Comment by avaer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by avaer | Hacker News Reader

Around 2019 it became clear to me how much I was underestimating how quickly AI would "take over" and "take credit" for the parts of my identity I wanted to keep (engineering, design taste, invention for example).

But it also made me realize that because I was always at the tip of my chosen curve of tech adoption, I was also the first to be feeling the existential dread that would soon permeate the lives of everyone living a life even tangentially touched by tech.

(I think the author is ahead of the curve too).

But I feel this post identifies the problem and then compounds it with this line:

> This messaging works. Look at me. I feel the need to write a post about it. But it is completely wrong.

I would counter that (intentional) "ignorance is bliss". If you want to play the VC grind hustle game, do it, but be intentional about checking in and checking out, and don't let it into your identity. And don't write posts like this.

It might "feel" dishonest to operate like this, but the alternative is doom, because you are fighting against demons that don't actually exist. I think more and more people will realize this over the coming years -- we are only now starting to react to the personal problems caused by immersion in social media.

This also reminds me of a good piece by PG: https://paulgraham.com/identity.html

I think AI is completely optional for software development.

There seems to be a new kind of anxiety wherein devs feel that they aren't leveraging AI to the fullest in order to make them more productive at developing software, and that since they aren't doing so, they should just give up writing software completely.

This anxiety is unfounded. The difference between using AI vs not using AI is not like using a physical spreadsheet vs Microsoft Excel. It's more like using a text editor versus an IDE. If you're happy producing software the way that you always were sans AI, you should just keep doing it that way and don't even pay mind to AI tooling.

Those guys who have super sophisticated MCP/tool use setups, and a roster of agents, and testdrive all the latest tools and plugins, and curate a personal library of carefully tuned prompts that make them the "LLM Whisperer" — they're not actually doing that much better than you at producing software. Or at least not to the extent that you are totally obsolete.

I think it’s exactly like going from paper spreadsheet to Excel in some very important aspects of engineering (but not all).

I really encourage you to update your priors since capabilities are very different than even 6 months ago.

I like to think I'm very much abreast of the bleeding edge because I feel this anxiety myself. At this point I can't code without LLMs because I just notice things that I could hand off to LLMs and they will do it faster and there's no reason for me to do it myself (although I still could).

But the overall gain in efficiency is still a low single digit speedup. It's not a multi-OOM speedup as if e.g. doing 1000 long divisions by hand over many days versus letting a computer program do them in a split second. The "wall" that is irreducible complexity was never OOMs away from how modern pre-AI software development was done.

For me the speed-up has not been in doing things I was already an expert at doing quickly with high quality. It has been in skipping the learning curve for adjacent things.

Does it make the curve easier or do you skip learning it entirely and just trust the LLM? I wouldn't do the latter.

Will you remember it if you don't "break your teeth" on it though? At the same level as the things you're already an expert on?

I'm a big believer in desirable difficulty for learning. But I'm a big believer in reduced difficulty for non-learning-oriented getting-things-done.

So far I've skipped learning it entirely. For things I want to learn, I learn the old school way--maybe with an LLM as an unreliable thesaurus and/or second search engine (where I distrust its output, but read its links). For things I want to just get done, I use an LLM. It's something close to blind trust, but not completely.

For example, I've used LLMs to write ~1600 lines of Rust in the past few days. I'm having it make Ratatui bindings for Ruby. I haven't ever learned Rust, but I can read C-like languages so I kinda understand what's happening. I could tell when it needed to be modularized. I have a sneaking suspicion most of the Rust tests it's written are testing Ratatui, rather than testing its own bindings. But I've had the LLM cover the functionality in Ruby tests, a language I do know. So I've felt comfortable enough to ship it.

The 6 months ago is a meme at this point.

Don‘t worry, these „LLM Whisperers“ are too busy on social media to get anything done.

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