “I used to carve by hand, but now I tell the carving machine to make a chair and it spits it out.”
Yes, using analogies of comparing LLMs to relatively simple tools and on the same plane declaring them the predecessors to AGI (or for some, we have achieved AGI) is a common hypocritical take.