Trade offs around "room to do more of other things" are an interesting and recurring theme of these conversations. Like two opposites of a spectrum. On one end the ideal process oriented artisan taking the long way to mastery, on the other end the trailblazer moving fast and discovering entirely new things.
Comparing to the encyclopedia example: I'm already seeing my own skillset in researching online has atrophied and become less relevant. Both because the searching isn't as helpful and because my muscle memory for reaching for the chat window is shifting.
If you outsource a skill consistently, you will be engaging less with that skill. Depending on the skill, this may be acceptable, or a desirable tradeoff.
For example, using a very fast LLM to interactively make small edits to a program (a few lines at a time), outsources the work of typing, remembering stdlib names and parameter order, etc.
This way of working is more akin to power armor, where you are still continuously directing it, just with each of your intentions manifesting more rapidly (and perhaps with less precision, though it seems perfectly manageable if you keep the edit size small enough).
Whereas "just go build me this thing" and then you make a coffee is qualitatively very different, at that point you're more like a manager than a programmer.
I have a whole half-written blog post about how LLMs are the cars of the mind. Massive externalities, has to be forced on people, leads to cognitive/health issues instead of improving cognition and health.
[0] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/when-cities-treated-cars-... [1] https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/03/19/study-most-car-owners...
More like mobility scooter for disabled. Literally Wall-E in the making.
I do, which is exactly why I found the presumption that not spending your time doing the coding is equivalent to a disability both gross and arrogant.
> Where are they supposed to learn good design when slop takes over?
You're not learning good architecture and systems design from code. You learn good architecture and systems design from doing architecture and systems design. It's a very different discipline.
While knowing how to code can be helpful, and can even be important in narrow niches, it is a very minor part of understanding good architecture.
And, yes, I stand by the claim the coding is by far the simplest part, on the basis of having done both for longer than most developers have been doing either.
Doubling down on your ignorance, bold strategy.
Yes, that is my experience. I have done some C# projects recently, a language I am not familiar with. I used the interactive encylopedia method, "wrote" a decent amount of code myself, but several thousand lines of production code later, I don't I know C# any better than when I started.
OTOH, it seems that LLMs are very good at compiling pseudocode into C#. And I have always been good at reading code, even in unfamiliar languages, so it all works pretty well.
I think I have always worked in pseudocode inside my head. So with LLMs, I don't need to know any programming languages!
In that sense, going from pseudocode to a programming language is no different from that, or even translating a piece of code from one programming language to another.