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Comment by lelanthran | Hacker News Reader

> If the thinking bit is your favorite part, AI allows you to spend nearly all of your time there if you wish, from concept through troubleshooting.

This argument is wearing a little thin at this point. I see it multiples times a day, rephrased a little bit.

The response, "How well do you think your thinking will go if you had not spent years doing the 'practice' part?", is always followed by either silence or a non-sequitor.

So, sure, keep focusing on the 'thinking' part, but your thinking will get more and more shallow without sufficient 'doing'

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Separate from AI, as your role becomes more tech lead / team lead / architect you're also not really "doing" as much and still get involved in a lot of thinking by helping people get unstuck. The thinking part still builds experience. You don't need to type the code to have a good understanding of how to approach problems and how to architect systems. You just need to be making those decisions and gaining experience from them.

> You just need to be making those decisions and gaining experience from them.

The important part that everyone glosses over is the "gaining experience" part.

The experience you gained writing code lead to you being tech lead / team lead /architect.

The experience you get from those roles, including "helping people get unstuck", makes you valuable because there are people involved, not just technology. IOW, that is different to the experience you get from prompting.

We have yet to see how valuable the experience from prompting will be. At this point the prompters are just guessing that their skills won't atrophy, and that their new experience won't be at the same level as vibe-coders who can't spell "Python".

As a fairly senior person myself, and an occasional user of LLMs, and someone who has tried CC in recent months, the experience I got from LLMs, while not nothing, was not recognised by me as valuable in any way - it basically put me at the same skill level as a vibe-coder.

OTOH, the experience I got mentoring very junior engineers the month before that I recognised as instantly valuable; at the end of it I had learned new strategies for dealing with people, growing them, etc.

The only "experience" you get with LLM is "put another coin into the slot and pull the lever again".

> The only "experience" you get with LLM is "put another coin into the slot and pull the lever again".

I relate it to directors on a production. It's certainly very valuable to know how to operate a camera, and especially to understand lighting, storytelling, etc. It gives you insight in how to work with the people who are actually doing these tasks. It helps you to know when someone is gaslighting you, etc.

That being said, it's kind of an insane statement to say that all a director does is pull a lever. I'm sure there are a ton of wannabe directors who try to do exactly that and proceed to fail miserably if they don't adapt quickly to reality. But having a great director is obviously a huge differentiator in output.

Do I think we'll have as many programmers in the future as we do today? Probably not. I think we're going to see a real decimation of coders, but at the same time we might (I say "might") see much greater overall production that may not otherwise exist from the less talented vibers or w/e ridiculously critical name you want. Some of that is certainly going to be interesting and maybe even radically game changing.

IMO our feelings about this are about as relevant as shaking our fist at the cosmos.

> different to the experience you get from prompting

In my experience no. The agents get trapped by the exact programming pitfalls a junior would. The LLM is basically a 16 year old who read a given languages For Dummies book cover to cover 3-4x and has the syntax down but understands little about actually programming especially once you run into any real complexity. However 100% of those limitations can be overcome by proper architecture, testing, specification / requirements analysis (which is a lost art in the time of Agile but which I am a master of), and a sprinkle of technical strategic guidance. Especially the agent doesn’t understand its limitations so you need to have an eye for when it’s working on a problem that’s outside the competency its token window can produce. I could go on for 2 hours but bottom line is IMHO there’s more to it than this simple claim.

> Separate from AI, as your role becomes more tech lead / team lead / architect you're also not really "doing" as much and still get involved in a lot of thinking by helping people get unstuck

True. But the roles as such require you to do a lot of thinking by helping a LOT of people. You end up shuffling between multiple projects/deliverables. Here we are talking about probably a developer working on a single project/deliverable and then equating it to AI. Not to mention the easy to forget part is that by the time you are a tech lead / team lead / architect you have so many hours that you know some stuff like back of your hand.

It's about as much time as I think about caching artifacts and branch mispredict latencies. Things I cared a lot about when I was doing assembly, but don't even think about really in Python (or C++).

My assembly has definitely rotted and I doubt I could do it again without some refreshing but it's been replaced with other higher-level skills, some which are general like using correct data structures and algorithms, and others that are more specific like knowing some pandas magic and React Flow basics.

I expect this iteration I'll get a lot better at systems design, UML, algorithm development, and other things that are slightly higher level. And probably reverse-engineering as well :) The computer engineering space is still vast IMHO....

Do you think that all managers and tech leads atrophy because they don’t spend all day “doing”? I think a good number of them become more effective because they delegate the simple parts of their work that don’t require deep thought, leaving them to continue to think hard about the thorniest areas of what they’re working on.

Or perhaps you’re asking how people will become good at delegation without doing? I don’t know — have you been “doing” multiple years of assembly? If not, how are you any good at Python (or whatever language you currently use?). Probably you’d say you don’t need to think about assembly because it has been abstracted away from you. I think AI operates similarly by changing the level of abstraction you can think at.

I hear all the time from people who have moved into management that their engineering skills atrophy. The only antidote is to continue doing IC work while managing.

> Do you think that all managers and tech leads atrophy because they don’t spend all day “doing”?

People have argued for years that software architects must write code.

Regarding your second paragraph: When you write python you then debug it at the level of the abstraction. You never debug the python interpreter. You can try to treat AI like an abstraction but it immediately breaks down as soon as you go to debug. It would only be a complete abstraction if you never had to deal with the generated code.

Managers 100% lose their abilities, their focus shifts to completely different concerns -- codebase health, enabling people, tracking velocity metrics, etc. They still understand high-level concerns, of course (if we are talking about strong technical background), but they'd struggle a lot if just dropped into the codebase.

Tech leads can exist in many variants, but usually they spend the majority of time in code, so they don't lose it. If they become too good at managing and change their priorities, they _will_ gradually drift away too.

> Do you think that all managers and tech leads atrophy because they don’t spend all day “doing”?

Yes? If not 100% then a number pretty close to that. Definitely 100% of all the managers/non-coding leads I’ve worked with

As an IC turned temporary manager that went back to being IC, yes, absolutely my skills atrophied. This isn't even a programming thing, this is just a regular human thing with most, arguably all, things that you don't practice for a while.

Also I find the idea that most managers or technical leads are doing any kind of "deep thought" hilarious, but that's just maybe my apathy towards management speaking.

> Do you think that all managers and tech leads atrophy because they don’t spend all day “doing"

Yes, obviously this happens.

Do you seriously think that skills don't rust when you stop using them daily?

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