LLMs are making me lose my savviness • Hacker News Board

Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness

#31

Post by nobodywillobsrv » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 9:30 PM UTC

titularcomment wrote: post #24

Scubabear68 wrote: post #12

It 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…

I see this response a lot. What part of the thinking are you thinking is actually offloaded?

Writing things down and then arguing with an agent that constantly gets things wrong is just a new kind of Rubber Duck.

Are Rubber Ducks offloading thinking?

These are more like search plus memory tools.

Memory loss is real but that has been happening for me way before agents.

Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness

#32

Post by pintert3 » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 9:31 PM UTC

This is exactly my predicament of recent. I haven't necessarily feel like I've lost the savviness yet, but I feel I've lost the fun of the job. I guess it's the reality of life that all fun work eventually has its end of fun. Even the foot messengers of the past now probably load trucks/trains and sit the whole day, no longer feeling the fun of meeting people on the journey through whatever street or town they pass.

Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness

#33

Post by grebc » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 9:31 PM UTC

dvt wrote: post #28

Have 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 fac…

I’d argue you’ve got a very VC focused view of coding.

Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness

#34

Post by titularcomment » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 9:32 PM UTC

phoghed wrote: post #25

titularcomment wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The original article talks about 'savvy', which is to me an essence of learning. If 'exploration' is looking at walls of code you don't understand but the linter makes them look cool, you don't need LLMs for that.

Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness

#35

Post by phoghed » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 9:33 PM UTC

system2 wrote: post #21

This article tells me the author is not that creative. With LLMs, the number of projects I create increases by 1000%.

I keep trying to get the product people I work with to do personal vibe coding and they haven’t yet. Feels like they should have more ideas than I do.

Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness

#36

Post by pintert3 » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 9:35 PM UTC

dvt wrote: post #28

Have 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 fac…

I think he means the savviness in the art of programming the ideas. The skill and art involved in finding interesting and efficient ways to effect ideas and solutions to problems. It is(or was) fun for a good number of us who joined before AI changed the game. Now its dismissed tending to a waste of time, hence the supposed loss in savviness over time.

Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness

#37

Post by jhhh » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 9:36 PM UTC

Scubabear68 wrote: post #12

It 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…

I agree with the exploration aspect of AI. I don't have it create code for me but I have certain longer threads about topics that I think are interesting but would not have approached without it. Previously you would've had to find an entire textbook or class on a subject that may not have been quite what you were looking for if you were just interesting in poking around in a topic to start. Like I have a long running chat about making databases and WALs that I don't think I'd have started if I had to dive fully into a course on writing a database from scratch (if that even exists).

Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness

#38

Post by adamddev1 » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 9:36 PM UTC

dvt wrote: post #28

Have 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 fac…

> Have mathematicians become "less savvy" since the invention of the abacus or calculator? The invention of logarithms or analysis?

This is not a fair analogy. Those things are like compilers, languages, and type-checkers. They are deterministic, carefully proven, hand-crafted tools, that allow people to go safely to a higher level of abstraction and still make things in a deterministic way. The jump into the fuzzy world of LLMs is a completely different thing. It's different than the jump from assembly to a higher-level language.

Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness

#39

Post by dumberquestions » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 9:41 PM UTC

I remember feeling a little bad the first time seeing AI create a UI as good as the one I did using a niche library and only a picture reference, when I focused on the feeling I realized it was an ego issue, nothing is stopping me from doing it by hand if I enjoyed it for itself, it's just that what I did was no longer scarce or difficult.

Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness

#40

Post by dvt » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 9:44 PM UTC

adamddev1 wrote: post #38

dvt wrote: post #28

Have 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 fac…

> Have mathematicians become "less savvy" since the invention of the abacus or calculator? The invention of logarithms or analysis? This is not a fair analogy. Those things are like compilers, languages, and type-checkers. They are deterministic, carefully proven, hand-crafted tools, that allow people to go safely to a higher level of abstraction and still make things in a deterministic way. The jump into the fuzzy w…

Not sure how much frontier math you follow, but probabilistic arguments are extremely popular (particularly in, weirdly enough, number theory), especially for fiddling with the bounds on things, or getting closer to full coverage of various theorems.

So this idea that doing math is some kind of fully deterministic & mechanistic process is a bit misleading.