Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that LLMs are only going to make people with real tech/programming skills much more in demand, as younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering and never develop themselves technically beyond the bare minimum needed to glue things together. The gap between people with deep, hands-on experience that understand how a computer works and prompt engineers will become so insanely deep. Somebody needs to…
I think we who are already in tech have this gleeful fantasy that new tools impair newcomers in a way that will somehow serve us, the incumbents, in some way. But in reality pretty much anyone who enters software starts off cutting corners just to build things instead of working their way up from nand gates. And then they backfill their knowledge over time. My first serious foray into software wasn't even Ruby. It wa…
Because of the mode of interaction.
When you dive into a framework that provides a ton of scaffolding, and "backfill your knowledge over time" (guilty! using Nikola as a SSG has been my entry point to relearn modern CSS, for example), you're forced to proceed by creating your own loop of experimentation and research.
When you interact with an LLM, and use forums to figure out problems the LLM didn't successfully explain to you (about its own output), you're in chat mode the whole time. Even if people are willing to teach you to fish, they won't voluntarily start the lesson, because you haven't shown any interest in it. And the fish are all over the place - for now - so why would you want to learn?
>It's like presuming that StackOverflow will keep you as a question-asker your whole life when nobody here would relate to that.
Of course nobody on HN would relate to that first-hand. But as someone with extensive experience curating Stack Overflow, I can assure you I have seen it second-hand many times.