The effect of AI on technical skills is closer to the famous Microsoft's strategy - Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. First you embrace AI because it appears so helpful: it can do boring stuff for you. Next you change the way you work and think to better leverage the AI greatness: now you verify half-assed AI output instead of making your own, you switch between 5-6 parallel projects done by AI instead of focusing on one thing, you find clever ways to prompt AI instead of building a mental model of your work and so on. You are an extension of AI at this point. Eventually you delegate all thinking to AI, because why bother? Your mind atrophies, while AI becomes good enough to replace you and effectively extinguish.
AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills
291–300 of 344 posts
Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe specialists have a higher bar than consumers, and as a design consumer he's right about the design, and the designer is right about the code, if "being right" means "understanding what the end customer will think about this".
Well, design isn't just about looking nice, nor even just about what people think about it. Something can look nice and fail as a design. That is to say - it's entirely possible to have a design that a layperson looks at and goes "wow that's beautiful", and then A/B test it in the real world and your revenue goes down X% because (for example) certain important sections now require more clicks to access. Or to use a r…
those are some nice thoughts but it doesn't seem to have worked out that way, or software would get more responsive, more legible, and less irritating over time. the opposite has been true for decades. user friendliness can be cracked open to increase revenue and those who do just the right amount of cracking win. right now a meme is the frustration is the product. failing as design means something different now than what it meant at like nasa in the 60s.
Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills
#293100% could not agree more. Was hired to fix a vibe coded app for a company that one of their people whipped up over five months. Tens of thousands of lines of code in a single file and no security whatsoever.
The guy uses Claude Code, same as me… it’s like a highly skilled mason with a chisel, against me with a chisel. I’m not going to produce the same masterpiece, because there is SME that underpins the accelerant.
Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, you're both right. Using AI as a supplementary learning aid -- i.e. students use AI as a personalized tutor but still do the assignments themselves -- produces better outcomes. But using AI as a crutch -- i.e. using it to do the assignments -- produces worse outcomes. There is even preliminary research evidence for this, e.g. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/14/10/4115 and https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc…
> students use AI as a personalized tutor but still do the assignments themselves. So your first study actually concludes the opposite. It concluded that all AI users performed worse, but the effect was smaller for students which used AI as a tutor. The second meta analysis I don‘t quite understand. I understand they conclude that using AI tutor shows significant improvement, but I don‘t understand the methodology. I…
I hadn't looked at that study you selected, but yeah the methodology conflicts with the abstract (Also it low-key seems to be an ad for "Flexi 2.0.") It does seems to be a shady paper, with a small N and in a journal of questionable repute.
That said, there are 80+ other studies listed in the meta-study, which is pretty frank about its limitations. (Note the snippets about positive biases in the conclusion.) It is going more for quantity over quality and is transparent about the statistical findings of each one (or lack thereof; see the count of "Not reported"s.) All these references have a myriad of results, but across the spectrum of well-designed studies at reputable venues to the other end, they follow the same themes, so I don't think this can be dismissed that easily.
But if you want, here's more research (some of which I linked in a sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48241839) which has similar findings:
https://scale.stanford.edu/ai/repository/ai-meets-classroom-...
https://arxiv.org/html/2601.20245v2 (from Anthropic)
This article summarizes some of the above and more studies and has similar findings: https://maxmynter.substack.com/p/learn-to-code-with-llms-i-r...
Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills
#295I 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 have noticed it generating good code even in domains I'm an expert in!
I think that it is extremely tempting to just let Claude run freely over the codebase and turn it into unmaintainable slop. My hot take is that this is fine.
It doesn't take very long to come up with a list of simple yes-or-no style rules (e.g. modules should be descoped to simple files, each module must have tests at filename_test, a reasonable reader should find comments to be concise and not extraneous, etc). It doesn't take very long to set up a precommit hook that starts a short Claude session to check each rule, block if any are failed, and explain the issues.
After that? I've found that it's pretty easy to get good code written, and even easier to maintain it. Obviously anything with a value judgement is an avenue for issues, but even a non-frontier model can generally do a passable job answering questions. As long as you eventually read the code to decide on big-picture refactorings, you'll be in a great place.
Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills
#296The more time I spend accelerating my work with AI tools the more I realize how incredibly hard the craft of shipping useful software actually is. Sure, Claude Code and Codex can write (most of) the code for me - but the amount of technical knowledge I need to decide what and how to build remains enormous. As an example: I'm working on a system right now that works like Claude Artifacts, allowing custom HTML+JS apps…
> 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. But that's not what senior executives think. That's all that matters. If they think that AI can replace engineers, so let it be. I mean, since when senior executives know shit about what quality means? They only care about reven…
That’s very black and white. An org with a sizable enough engineer employment base will have leaders who understand that engineering is a deep discipline and quality matters, after all what they sell is an SLA.
Sure not all orgs are like that, but AI has not changed the calculus: fast / cheap / good, are tradeoffs long discussed before AI.
Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills
#297I 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…
I kind of wonder if we could have the equivalent of "authors" to style the code in.
Sort of like LLMs can be prompted "in the style of Charles Bukowski" write blah blah
maybe "in the style of core freebsd code" to make things tighter or maybe a specific git author who checks things in
Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills
#298I 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…
> "write-only code"
so... perl?
Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
I firmly believe that your existing skills and experience are more valuable in a world where the AI tools can speed up the bit where you type the code.
It's great that you believe this, but are you hiring? I don't intend this to read as pure snark, but someone's abstract value isn't much good to them if the job market itself can't / won't recognize it.
You’re right. Hiring depends on revenue streams. Code being cheaper means less coders needed for same code. Less-sr-coders-needed means more senior engineers competing for limited architect/leadership roles.
However, the happy path is that as more code is written, more revenue streams will be developed and more sr engineers will be needed and hired to manage those ballooning codebases. That will be a gradual process of growing the pie though.
Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills
#300The more time I spend accelerating my work with AI tools the more I realize how incredibly hard the craft of shipping useful software actually is. Sure, Claude Code and Codex can write (most of) the code for me - but the amount of technical knowledge I need to decide what and how to build remains enormous. As an example: I'm working on a system right now that works like Claude Artifacts, allowing custom HTML+JS apps…
“ the more I realize how incredibly hard the craft of shipping useful software actually”. I posted something here not long ago re. There is a huge amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and great product. And it received a lot of downvotes. LLM’s don’t change this in reality. That’s why we haven’t seen an explosion of high value products. Creating a product in the first place that create value is VERY, VERY…
Right!
And it's not just the product design either - the number of steps it takes to get a piece of software in front of other people, correctly deployed, with backups and analytics and monitoring and a domain name...
Even with all the LLM help in the world you still need to know a whole lot about how web software works to pull that off.