The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

At the moment, a single line of production code costs hundreds of dollars. I'm not talking about the bedrock of technology, like compilers, mysql, the Linux kernel, which represent hundreds of billions of value. I'm talking about the shitty code that powers Salesforce and ERP integration, Drupal modules, intranet customisation, insurance company call centre agent policy workflows, the thrice cursed apps that ship with cheap Chinese android phones, the putrid code to analyse our shopping loyalty card purchases and turn it into business insights.

All that code is shit, and it costs a fortune. Meanwhile regular people have no code. Even I run my life on almost no code, I have to use SaaS (like Gmail and Docs). If I want something like a financial analysis to be understood by my family I don't code it in python, I use Excel. I use whatever automation comes in my car. But once simple code becomes a process of thinking about what you want rather than knowing esoterica like calling conventions, allocation lifetimes etc, then we have made custom software accessible to billions of people, people who are clever and industrious.

So stay in your cathedral and illuminate your manuscript if you like, there is a need for excellent code, and tooling like Lean that can define what correct means, but let the people eat.

I used to use a bookkeeper, but I got Claude a QuickBooks API key and have had it doing my books since then. I give it the same inputs and it generates all the various journal entries, etc. that I need. The difference between using it and my bookkeeper is I can ask it all kinds of questions about why it's doing things and how bookkeeping conventions work. It's much better at explaining than my bookkeeper and also doesn't charge me by the hour to answer. I've learned more about bookkeeping in the past month than in my entire life prior - very much the opposite of skill atrophy.

Claude does a bunch of low-skill tasks in my business, like copying numbers from reports into different systems into a centralized Google Sheet. My muscle memory at running reports and pulling out the info I want has certainly atrophied, but who cares? It was a skill I used because I needed the outcome, not because the skill was useful.

You say that using AI reduces all these skills as though that's an unavoidable outcome over which people have no control, but it's not. You can mindlessly hand tasks off to AI, or you can engage with it as an expert and learn something. In many cases the former is fine. Before AI ever existed, you saw the same thing as people progressed in their careers. The investment banking analyst gets promoted a few times and suddenly her skill at making slide decks has atrophied, because she's delegating that to analysts. That's a desirable outcome, not a tragedy.

Less capability doesn't necessarily mean less agency. If you choose to delegate a task you don't want to do so you can focus on other things, then you are becoming less capable at that skill precisely because you are exercising agency.

Now in fairness I get that I am very lucky in that I have full control of when and how I use AI, while others are going to be forced to use it in order to keep up with peers. But that's the way technology has always been - people who decided they didn't want to move from a typewriter to a word processor couldn't keep up and got left behind. The world changes, and we're forced to adapt to it. You can't go back, but within the current technological paradigm there remains plenty of agency to be had.