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Comment by appsoftware | Hacker News Reader

I think this is where current senior engineers have an advantage, like I felt when I was a junior that the older guys had an advantage in understanding the low level stuff like assembly and hardware. But software keeps moving forward - my lack of time coding assembly by hand has never hindered my career. People will learn what they need to learn to be productive. When AI stops working in a given situation, people will learn the low level detail as they need to. When I was a junior I learned a couple of languages in depth, but everything since has been top down, learn-as-i-need to. I don't remember everything I've learned over 20 years software engineering, and the forgetting started way before my use of AI. It's true that conceptual understanding is necessary, but everyone's acting like all human coders are better than all AI's, and that is not the case. Poorly architected, spaghetti code existed way before LLM's.

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> But software keeps moving forward - my lack of time coding assembly by hand has never hindered my career.

Well, yeah. You were still (presumably) debugging the code you did write in the higher level language.

The linked article makes it very clear that the largest decline was in problem solving (debugging). The juniors starting with AI today are most definitely not going to do that problem-solving on their own.

I want to compliment Anthropic for doing this research and publishing it.

One of my advantages(?) when it comes to using AI is that I've been the "debugger of last resort" for other people's code for over 20 years now. I've found and fixed compiler code generation bugs that were breaking application code. I'm used to working in teams and to delegating lots of code creation to teammates.

And frankly, I've reached a point where I don't want to be an expert in the JavaScript ORM of the month. It will fall out of fashion in 2 years anyway. And if it suddenly breaks in old code, I'll learn what I need to fix it. In the meantime, I need to know enough to code review it, and to thoroughly understand any potential security issues. That's it. Similarly, I just had Claude convert a bunch of Rust projects from anyhow to miette, and I definitely couldn't pass a quiz on miette. I'm OK with this.

I still develop deep expertise in brand new stuff, but I do so strategically. Does it offer a lot of leverage? Will people still be using it on greenfield projects next year? Then I'm going to learn it.

So at the current state of tech, Claude basically allows me to spend my learning strategically. I know the basics cold, and I learn the new stuff that matters.

> my lack of time coding assembly by hand has never hindered my career.

I'd kinda like to see this measured. It's obviously not the assembly that matters for nine-9s of jobs. (I used assembly language exactly one time in my career, and that was three lines of inline in 2003.) But you develop a certain set of problem-solving skills when you code assembly. I speculate, like with most problem-solving skills, it has an impact on your overall ability and performance. Put another way, I assert nobody is worse for having learned it, so the only remaining question is, is it neutral?

> everyone's acting like all human coders are better than all AI's

I feel like the sentiment here on HN is that LLMs are better than all novices. But human coders with actual logical and architectural skills are better than LLMs. Even the super-duper AI enthusiasts talk about controlling hoards of LLMs doing their bidding--not the other way around.

Being able to read assembly has helped me debug. You don't have to write it but you have to be able to write it. The same applies to manual transmissions and pocket calculators.

thats fair enough but reading assembly is such a pain in the ass... it was exciting for the first 10 minutes of my life, but now, if i ever got to that point, i will 100% copy-paste the listing to chatgpt with "hey, can you see anything sketchy?"

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