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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

#91

Post by marcosdumay »

simmerup wrote: post #40
akersten wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The problem is it’s impossibly hard to test all the edge cases Which is probably why so many random buttons in microsoft/apple/spotify just stop working once you get off the beaten path or load the app in some state which is slightly off base

The problem is worse than that.

The number of edge cases in a software is not fixed at all. One of the largest markers of competence in software development is being able to keep them at minimum, and LLMs tend to make that number higher than humanely possible.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#92

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

gbear0 wrote: post #87
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…

Why was it a maintenance dead end? It sounds like you were able to iteratively work on it in its current state, but are you going to be the one maintaining the code? I keep asking myself the same questions, and the conclusion I keep coming to is the clean modeled structure we want to see is for humans to maintain and extend, but the AI doesn't need this. There's definitely an efficiency angle here where it's faster f…

> Why was it a maintenance dead end?

LLMs have a limit to how deep they can understand and refactor architectural issues.

That limit is far, far lower than a human's.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#94

Post by ttd »

gbear0 wrote: post #87
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…

Why was it a maintenance dead end? It sounds like you were able to iteratively work on it in its current state, but are you going to be the one maintaining the code? I keep asking myself the same questions, and the conclusion I keep coming to is the clean modeled structure we want to see is for humans to maintain and extend, but the AI doesn't need this. There's definitely an efficiency angle here where it's faster f…

> the clean modeled structure we want to see is for humans to maintain and extend, but the AI doesn't need this.

This does not match my experience. I do a lot of AI-assisted coding at this point, and what I've seen is that when the AI is asked to extend or modify existing code, it does a much better job on clean, well-structured and well-abstracted code.

I think the reason is simple, and tracks for humans as well: well-structured code is simply easier to understand and reason about, and takes a smaller amount of working-set memory. Even as LLMs get better with coding, I expect that they would converge on the same conclusion, namely that good structure + good abstractions make for code that is more efficient to work with.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#95

Post by xxs »

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…

> has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant, and that becoming an expert has accelerated for those with the personal stamina to dig deep (this as a requirement hasn't changed)

If anything it allows to be as lazy as possible. I have not seen anyone digging deeper with the AI tools.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#96

Post by reconnecting »

tambourine_man wrote: post #82
reconnecting wrote: post #4

> I think AI tools are more like Iron Man's suit. There's an interesting repository with 63600 stars on GitHub (1). The developer of the repository is No 1 at the GitHub's trending contributors list (2). However, it seems like the application isn't what it's described to be (3), and the developers, on their end, are unable to clearly answer whether this is real or not, as it's just messy LLM output. Proof that the su…

> After a thorough independent code audit with cross-verification from three AI systems (Claude, Codex/GPT-5.2, Gemini), we confirm that this project is a non-functional facade. So, a nonfunctional project is created by AI and AI is used to attests its nonfunctionality. What a brave new world.

It seems like a perfect ouroboros illustration for the current world.

AI creates a delusional product, people don't trust their own opinion regarding it and follow it, another AI is needed to prove that the product is unreal.

In the loop.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#97

Post by bluegatty »

"Without guidance, LLMs tend to paint themselves into a corner, because they’re generating code to solve individual prompts, not thinking holistically about an application’s architecture." user error, mostly.

But the general argument of 'we will need skilled operators' still holds.

For every 'junior' displaced by AI, there will be some other kind of relevant role they're needed for.

Agentic workflows, integration, all the data science stuff, new UX paradigms.

I don't think the job numbers will dwindle, just shift.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#98

Post by keybored »

> I want to talk a bit about AI and the related shifts in the tech industry. I know this is top-of-mind for lots of y’all, and you might be wondering if it even makes sense to learn new programming skills in this environment.

Y’all sound the same:

> Let’s start with an uncomfortable truth: AI models have become shockingly good at completing a wide variety of programming tasks. They’re certainly not perfect, but in many cases, they’re good enough. I’m not happy about this, for a wide variety of ethical/environmental/safety reasons, but it is what it is.

More Inevitabilism posting with the “not happy with” but is-what-it-is washing of your hands. At a distance you all look the same: an army of posts insisting the obvious, the inevitable; who knows why you all need to sound the same and say the same thing, but I guess it is to keep it top-of-mind for us alls. It is what it is.

> [...] It’s never been easier to learn about new topics, with tools like ChatGPT that can answer any questions you have. But that only works when you know what questions to ask. My course offers a curated curriculum that will introduce you to all sorts of new techniques. I think you’ll be amazed at what you can build after taking the course.

Okay, sure. I ask these LLMs things too (c.f. outright --be coding) so that’s not necessarily incongruent with the stance of being not-happy-about-this.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#99

Post by lambda »

gbear0 wrote: post #87
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…

Why was it a maintenance dead end? It sounds like you were able to iteratively work on it in its current state, but are you going to be the one maintaining the code? I keep asking myself the same questions, and the conclusion I keep coming to is the clean modeled structure we want to see is for humans to maintain and extend, but the AI doesn't need this. There's definitely an efficiency angle here where it's faster f…

> but the AI doesn't need this

That's not true. The LLM performance will degrade as the codebase gets messier as well. You get to a point where every fix breaks something else and you can't really make forward progress.

Yes, you might be able to get a bit further with a messy codebase just because the LLM won't complain and will just grind through fixing things, but eventually it will just start disabling failing tests instead of actually fixing things.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#100

Post by empath75 »

ttd wrote: post #94
gbear0 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why was it a maintenance dead end? It sounds like you were able to iteratively work on it in its current state, but are you going to be the one maintaining the code? I keep asking myself the same questions, and the conclusion I keep coming to is the clean modeled structure we want to see is for humans to maintain and extend, but the AI doesn't need this. There's definitely an efficiency angle here where it's faster f…

> the clean modeled structure we want to see is for humans to maintain and extend, but the AI doesn't need this. This does not match my experience. I do a lot of AI-assisted coding at this point, and what I've seen is that when the AI is asked to extend or modify existing code, it does a much better job on clean, well-structured and well-abstracted code. I think the reason is simple, and tracks for humans as well: we…

Yeah I have had claude take over multiple internal (human written) projects that were in a dire state and spent a week just completely refactoring them and adding exhaustive tests before doing any new features. It's worth starting from a clean slate.
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