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Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

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Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#81

Post by w10-1 »

Some effect is real, but it's likely overstated by poor metrics.

"Currency" in all fields relates to the recency and frequency with which you dealt with a particular issue. Whether flying on auto-pilot or coding with AI, automated reduces some currency. But is that a reduction in capability?

Measuring concrete tasks makes currency the operative skill; that's why it works to cram for standardized and mid-level tests.

(Indeed, the 2010's interviewing "wisdom" about people being quick to answer simple questions veered into measuring currency, not skill.)

I think this effect is strongest in time-impacted professionals. Doctors doing dozens of endoscopies a week and developers churning out code will use what tool leverage they can, and forget as much as possible to focus on what they need to. I suspect the effect is weaker in personal or research projects.

People riding bikes won't be able to run long distances - because they won't have to, and will be able to outdo any runners. That's only a problem if the supply of bikes is someone constrained. So the risk is not skill loss, but losing control of the means of production.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#82

Post by arbitrary_name »

ForHackernews wrote: post #69
hodder wrote: post #61

Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old. New sports, new businesses, new academic pursuits. Technology is a lever and AI is the biggest lever we've ever had. It enables laziness or incredible productivity. Choose your own path forward.

Are you actually learning them or are you just letting the AI kinda do them for you? There was a time I knew how to take a path integral, but kinda-sorta knowing what something is and how to ask a calculator for it is different than knowing yourself.

I'm using it to learn coding.

i could not get through the hurdles of installing an IDE and js/python modules before.

now i am learning basic scripting and data modeling etc.

it is phenomenal for learning languages.

i built a chicken coop and some furniture. the skills and confidence i gained are real. am i failing to learn certain skills in the process? of course. but I'm getting further then i would on my own, and that is truly meaningful.

you can keep dismissing it; but I'm genuinely using it to break down barriers, give me confidence, and highlight my ignorance in very productive ways.

i find it bizarre how unwilling some people are to recognize that.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#83

Post by MiscCompFacts »

ForHackernews wrote: post #69
hodder wrote: post #61

Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old. New sports, new businesses, new academic pursuits. Technology is a lever and AI is the biggest lever we've ever had. It enables laziness or incredible productivity. Choose your own path forward.

Are you actually learning them or are you just letting the AI kinda do them for you? There was a time I knew how to take a path integral, but kinda-sorta knowing what something is and how to ask a calculator for it is different than knowing yourself.

Yea, this is a serious problem but honestly it was present before LLMs. Actually knowing, deeply, how to do something was always very difficult and very time consuming. People would substitute it with “edutainment”: youtube videos, Ted Talks, blogs, etc. The thing is nobody was really learning deeply. We were training our brains for recognition, but mastery requires training for generation which was always the harder of the 2 cognitive processes.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#84

Post by cortesoft »

ForHackernews wrote: post #69
hodder wrote: post #61

Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old. New sports, new businesses, new academic pursuits. Technology is a lever and AI is the biggest lever we've ever had. It enables laziness or incredible productivity. Choose your own path forward.

Are you actually learning them or are you just letting the AI kinda do them for you? There was a time I knew how to take a path integral, but kinda-sorta knowing what something is and how to ask a calculator for it is different than knowing yourself.

I literally just started playing around with Lathe (https://github.com/devenjarvis/lathe) which was shared here on HN a few weeks back. There are some things I have been wanting to learn more about (some for work, some for personal desire), and I used it to generate a tutorial about some of the things.

I have been very pleased with the results so far. I was able to tune the tutorial to exactly what I want to learn, and it did a very good job (at least that i have seen so far). It has made learning fun, since I get to learn exactly what I want, and I can ask the AI questions and have it make changes to the tutorial in real time as i am working through it.

Now, will I keep using this at a rate to fully offset all of the thinking i have stopped doing since i started using AI? I am not sure, I guess time will tell.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#85

Post by probably_wrong »

jimt1234 wrote: post #57

Back in the mid-90s I was doing desktop support. It was a lot of work because PCs were relatively new (and they were garbage!), and people broke shit all the time. Sometime around '96 a disk-cloning utility called Ghost was released. It was great - one could provision a fully working PC with all required apps and config settings in minutes! Sounds lame now, but back then it was revolutionary. It had a dark side, thou…

Happened with all of tech support, really, or at least in my corner of the world: you take your PC to a technician and you receive in return a fresh Windows install, a folder with most of your files (including a copy of "C:\Windows"), and none of the programs or shortcuts you had before.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#86

Post by dgellow »

specproc wrote: post #8
iLoveOncall wrote: post #4

The two senior engineers in my org (in a FAANG) who vibe-code the most have lost literally all of their skills. Their code has become terrible and their judgment even worse. A very similar topic was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48392004 and I make the exact same conclusion: All of this makes me selfishly excited for my own future. It's glaringly obvious that anyone who's a heavy user of LLMs i…

You're making the right call there. I've felt it, seen it around me personally. That study is terrifying. I'm no code ninja at the best of times. It's scary to hear that's happening to top engineers. I need an exit strategy. Anyone else come off AI?

Yeah, I had the same and decided to cancel all my subscriptions and remove all my local models ~1 months ago ago.

So far I’m very happy with my decision.

I wrote about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48083162

> I had the same experience over the past year with early coding harness at the beginning of the year, then Claude code since its release date. But after 1+year going that direction I really don’t want to continue. The novelty is gone, dealing with AI now feels frustrating and boring, I miss engaging deeply with the actual lower level technical challenges. I do not want to manage fleets of agents. I do not want to rediscover for the hundredth time that in fact all this time an agent took shortcuts for acceptance tests I rely upon and didn’t catch. Or once again get the agent to understand why and what I want it to do after its context got bloated and it start to drift completely. While I got artifacts I can use (libraries, tools, docs), including some things that I’m pretty confident are SoA I do not feel satisfied anymore knowing that I used a model to generate them, even if I was the one designing every part of it. I do feel that I’m lying anytime I come to a colleague to share a new cool tool I have made.

> YMMV but I’m personally feeling burnt out with AI coding agents and ready to go back to the old ways for my next personal project

And also here (specifically to human communication): https://sam.elborai.me/articles/no-more-llm-comms/.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#87

Post by roamerz »

Of course. If you don’t use something it atrophies not only in non use but in losing interest in keeping up with the state of the art in said tech.

What we gain though is for people don’t possess that knowledge in the first place, now have this superpower. I know several individuals who have vast experience in specific disciplines and they are now able to solve real problems where there were previously struggling and having to make existing solutions work.

In the context of software engineering it allows people that have great institutional knowledge bypass the software market and construct stuff on their own - or at least prototype something and turn it over to an SE if the situation dictates.

I’ve been using CC for several months now and have noticed an increasing quality of output - Fable 5 I think was 85% there. At 95% SE’s are going to be increasingly looking for work to do.

To the title though, I’ve noticed while my desire to actually write code is decreasing CC is forcing me to improve my high level thought processes in the context of overarching goals in a project through discussion with CC. The software often introduces things that had escaped me or just think more outside the box.

My concerns are that this technology will be restricted at some point and the people making the restrictions will have a lot of control - and we know how that works out. But I believe they are inevitable, first obvious example being Fable 5. Are guardrails needed - yeah sure. Common sense says that I don’t want someone able to concoct an easily transmittable Ebola virus that has a 90 day incubation period in their kitchen but I do want an entrepreneur to be able to build a competitor to MS Office, or a cure for Ebola, for example.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#88

Post by mpalmer »

w10-1 wrote: post #81

Some effect is real, but it's likely overstated by poor metrics. "Currency" in all fields relates to the recency and frequency with which you dealt with a particular issue. Whether flying on auto-pilot or coding with AI, automated reduces some currency. But is that a reduction in capability? Measuring concrete tasks makes currency the operative skill; that's why it works to cram for standardized and mid-level tests.…

How do you measure the bundle of "skills" that comprises critical thinking? And if that's your analogy's distance running, what's the "riding a bike" analogue?

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#89

Post by kakacik »

mellosouls wrote: post #54

This is new, the scope of it, its not just about individual "skills" because its all of them ; we are being challenged at the very fundamentals of our ability to think deeply and widely and persistently. That has never happened before like this. It is quite extraordinary and breath-taking at times to see the agents in action; the flipside is that very power renders us both vulnerable to its seduction and enfeeblement…

Human mind as much as body needs challenge. That's the only way for growth, heck even sustaining some higher cognitive levels.

Nurses, doctors and family members know damn well how life trajectory nosedives for somebody ie suddenly bound to bed, when stimulus and doable challenges are reduced to minimum.

llms remove challenges, or minimize them. I can't image any added value for any engineer apart from cost cutting for employer. Sure, next come folks who are doing 10x compared to before, and some actually do. Even there, I have my doubts. For rest of us, its not good and won't get better unless they price it out of most markets.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#90

Post by wetwater »

ForHackernews wrote: post #69
hodder wrote: post #61

Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old. New sports, new businesses, new academic pursuits. Technology is a lever and AI is the biggest lever we've ever had. It enables laziness or incredible productivity. Choose your own path forward.

Are you actually learning them or are you just letting the AI kinda do them for you? There was a time I knew how to take a path integral, but kinda-sorta knowing what something is and how to ask a calculator for it is different than knowing yourself.

I agree with the sentiment of the parent comment. But I also sometimes question what you have posed exactly. Am I really learning or getting the curiosity itch scratched. The line is very thin sometimes. But I think I am more in the camp of learning. I can ask so dumb question that I never had the courage to ask nor were they entertained where I was educated. It has been a boon to finally ask.

For example I am following Dirac's book "The Principles of quantum mechanics" to study QM. Pre-AI wouldn't have been able to do so, I am just that dumb. Even with AI its tough. but the thing is I can keep asking questions until I get that concept drilled in. Now I am doing it at a pace that's unfathomable to me.

But now that I am getting to grips with QM, I can get to things that I am really interested to learn like spin resonance and so on. This is something I am so grateful for.

Now it can be questioned that is it making me wise, intelligent or just "giving me answers" that I should strive to discover myself. I dont know the answer to that. But studying what I want, how I want and not getting judged is something i deeply enjoy. Srry the comment might have taken some tangents.

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