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AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

joshwcomeau.com

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Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#151

Post by jmount »

adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #130
Waterluvian wrote: post #6

I had an Iron Man moment last week where I was “vibe coding” a UI design with component tests live on the other screen. Iterating by asking it to move things, reduce emphasis of an element, exploring layout options, etc. The loop was near realtime and felt amazing. The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly…

Could it be that the fact that the thing you’re an expert at looked like garbage to you, but the things you’re not an expert at, looked just fine, is not a coincidence? You can talk to a bunch of designers who will say the opposite. Claude Design Studio generated this garbage UI, that I fixed manually, but it created great code j never could have that made it work.

Good point on "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect."

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#152

Post by sandeepkd »

Its an interesting topic and it will take a while to really know how things pan out. One thing is for sure, it allows some one to ramp up in an unknown knowledge based territory fairly quickly(physical work still requires craftsmanship).

It can allow a skilled engineer to have multiplied effect of repeating their skills HOWEVER it would take away their ability to question, think and improve themselves. The syntax highlighting by editors is a good example, most engineers cant work without it, however its a static skill which does not needs constant improvement so its an acceptable support risk.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#153

Post by tomgp »

adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #130
Waterluvian wrote: post #6

I had an Iron Man moment last week where I was “vibe coding” a UI design with component tests live on the other screen. Iterating by asking it to move things, reduce emphasis of an element, exploring layout options, etc. The loop was near realtime and felt amazing. The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly…

Could it be that the fact that the thing you’re an expert at looked like garbage to you, but the things you’re not an expert at, looked just fine, is not a coincidence? You can talk to a bunch of designers who will say the opposite. Claude Design Studio generated this garbage UI, that I fixed manually, but it created great code j never could have that made it work.

I think this is true, it's like a close relation of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#:~:text=%5B14...

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#154

Post by redsocksfan45 »

therouwboat wrote: post #135
giancarlostoro wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy, have Claude review the code, tell it to be critical and that it needs to be easier to understand, follow Clean Code, SOLID principles and best practices. Lie to it, say you got this from a Junior developer, or "review it as if you were a Staff Level Engineer reviewing Junior code" the models can write better code, just nobody tells them to.

Is this a joke? Smartest people on the planet never thought about telling AI to just write better code?

[dead]

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#155

Post by genxy »

reactordev wrote: post #143
adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could it be that the fact that the thing you’re an expert at looked like garbage to you, but the things you’re not an expert at, looked just fine, is not a coincidence? You can talk to a bunch of designers who will say the opposite. Claude Design Studio generated this garbage UI, that I fixed manually, but it created great code j never could have that made it work.

This is the juxtaposition the general public is in. They don’t have advanced tech skills to know any better so they see an output that they can’t produce from their skills and think it’s great. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. What does the code look like?

Both had a working prototype. The flaw everyone is making is that they are over focusing on the artifact and not that they have a shared tangible object that they can both editorialize and iterate on.

These systems should allow rapid iteration on discovery and thinking. One can now make a prototype a day that would have taken a week. That means that we should be able to converge on a much better design in the same amount of time it would have taken to make a v0 that turns how to have systemic flaws.

AI should scale our understanding of systems, not just shovel out half baked features and apps.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#156

Post by bluefirebrand »

snide wrote: post #7

I mostly share Josh's opinion, but I think a lot of these posts that talk about Senior vs. Junior experience when working with AIs is kind of rubbish. Sure, you get better results as a Senior working with AI tooling and struggle more as a Junior. Nothing has changed in that equation except the amplification. What folks seem to avoid is that a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI…

> that becoming an expert has accelerated for those with the personal stamina to dig deep (this as a requirement hasn't changed)

This is a contradictory statement imo.

Digging deep still takes the same amount of time it used to. AI accelerates the surface level (badly, tbh), it doesn't accelerate digging deep. Becoming an expert still takes time and effort, there really aren't shortcuts.

To torture the Iron Man metaphor a bit. If you're not an expert without the AI, then you're not an expert with it.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#157

Post by nyantaro1 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #149
xnx wrote: post #12

An "elephant in the room" is a big topic that no one is talking about. Everyone is talking about AI. Better headline: "Why AI Multiplies Developer Skills Rather Than Replacing Them"

The outcome is the same, though Fewer developers required to achieve the same things means a lot of people are going to be unemployed It also means that the people who remain will likely be paid less. Why would you pay a senior salary when you could pay a junior salary plus AI subscription and get "the same result"? I think Software Devs are in for a rough time. I've been doing this for 15 years now, and I'm not look…

I agree with most of your take, but I don't really think those left are going to be paid less. I am not one of them, but I don't see why they would be paid less.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#158

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

louiereederson wrote: post #62
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the biggest thing I've noticed from LLMs is that large tech products now have even more bugs. Turns out the humans weren't so bad after all...

I'm wondering if companies are 'diverting' engineering resources from core products to AI products with the view that the former are legacy. Kind of two sides of the same coin though.

I'm sure there's a lot of AI investment, but I've definitely also seen fixed sets of core product engineers shipping a lot more bugs these days.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#159

Post by bluefirebrand »

nyantaro1 wrote: post #157
bluefirebrand wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The outcome is the same, though Fewer developers required to achieve the same things means a lot of people are going to be unemployed It also means that the people who remain will likely be paid less. Why would you pay a senior salary when you could pay a junior salary plus AI subscription and get "the same result"? I think Software Devs are in for a rough time. I've been doing this for 15 years now, and I'm not look…

I agree with most of your take, but I don't really think those left are going to be paid less. I am not one of them, but I don't see why they would be paid less.

Simple economics. There are fewer software developers required to achieve the same goals, so there are fewer jobs for software developers. That means there's an oversupply of software development labor. That means salaries for software developers will go down

It's the same thing that happened to every other skilled profession that was automated in the past. That's why unions became a thing and they started busting heads until their employers paid them more.

Edit: the only way I can see software developer salaries staying the same is if the amount of work available for them expands dramatically.

Hypothetically if half of software developers are laid off and replaced by AI, there will need to be twice as many software development jobs in order for salaries to not go down

Also keep in mind that even if salaries remain flat, inflation means you're making less.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#160

Post by chasd00 »

idopmstuff wrote: post #55
sarreph wrote: post #18

I agree with the author that -- right now -- we're still in the part of the AI adoption / product development curve that it's an extreme force multiplier. I like to think of it as a normal distribution, the further away a programmer is to the right of the mean, the more their benefit. It's almost like it's their standard deviation squared (σ²). So someone like Matt Perry (as OP mentioned), who is a >99.99% programmer…

100% agree with this. I think takes like OP's would be much more interesting if they staked out a position in the future. I think it's pretty uncontroversial to say that someone with a great deal of technical expertise is going to be a hugely more effective LLM user today. The question that really matters is whether that will continue to be the case. My guess is that technical expertise matters less over time, and th…

> My guess is that technical expertise matters less over time, and the ability to specify the desired outcome is eventually the only thing that becomes important

if you look at LLMs based coding as another step up in programming abstraction then it's clear this is the case. Think about the progression of programming languages. Over time, we go further and further from the hardware and closer and closer to specifying the desired outcome. The terminology, structure, and completeness of a user story that guides a codingagent to the desired output, and only the desired output, is the new programming language.

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