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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

#241

Post by dmoose »

xxs wrote: post #95
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…

> has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant, and that becoming an expert has accelerated for those with the personal stamina to dig deep (this as a requirement hasn't changed) If anything it allows to be as lazy as possible. I have not seen anyone digging deeper with the AI tools.

I have been having a blast going back through topics I learned in college and haven't used in years. Being able to rubber duck specific questions and follow a path based on what I remember vs don't is much faster with LLM than it would be with textbook. However, I'm doing this because it is personally fun. I'm guessing if presented with a task I wasn't interested in the LLM would create exactly the opposite outcome. Thankfully I'm at a point in my career where I don't have a lot of stuff forced on me externally so this hasn't come up, but I can picture teenage me taking a much lazier path with a much different end result.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#242

Post by 8note »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #177
dataflow wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused, this doesn't make sense. The target they're iterating on (UI) is the same one whose quality they're assessing, not a different one (source code). You're suggesting that (a) their UI skills are lacking (based on what? isn't UI exactly what they were iterating on and trying to improve?), and (b) that a real UI expert would've somehow felt the UI they were working on was consistently garbage, despite how m…

It's not confusing. It makes sense.

no, it is confusing.

the llm produced something the operator thought was garbage for the design too, and the operator iterated it from garbage to good.

they could also have the llm iterate the underlying code from garbage to good, if they wanted.

most likely a specialist would say its neither good nor bad, since its not considering the right things, and hasnt collected the right useability feedback, but making straightforward designs isnt that hard, and counting clicks and interactions, and avoiding hidden functionality is all measureable stuff

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#243

Post by noosphr »

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…

This isn't an indictment of how good AI is but how poor our tools are. We had gui makers in 1996 that made slop which allowed you to iterate in real time. They didn't need a datacenter worth of compute and a nuclear reactors worth of power to run.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#244

Post by noosphr »

akersten wrote: post #23
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…

> 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 a maintenance dead end. In the Tailwind thread the other day I was explicitly told that the intended experience of many frameworks is "write-only code" so maybe this is just the way of the future that we have to learn to embrace. Don't worry how it's all hooked u…

The if in there is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#245

Post by rhubarbtree »

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.

Colleague (non-designer) generated UI with Claude. It was awful and broke basic design rules. So yes you may be right.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#246

Post by 12_throw_away »

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.

> 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?

Well when you put it that way ... monetizing the Dunning-Kruger effect does actually sound like a very good business idea.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#247

Post by znnajdla »

Bingo. AI is NOT making raw skill/talent obsolete, rather it’s actually making it more valuable. Deep technical knowledge now has even more leverage in the real world, not less, because you then have more “surfaces” to apply the use of AI. And this realization is what actually inspired me to build my own homelab datacenter to host my tech SaaS rather than use cloud services like AWS. The value of learning basic networking, devops, and server hardware is now multiplied because that expertise can be applied faster and farther with AI. Before AI I would have to spend several hours or days learning RouterOS, for example, to be able to configure a datacenter-class Mikrotik router. With Claude that became a 20 minute job and I learned a lot about routing configuration in the process — that gives me unique controls over my product offering that I simply wouldn’t have if I “just used the cloud”. In fact I am actually tempted to build my own OS — something I wouldnt have dared to think of before AI.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#248

Post by customguy »

echelon wrote: post #219
miyoji wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It really saddens me to see some developers talk about literally quitting their careers over AI, right when the benefits of existing deep technical experience have never been more valuable. 1. Because the experience of interacting with AI is miserable. I like writing code. I don't like finding the magic incantation that gets the machine to write the correct code. I don't like correcting the machine when it gets thi…

> Because the experience of interacting with AI is miserable. I like writing code. I'm your exact opposite. I've felt like code is 1960's punch card tech my entire career. I've always wanted to do more. So much of coding is plumbing. Or paying attention to tiny little details. Or hunting down stupid bugs. Or changing requirements and refactoring. That shit sucks. All of it. I've never had so much fun with software. I…

"the sand doesn't matter, only the beach does"? Makes no sense.

Perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away.

> In 100 years people will look at our ephemeral artifacts as silly little things

Whereas they'll totally admire the hamster wheels in which people shoveled product? Well, I don't care either way. Craftsmanship and care have their own rewards, and shape the person engaging in them for the better.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#249

Post by onion2k »

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…

But it was instantly a maintenance dead end.

It doesn't really make sense to suggest AI can work on something any make it now and work correctly, and at the same time say it's unmaintainable. It is maintainable with AI.

The real question is whether or not you're happy to ship AI-generated code that you can't modify to production unless you use AI. Few developers are there yet, plenty of non-tech people are there already. I don't know which group is actually wrong.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#250

Post by [deleted] »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #53
akersten wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a maintenance dead end. In the Tailwind thread the other day I was explicitly told that the intended experience of many frameworks is "write-only code" so maybe this is just the way of the future that we have to learn to embrace. Don't worry how it's all hooked u…

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.

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