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

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

#191

Post by nilirl »

themafia wrote: post #172
mellosouls wrote: post #54

This is new, the scope of it, its not just about individual "skills" because its all of them ; we are being challenged at the very fundamentals of our ability to think deeply and widely and persistently. That has never happened before like this. It is quite extraordinary and breath-taking at times to see the agents in action; the flipside is that very power renders us both vulnerable to its seduction and enfeeblement…

> That has never happened before like this. You should possibly spend some time reading what people used to say about the invention of Radio and Television. > It is quite extraordinary and breath-taking at times to see the agents in action; So is any magic trick. The unsettling notion that it may all just be an illusion that you've failed to correctly understand doesn't seem to weigh on people. > its almost hard-drug…

Relatedly, this is Plato on writing:

"They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks"

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

#192

Post by fzeroracer »

wvenable wrote: post #179
fzeroracer wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An LLM absolutely shortens the research part of learning No, it doesn't. Because in any scenario where you are using AI in a potentially appropriate manner, you are verifying every single source it spits out and cross referencing everything it says. If you do not do this you are failing the process entirely.

If I ask my buddy for help, I don't cross reference everything he says either even though he could just as easily be wrong. A lot of what I'm talking about is every day stuff not nuclear physics. LLMs are not even close to that unreliable.

If I ask my buddy for help I'm not considering that part of research or learning I consider that leaning on their potential expertise. You're not learning shit on how to build a house just because you ask your friend to build one for you.

If we're talking about research as in actually attempting to learn and get to the heart of a matter then yes. You should be cross referencing everything.

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

#193

Post by Jensson »

spongebobism wrote: post #188
drawnwren wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why senior swes are known to provide so much more value than principals.

I find this hard to parse, maybe because English is not my first language. Do senior SWEs provide more value than they provide principles, or do they provide more value than principles do?

He means "Principal engineers", its a title for higher up engineers.

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

#194

Post by BobbyJo »

u8 wrote: post #184

We were so spoiled. We got fat salaries to sit in air conditioned Herman Millers all day learning about computers. Now we discover a way to synthesis intelligence and the only thing we can think to do with it is ruin the most fun career most of us could have ever hoped for. Sure, we're all more productive now, but how much of that is because we leverage AI on top of the intelligence we gained from all of that manual…

You're either using it wrong, or work somewhere that sucks. I'm having a ton of fun coding with AI.

I feel like I am learning a whole new branch of the programming skill tree. LLMs and their harnesses are like a mew set of constraints to work around when designing systems, but if you get them right you can build bigger, better things than ever before.

I say all of this as someone who spent the last two days rebuilding RBAC for my application after Claude royally messed it up.

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

#195

Post by davidcelis »

u8 wrote: post #184

We were so spoiled. We got fat salaries to sit in air conditioned Herman Millers all day learning about computers. Now we discover a way to synthesis intelligence and the only thing we can think to do with it is ruin the most fun career most of us could have ever hoped for. Sure, we're all more productive now, but how much of that is because we leverage AI on top of the intelligence we gained from all of that manual…

> Sure, we're all more productive now, but…

I’ve been trying to ask people a different question: sure, we’re more productive now but to me, the AI era is only serving to plunge us deeper than ever into producing more, more, more, faster, faster, faster. And for what? What’s it all for? I became a software engineer because I have a lot of fun writing code, thinking through and solving complicated problems, and experiencing the reward of seeing what I’ve built by hand working for the first time.

Do people really have fun managing a fleet of agents that generate the code instead? Or is it just the rush of producing something extremely quickly, much more quickly than you might be able to alone, regardless of how well (or poorly) it might work? For me, being able to move quickly was never the fun part.

It’s one thing to utilize AI to lessen the drudgework, the boilerplate, but I look at people who have gone all in on agentic development and it just really makes me wonder.

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

#196

Post by ncruces »

sdesol wrote: post #125
Retric wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI needs a great deal of handholding which is different than just offloading tasks. You spend a lot of cognitive energy playing a slot machine hoping the RNG works out this time. There’s definitely a skill to using AI but it just doesn’t generalize very well.

> playing a slot machine hoping I still believe the slot machine analogy holds to some extent, but I can honestly say my winning percentage is at least 90% for one shot generated code now. I think if you know it's limitations (inlcluding your own), I don't think about hoping anymore. I should note that when I say AI, I mean the collective models from all the major providers. The most important lesson is, you need to…

I wish I could've one shoted this 200 LoC PR: https://github.com/ncruces/wasm2go/pull/42/changes#diff-5181...

I'd really like to know the prompt, because I did try and, this took me way too long to figure out.

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

#197

Post by Jensson »

nilirl wrote: post #191
themafia wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That has never happened before like this. You should possibly spend some time reading what people used to say about the invention of Radio and Television. > It is quite extraordinary and breath-taking at times to see the agents in action; So is any magic trick. The unsettling notion that it may all just be an illusion that you've failed to correctly understand doesn't seem to weigh on people. > its almost hard-drug…

Relatedly, this is Plato on writing: "They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks"

And he was right, that is why we don't let people bring their textbooks to most tests. That rule wasn't made because we hate students, its because it improves the outcomes if we force people to commit things to memory instead of just looking them up.

You would need similar restrictions during the learning phase to get people to learn things in an LLM world.

So writing and LLM are still a net positive, but only if you acknowledge the problem and add fixes so people still learn rather than just rely on this crutch.

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

#198

Post by saadn92 »

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 think you're learning things at a pace you never imagined, but all you're really doing is learning superficially. You never really go deep into things, and it "seems" like you're learning faster, but how much can you actually recall of the things you learned? By the way, I'm saying all this because this has been my experience. I can prompt like no tomorrow asking questions, but I forget most of it because it's not deep learning. I'm not actually thinking myself, I'm allowing the AI to think for me.

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

#199

Post by hodder »

elorant wrote: post #99
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.

How exactly is AI helping you with sports? Have you become a better athlete? Have you learned more about the strategy of each sport from the perspective of a coach for example? Care to elaborate?

recently vibe-coded a personalized skateboarding block-training app. The platform maps curated YouTube tutorials to specific tricks I want to learn, logs my daily progress, and tracks failure rates alongside the specific reasons for missed attempts.It also functions as a structured video journal that integrates seamlessly into my coaching routine. For instance, during a session of 10 daily kickflip attempts, the app logs my success metrics and video capture so my coach can review my exact mechanics. Over time, this data-driven feedback loop visualizes my progression curve and systematically improves my landing consistency.

In another case I follow a bodybuilding cutting regimen and it helps me create and track recipes consistent with my diet plan and macro guidelines. It helps me also create tasty recipes that fit my criteria based on the ingredients I have on hand.

Those are just 2 examples.

I also recently built a backyard jib setup with a platform, ramp, PVC jib rail for snowboarding, and it helped me architect the design for it.

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

#200

Post by sublinear »

BobbyJo wrote: post #194
u8 wrote: post #184

We were so spoiled. We got fat salaries to sit in air conditioned Herman Millers all day learning about computers. Now we discover a way to synthesis intelligence and the only thing we can think to do with it is ruin the most fun career most of us could have ever hoped for. Sure, we're all more productive now, but how much of that is because we leverage AI on top of the intelligence we gained from all of that manual…

You're either using it wrong, or work somewhere that sucks. I'm having a ton of fun coding with AI. I feel like I am learning a whole new branch of the programming skill tree. LLMs and their harnesses are like a mew set of constraints to work around when designing systems, but if you get them right you can build bigger, better things than ever before. I say all of this as someone who spent the last two days rebuildin…

What's an example of "bigger and better" and what projects did you have before?
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