Wow so technology doing tasks for people has an effect of diminishing their skill at those tasks. Truly unprecedented.
Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good
201–210 of 328 posts
Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My point is if you ask your friend/LLM how to build a house and then build a house then you've learned how to build a house.
I've build a lot of "houses" recently that I wouldn't have attempted if I didn't have a friend/LLM to ask.
Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you actually learning them or are you just letting the AI kinda do them for you? There was a time I knew how to take a path integral, but kinda-sorta knowing what something is and how to ask a calculator for it is different than knowing yourself.
"[Learning] new sports" strikes me as an especially odd one. I can see how an AI tool could help to learn the theory or perhaps come up with better training or match-day/racing strategies, but it won't short-cut the work of developing the necessary physical skills, will it?
See my response above on this.
Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good
#204I haven't written a full function of code in over a year. That being said, I've been spending a lot more time thinking about architecture and system properties. So, yes, I do feel like I've lost some of that very low-level skill. But maybe I've also been able to spend more time on a higher level skill? Maybe the doctors got worse with the images but had more cognitive resources to think about the patient's context? N…
You’re fucked once you have to start getting AI to produce code for languages you’ve never actually worked in.
You will have to write code to understand deeply what goes on at the low level. Without a solid understanding of the low level, you won’t truly know what optimal solutions look like on a high level. You will be flying by the seat of your pants, churning out code that works but has bad low level quirks sprinkled through the code base. The AI will say it’s fine, but you’re just building up shitty software. Feels like shit, run likes shit.
Once someone new comes along who has worked with the language manually and can get AI to produce effective high quality code, you’ve lost competitive advantage. They can build way better versions of whatever you do. You’re finished. You’re a low quality engineer.
Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good
#205Earlier 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…
whats your fave/best one shot code gen?
mine def has to be the initial impl of my python to my personal fave compiler ir. i got claude chat to write it in two sentences. 4 turns helping it rmeemver where it put shit becsuse of transcript issues
Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm using it to learn coding. i could not get through the hurdles of installing an IDE and js/python modules before. now i am learning basic scripting and data modeling etc. it is phenomenal for learning languages. i built a chicken coop and some furniture. the skills and confidence i gained are real. am i failing to learn certain skills in the process? of course. but I'm getting further then i would on my own, and t…
> i could not get through the hurdles of installing an IDE and js/python modules before You want us to believe you couldn't overcome the puddle-deep challenge of installing an IDE and using Pip or Node in the past, but now you're actually learning how to write functions? Cool for you if true I guess but I'm pretty seriously skeptical
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Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good
#207We 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…
Please stop saying we - because many of us didn't ever desire or contribute (outside of having our code / data / IP stolen) to these models or the companies developing them. Many of us weren't willingly singing up to use AI - we were essentially forced to by our employers. Not everyone is more productive now because of AI - many people spend the extra time they save writing code, reviewing code produced by AI.
Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good
#208We 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…
if computers themselves are bicycles for the mind, LLMs are cars. or even motorcycles, if we talk smaller models.
- they require specific roads being paved for them. for example, if your tooling is proprietary and not accessible from the CLI, your agent is pretty much fucked. if your tool is not represented in training data (think, `jj` VCS or your proprietary/tailor-made tooling), you require duct tapes such as "skills" and "memories". a bicycle (that is, your own mind + computer) handles such off-roads much better.
- they get you from A to B faster, sure, but along the way you may encounter something curious - a different road to take, an interesting vista. not to mention, bicycles are actually good for your health, and professional drivers suffer from all the sedentary job diseases we programmers do, unless they actively counter it. with LLMs, we get a "sedentary job disease" of skill atrophy, on top of all the other atrophies us coders should counter with a proper exercise set at least three times a week.
- finally, when you crash in a car (Opus/Sonnet, GPT-5.5) or, worse, on a motorcycle (smaller Qwens, DeepSeek, Haiku/GPT-5.4-nano), you crash very loudly and with a high chance of irrecoverable casualties.
Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good
#209I haven't written a full function of code in over a year. That being said, I've been spending a lot more time thinking about architecture and system properties. So, yes, I do feel like I've lost some of that very low-level skill. But maybe I've also been able to spend more time on a higher level skill? Maybe the doctors got worse with the images but had more cognitive resources to think about the patient's context? N…
In the eyes of many ceo’s, you are slowly becoming useless.
Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good
#210We 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 experie…
I use Ai to remove large amounts of code from our code base. Do refactorings that would not have made business sense before.
I also use Ai to be more ambitious. Online evaluation for our in app flows instead of offline.
So for us the entire quality of the product has been increased a lot.