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

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

#141

Post by anon7725 » Fri, Jun 19, 2026, 7:45 PM UTC

bigfudge wrote: post #44

iLoveOncall wrote: post #4

The two senior engineers in my org (in a FAANG) who vibe-code the most have lost literally all of their skills. Their code has become terrible and their judgment even worse. A very similar topic was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48392004 and I make the exact same conclusion: All of this makes me selfishly excited for my own future. It's glaringly obvious that anyone who's a heavy user of LLMs i…

As someone who was self taught as a programmer and has a reasonable high level understanding of some CS concepts but not lots of experience applying them, and no good mentor, I’ve found working with an LLM really englightening. Asking Claude to think about “good ways to structure this” or asking how similar problems get solved in industry or high profile projects has really helped me design better solutions and avoid…

> Asking Claude to think about “good ways to structure this” or asking how similar problems get solved in industry or high profile projects has really helped me design better solutions

I think this highlights the difference between the “how do I make a ham sandwich?” approach of chat vs the “sudo make me a ham sandwich” of agentic coding.

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

#142

Post by oulu2006 » Fri, Jun 19, 2026, 7:45 PM UTC

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.

I'm learning by doing things.

For example: AI has helped me get into restoring retro tech, specifically resoldering leaky caps on retro Macintosh logic boards. Before AI, I didn't know how to use a multimeter (I knew theoretically how it worked), I didn't know how to use flux, solder wick, heat gun. I also didn't understand how bromine radicals yellowed plastic and how to reverse it by using blue light similar to what they use for indoor aquariums.

So AI unlocked doing for me.

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

#143

Post by drawnwren » Fri, Jun 19, 2026, 7:45 PM UTC

dofm wrote: post #134

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. 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.

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

#144

Post by hodder » Fri, Jun 19, 2026, 7:47 PM UTC

zerobees wrote: post #112

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.

I don't know this applies to you, but I've had several friends who convinced themselves they're exploring the frontiers of science, and it always turns out that their conversations spiraled into some sort of weird quantum-metaphysical gobbledygook. LLMs are sycophants, and in long conversations, their sycophancy produces a positive feedback loop: the context window contains affirmations of incorrect interpretations /…

You really just need to augment with tight prompting and know how to extract information and links to peer reviewed literature and well sourced information. Once again, technology here is a lever. Separating wheat from chaff has been key in academic and information pursuits forever and it is becoming ever more important.

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

#145

Post by devin » Fri, Jun 19, 2026, 7:48 PM UTC

The biggest negative I'm seeing is that people are moving _too fast_ to evaluate the stuff they're slinging. When you move too fast, you do not take the time to build up your taste or appreciate the nuances of different approaches to the same problem.

I am using LLMs quite a lot, but the amount of time I spend sitting on some slopped out code is I think on average much longer than a lot of my peers. What I've found is that while the original thing "works", it usually winds up being another 2-3 cycles of iterating on the original idea after I've let it settle in my head before I actually feel confident about merging.

As a result, when I add it all up, for actual "this is important" design-level concerns, I do not feel significantly more productive.

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

#146

Post by lelanthran » Fri, Jun 19, 2026, 7:48 PM UTC

oulu2006 wrote: post #142

lelanthran wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm learning by doing things. For example: AI has helped me get into restoring retro tech, specifically resoldering leaky caps on retro Macintosh logic boards. Before AI, I didn't know how to use a multimeter (I knew theoretically how it worked), I didn't know how to use flux, solder wick, heat gun. I also didn't understand how bromine radicals yellowed plastic and how to reverse it by using blue light similar to wha…

You realise that every single one of those things had easily accessible videos to learn from, right?

You're happy using AI instead of other material because it will constantly tell you how brilliant you are, or how quick you're learning.

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

#147

Post by wvenable » Fri, Jun 19, 2026, 7:49 PM UTC

cryo32 wrote: post #94

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.

You're not learning them. You're being told about them and given a hammer to leverage them with mediocre to low skill level. Learning requires a huge time investment. Using an LLM doesn't shorten that.

You've described school. You get told about things and given a hammer to leverage what you've been told.

An LLM absolutely shortens the research part of learning. If I had a human of who had a moderate level of skill who would endlessly answer all my questions, the result would be the same.

You might have a point when it comes to software development because the AI can tell you things but it also just do them for you, at which point, you've learned a lot less. But for non-software things I have to learn things so I can then go and do them.

But even for software development, I've learned a lot of esoteric crap to get interop working on projects that I will probably quickly forget just the same as when I had to spend hours skimming through stackoverflow.

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

#148

Post by hodder » Fri, Jun 19, 2026, 7:49 PM UTC

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.

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.

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

#149

Post by contingencies » Fri, Jun 19, 2026, 7:50 PM UTC

jstummbillig wrote: post #64

contingencies wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they can keep up. Unfortunately, we learn from previous technology shifts that the masses will always favor ease of use (to the point of infinite scroll 5 second videos dopamine puddle, or echo chamber social networking in lieu of critical media consumption), which does not bode well for the market for alternative hardware: one which is already expensive. I fear on-prem AI is likely to become as popular as on-prem…

> If they can keep up. Consider another perspective: They don't have to keep up. Once a model is good enough for a task, the model can stay. A hammer is a hammer and a hammer from 100 years ago still has most of its utility. Similar to the hammer, it's not unreasonable to think that some classes of work will simply be solved by some model generation and whatever happens at the frontier after that does not matter all…

Carrying your analogy further, let's assume all human jobs fall under good enough open source models. All human problems (food, shelter, not clobbering each other over the head because of monkey genes) are solved through a combination of AI and robotics. Maybe we even remove governments, police, and live in a future post-capitalist ecotopia.

Even if this occurs, and I don't trust well-resourced humans to allow their existing apex-predator positions in present era capitalism to be overturned, the action - as far as either humanity or AI is concerned - will still be at the forefront of possibility: a front by definition invisible to old models. And someone has to pay for the hardware to be there. Do we (a) allow private-sector dominance, effectively depowering traditional nation states and empowering a private cabal beyond historically conceivable levels (b) nationalize thought (c) head in sand and pretend it will all go away?

Most of the world seems to be with strategy C right now, strategy A is the advancing default and has already achieved extra-terrestrial reach with a threat of extra-terrestrial persistence, and strategy B is potentially scarier than the other outcomes if it goes wrong but might be lovely, if you believe in nordic state funds, solarpunk futures and socialist utopia.

Interesting times. By the way, if anyone with AI capitalization reads this, I'm looking for investment to feed humans more efficiently and have a NASDAQ reverse merger under negotiation and effectively priced out with board buy in. Just need capital support. https://infinite-food.com/

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

#150

Post by zerobees » Fri, Jun 19, 2026, 7:50 PM UTC

hodder wrote: post #144

zerobees wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know this applies to you, but I've had several friends who convinced themselves they're exploring the frontiers of science, and it always turns out that their conversations spiraled into some sort of weird quantum-metaphysical gobbledygook. LLMs are sycophants, and in long conversations, their sycophancy produces a positive feedback loop: the context window contains affirmations of incorrect interpretations /…

You really just need to augment with tight prompting and know how to extract information and links to peer reviewed literature and well sourced information. Once again, technology here is a lever. Separating wheat from chaff has been key in academic and information pursuits forever and it is becoming ever more important.

And you're gonna review that voluminous academic literature in a field you're not familiar with, right?...

That is my point: an LLM can be great if you know the field and can spot errors. Or, to a lesser extent, if you have some automatic feedback loop that the model can't easily game ("does this code pass unit tests?"). It's a lot less great if there's a risk that you won't detect the early drift.