The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds • Hacker News Board

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#161

Post by spaceballbat » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 5:30 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #146

spaceballbat wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grade inflation has spilled over into the corporate world. I’ve interviewed people titled “principal” who would barely qualify as “senior” a few decades ago.

"Senior" was already a weird title, given it could have been anything from 3-10 years of experience even back in 2021. I've seen people with 10 years experience blindly duplicate C++ classes rather than subclass them, and when questioned they seemed to think the mere existence of `private:` access specifiers justified it. There were two full time developers including him, and no code review, so it's not like any of t…

The jump from junior to senior means you can self start and have created enough of a network to seek out help. Junior used to be a 1-3 year training period. Senior to principal means you have signififcant positive impact across the company: upper management relies on you to define the roadmap. Most people hang out in ‘senior’ for their entire careers because they never have that drive to stand out. Thats why there are titles like “staff” and “senior staff” to promote people who don’t have what it takes to get to principal.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#162

Post by dagmx » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 5:35 PM UTC

drdaeman wrote: post #159

dagmx wrote: post #85

Atrophy has really been an issue in my recent hiring cycles for good senior engineers. 80% of senior candidates I interview now aren’t able to do junior level tasks without GenAI helping them. We’ve had to start doing more coding tests to weed their skill set out as a result, and I try and make my coding tests as indicative of our real work as possible and the work they current do. But these people are struggling to…

> aren’t able to do junior level tasks without GenAI helping them I’m assuming “unable” means not complete lack of knowledge how to approach it, but lack of detail knowledge. E.g. a junior likely remembers some $algorithm in detail (from all the recent grind), while a senior may no longer do so but only know that it exists, what properties it has (when to use, when to not use), and how to look it up. If you don’t thi…

I don’t test rote algorithmic knowledge in our coding tests. Candidates can pick their language

Candidates can ask for help, and can google/llm as well if they can’t recall methods. I just do not allow them to post the whole problem in an LLM and need to see them solve through the problem themselves to see how they think and approach issues.

This therefore also requires they know the language that they picked to do simple tasks , including iterating iterables

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#163

Post by sktrdie » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 5:36 PM UTC

dagmx wrote: post #85

Atrophy has really been an issue in my recent hiring cycles for good senior engineers. 80% of senior candidates I interview now aren’t able to do junior level tasks without GenAI helping them. We’ve had to start doing more coding tests to weed their skill set out as a result, and I try and make my coding tests as indicative of our real work as possible and the work they current do. But these people are struggling to…

> then why am I paying for a senior ?

Because they know how to talk to the AI. That's literally the skill that differentiates seniors from juniors at this point. And a skill that you gain only by knowing about the problem space and having banged your head at it multiple times.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#164

Post by htrp » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 5:43 PM UTC

sktrdie wrote: post #163

dagmx wrote: post #85

Atrophy has really been an issue in my recent hiring cycles for good senior engineers. 80% of senior candidates I interview now aren’t able to do junior level tasks without GenAI helping them. We’ve had to start doing more coding tests to weed their skill set out as a result, and I try and make my coding tests as indicative of our real work as possible and the work they current do. But these people are struggling to…

> then why am I paying for a senior ? Because they know how to talk to the AI. That's literally the skill that differentiates seniors from juniors at this point. And a skill that you gain only by knowing about the problem space and having banged your head at it multiple times.

Except most junior devs will be better than sr devs at wholehearted ai adoption

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#165

Post by daxfohl » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 5:44 PM UTC

The education system is already a relic of the past. All the points mentioned in the article assumes that a classroom full of students writing five-paragraph essays on The Red Badge of Courage in 12-point TNR with one-inch margins, hastily graded by an overworked, underpaid public school teacher is still the best way to teach kids in 2025 about critical thinking.

I picture going forward we'll have much more personalized AI-led curricula that students work on at their own pace. The AI systems can let you use as much or as little AI autocompletion as they feel appropriate, can test your understanding real-time by adding some subtle mistakes or opportunities for improvement, and iterate until you get it.

The main issue I worry about is perhaps the opposite. With education actually becoming more effective and interesting, what happens to kids' social and collaboration skills? And maybe that's where human teachers can still add value. Or in discipline and motivation, etc. IDK exactly how that plays out, but I imagine there's still a role for human teachers to play, and perhaps that aspect is even more important than "lecturer" and "grader" that takes most of their time now.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#166

Post by htrp » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 5:45 PM UTC

dagmx wrote: post #96

Narciss wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was actually thinking about this the other day while vibe coding for a side project. I am a lead engineer, but I’ve been using AI in much of my code recently. If you were to ask me to code anything manually right now, I could do it, but it would take a bit to acclimate to writing code line by line. By “a while”, I mean maybe a few days. Which means that if we were to do a coding interview without LLMs, I would prob…

In your scenario though, how do you avoid hiring based on blind faith? How do I know you aren’t just a lead with a very good team to pick up the slack? How do I separate you from the 20 other people saying they’re also good? Why would I hire someone who can’t hit the ground running faster than someone else who can? Furthermore, why would I hire someone who didn’t prepare at all for an interview, even if just mentally…

We're gonna have to reinvent swe hiring

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#167

Post by drdaeman » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 5:47 PM UTC

dagmx wrote: post #162

drdaeman wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> aren’t able to do junior level tasks without GenAI helping them I’m assuming “unable” means not complete lack of knowledge how to approach it, but lack of detail knowledge. E.g. a junior likely remembers some $algorithm in detail (from all the recent grind), while a senior may no longer do so but only know that it exists, what properties it has (when to use, when to not use), and how to look it up. If you don’t thi…

I don’t test rote algorithmic knowledge in our coding tests. Candidates can pick their language Candidates can ask for help, and can google/llm as well if they can’t recall methods. I just do not allow them to post the whole problem in an LLM and need to see them solve through the problem themselves to see how they think and approach issues. This therefore also requires they know the language that they picked to do s…

That’s weird. Any senior developer worth their salt surely should know that LLMs produce a lot of weird nonsense with one-shot prompts, so they need to talk design first, then code the implementation.

This said, IMHO one-shot is worth a try because it’s typically cheap nowadays - but if it’s not good (or, for interview reasons, unavailable) any developer should have the skills to break the problem down and iterate on it, especially if all learning/memory-refreshing resources are so available. That’s the skill that every engineer should have.

I guess I must take my words back - if that’s how nowadays “seniors” are then I don’t know what’s going on. My only guess is that you must’ve met a bunch of scammers/pretenders who don’t know anything but trying to pass for a developer.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#168

Post by GeoAtreides » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 5:52 PM UTC

NaomiLehman wrote: post #144

raincole wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading books is good for your brain. Even just fiction [0]. But I do think people often approach this issue wrong. Especially, as demonstrated by the OP article: > “Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet,” Horowitch wrote. It's a wrong question to ask why people can't focus on a sonnet. The real question is: why do the stude…

I would say that fiction is incredibly more important than reading non-fiction, in general, for human development.

Reading sets up, programs and tunes the holodeck in your brain. The better the holodeck is programmed, the better and more accurate the simulation is.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#169

Post by daxfohl » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 6:14 PM UTC

jncfhnb wrote: post #80

Can’t say the author’s fixation on reading long texts resonates with me. I’m sure Newton’s Principia is interesting and all but… no I’m not going to read that. Conciseness is a valuable thing. It wasn’t practical to convey knowledge in a short form previously because printing and distributing a blog post worth of info was too expensive. On some level long form content just seems… poorly written. It’s long for the sak…

I agree with your main point, though with an asterisk.

I don't think concise is necessarily better than long, nor do I think long is better than concise. The thing is, humanity tends to go in cycles. Poems for Babylonians, long epics for the Greeks, back to poems for Shakespeare and Goethe, then the Russians brought back epics. Kind of a mix during the 20th century, but poetry seemed to slowly fade, and novels trended generally shorter. (All of this is very 30K foot-view; of course there were many exceptions in every era).

Philip Roth predicted the end of the era of the novel at some point, long (relatively) before AI [1]. He said that, similar to poetry in the early 20th century, humanity has evolved past the meaningfulness of the long-form novel.

This doesn't mean "the humanities is dead." It just means that we're entering another cycle where a different from of humanities needs to take over from what we've had in the past.

Anyone arguing that the death of the long-form novel is equivalent to the death of humanities is missing the fact that "humanities" is not a precisely-defined set of topics written in stone. Though it can seem like this is the case at any one point in time, humanities can, and must, exist in many forms that will invariably change as humanity's needs do likewise. That's why its prefix is "human".

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/books/philip-roth-apprasi...

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#170

Post by gertlex » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 6:19 PM UTC

skydhash wrote: post #89

mcny wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started programming before stack overflow, was never any good (still am not to this day), but I was always scared of asking questions on stack overflow. I felt like there was a certain amount of homework expected when you ask a question and usually by the time I did enough work to post a question, it was moot because I would have solved my problem usually by stringing together two or more stack overflow questions t…

I can't check, but I don't think I've ever asked questions on StackOverflow, or even Reddit. Maybe I'm lucky, but my searches have always given me enough leads to find my own solutions or where to find them. There's a lot of documentations and tips floating around the internet. And for a lot of technologies, the code is available as well (or a debugger).

I always enjoyed documenting things. So got great delight out of carefully asking the few questions I was really stuck on on stack overflow... and then half the time later coming up with a solution and adding that good answer.

(Mostly this ended up being weird Ubuntu things relating to usecases specific to robots... not normal programming stuff)