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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

#321

Post by anonyfox »

jeanloolz wrote: post #311
simonw wrote: post #121

The 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…

This is a refreshing opinion, and also matches with my own experience. Many software engineers around me have now made the conclusion that AI will take their jobs and they're thinking changing careers already. I feel this is too early to tell. The prompts I write are all very technical, someone without my expertise would struggle with just an agent to talk to. Every time I do something outside my expertise, it is not…

in fact engineering job openings are skyrocketing, just far beyond the big megacorps. AI was a neat excuse to correct the covid overgiring phases, now axes happened while lots of people built lots of new things they couldn't before and at some point it "swamps" under the complexities of reality at scaling up, thus engineers are needed. jibs are shuffling around yes, but demand will be surging even more soon.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#322

Post by anonyfox »

wg0 wrote: post #191

I'm a severe AI critic. Bitterly so. But this much I would agree that AI has a multiplying effect for the expert who can still do the job by hand albeit slower no matter how much slower but a good job nevertheless. And still worth repeating that AI has net negative gain in team settings but is a booster for lone wolves like me.

lone wolf here too, can confirm.

true fullstack (not only tech parts - from marketing to product to boring IT and financials) makers now have insane speedups, IF they previously did everything by hand properly and found ways to be good at it solo. Often the only scarce resource was your own time (or more correct: attention/focus hours per day) for execution and research. Now offloading stuff to agents, especially since you know the domain and the shortcomings by heart and when to (not) not trust AI is supercharged.

People fail to reap benefits for organizational scale and mostly fail completely, they try to make AI fit a human process spaghetti theater somehow, but a lone wolf can just change himself entirely in days and be adapted and leverage AI-first if he wants to. just like that. no coordination needed beyond rewriting personal scripts, which is fast with LLMs too.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#323

Post by kokekolo »

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…

So you iterated on the design but not on the code? You have to do with the code what you did with the design. Review, adjust (or ask AI to adjust), rinse, repeat.

I've found that Claude can write code that's on par with what an average SE can produce, but you have to guide it. Write instructions, but also ask it to propose and assess multiple options, even ask it to run a code review and refactoring every so often.

Yes, the code is unlikely to be approved by Linus Torvalds, but so is the code that's made by many humans that is still merged and shipped.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#324

Post by AngryData »

NiloCK wrote: post #218
simonw wrote: post #136

Earlier 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.

This echos my sentiments with trade work and repair skills, everyone claims it is so valuable and rare skills, but the job market doesn't seem to agree with it. There are people with 30 years of experience that could build a house from scratch then go home and rebuild their car engine, but are barely making more than people waiting tables at Olive Garden.

What skills people think are valuable and prized, and what skills corporations are willing to pay for, are often very different.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#325

Post by AngryData »

znnajdla wrote: post #247

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 netwo…

Im not so sure, people probably thought the same thing about power tools and nail guns. They allow the house to be built much faster, but wages dropped, work quality went down, and the value of having skills and experience was severly diminished.

Plastering walls use to be a great paying skilled job, and when drywall came out and everyone thought that meant less time making boring flat walls and more time doing fancy plasterwork in corners and edges. But the fancy corners and edgings disappeared, it took too long compared to the rest of the wall plane and people who did it still wanted decent pay for maintaining or building that skill. And even for plain drywallers, productuon demands went up while wages stagnated. And now these days most drywall is seamed like trash and most guys doing it are desperate and/or addicts. The only thing that earns money now in drywall and plaster is meth head production speed and a lack of complaints about the work.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#326

Post by echelon »

ozozozd wrote: post #307
echelon wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I mean, if you don’t like refactoring, which is my absolute favorite, it’s hard to believe you understand software engineering and software architecture. Tedium absolutely exists in coding. And is usually a sign of bad interfaces and/or architecture. For most of us it wasn’t really about getting the user to do X. It’s getting the user to do X at 1/10th of the price, 10x the speed, and the user is left absolutely amaz…

> it’s hard to believe you understand software engineering and software architecture.

I made over $500k TC writing active-active high availability services that moved billions of dollars a day. I've been around the block.

> Magic is for the user to experience. Not for the user of the programming language.

Why are you treating our primitive technology as holy? It's all temporary fucking garbage that is a limitation of our current civilizational abilities.

Do you think the Linux kernel will live forever? I think we'll be done with it before 2050. Seriously.

Everything you think is permanent is just temporary.

I would rather be building star ships and holodecks and engineering 10,000 year human lifespans, brain uploads, and stuff like that than worrying about the craftsmanship of some dumb web service.

I think you should dream more and worry about the current station of SWEs less. We're merely a stepping stone.

You and I are stepping stones. We're dust.

None of what we do today will be relevant in some short decades. And that is a blip on the geologic timescales.

I was born too early for this bullshit. I don't like living with you neanderthals, especially when you don't want to step out of the cave.

Thankfully I don't have to worry about this tech winning. It already is. You can keep up or hold your nose until you're out of a job. There are plenty of other things you could do, I just wouldn't bet on being a truck driver.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#327

Post by reactordev »

reactordev wrote: post #290
lobf wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah I see. Funny enough I consider myself more of a dinosaur or originalist- the PC was idealized as a device for individuals to write their own programs for their personal use. The issue before is that coding is not only difficult and time-consuming to learn, but also that I think it requires a particular type of person to fully grasp this new, non-human language. I see these SOTA LLMs as akin to the digital camera r…

Yup, same lens, different revolution. The issue now is it's not just photography that's more accessible. It's all creative endeavours. Writing (including software) included.

I want to also add something here. This by no way means you should STOP doing these things! It just means that the means of which you make it change, the value is no longer on the tangible, but the execution of it.

For example, you can make AI music, but who will listen? If you form an AI band around AI music and execute an AI marketing strategy like it was a real band, probably thousands, hopefully millions.

If you make AI art, who’s going to look at it? If you make AI art in a very specific style and you can crank out 8x upscaled high resolution versions of it for print, well, you just have a business!

And if you make film, you already know, green screen and chroma key models are far superior, that AI enhancements can help you in the editing room, and that LTX2.3 can fill in the VFX shots when the budget is exhausted.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#330

Post by mpalmer »

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…

I don't see the juniors in my vicinity using these tools to learn. At all.
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