Comment by chriswait | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chriswait | Hacker News Reader

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Obviously I assume LLMs will continue to improve, I don't know why you'd think I don't.

But the actual relevant prediction here (the one you're confident enough about to give skills development advice on) is whether they'll improve sufficiently that programming is no longer a relevant skill.

I think that's possible, but I'm not nearly so confident I'd write your article: LLMs went mainstream ~2 years ago, and they still have some pretty basic limitations when it comes to computational/mathematical reasoning, which they'll need to solve novel software engineering tasks. (Articles about these limitations get posted here pretty frequently)

To your second point, I'm still not sure how you will debug someone else's code without learning to write code yourself, because you need to be able to read code, and understand it well enough to execute it inside your mind. I am not totally convinced you understand the difference between "understanding programming concepts" and "being able to understand whether this code works".

Sorry if this comes across as rude, but I think the reason the feedback on your post is overall quite negative is that you're excited about AI making this job much easier, and your advice about which skills are worth learning are too confident. Ironically I think an LLM would give a more balanced view than you have.

LLMs have already improved sufficiently that people are worried their programming skills are decaying, debugging skills included (based on the article I referenced). I'm curious to see how you envision LLMs improving without this not becoming even more pronounced. Isn't that the definition of a skill slowly becoming irrelevant? The fact that you can see you are not using it as much?

As for the reception, I did not expect it to be positive. People usually have a strong negative emotional reaction when you suggest their skills are, or are going to become, less relevant.

Not really? Your thinking about the definition of the word "relevant" seems a bit confused here... By your logic, home insurance is "irrelevant" because you don't seem to use it much, then one day it's suddenly extremely relevant (at which point then it's too late to buy it).

I guess we'd probably agree that "writing code is an irrelevant skill" actually all comes down to whether LLMs will improve enough to match humans at programming, and thus comprehensively remove the need for fixing their work.

They currently don't, so at the time you claimed this it was incorrect. Maybe they will in the future, at which point it would be correct.

So, would it be responsible for me to bet my career on your advice today? Obviously not, which is why most people here disagree with your article.

You were prepared in advance to explain that criticism as people having a strong negative emotional reaction, so I'm not sure why you posted it here in the first place instead of LinkedIn where it might reach a more supportive audience.

The insurance analogy doesn't work - programming skills exist on a spectrum of daily relevance. Insurance becomes relevant in rare emergencies. Programming skills are becoming less relevant in day-to-day.

What I pointed out in my post is a trend I notice where an LLM can do more and more of a developer's work. Nowhere did I claim LLMs can replace human developers today, but when a technology consistently reduces the need for manual programming while improving its capabilities, the trajectory is clear. You can disagree with the timeline, but the transformation is already underway.

I posted on HN precisely because I wanted rigorous technical discussion, not validation.

Ah okay, I think it's a perfect analogy, and this helps clarify where our disagreement is.

I do believe it's a binary thing: One day a model gets released which is sufficiently good at programming that I don't need to be able to debug or write code any more. That's the exact day my skills aren't relevant.

They aren't only 50% relevant 6 months before that date, because I need to entirely maintain my code during that 6 months, so that 50% is effectively 100%.

Seeing it as a spectrum carries a specific risk: you neglect your skills before that point is actually reached, at which point you're relying on code you can't understand properly or debug.

I think if you wanted rigorous technical discussion, this is the sort of specificity your article would've needed.

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