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Comment by mgraczyk | Hacker News Reader

Even if you believe that many are too far on one side now, you have to account for the fact that AI will get better rapidly. If you're not using it now you may end up lacking preparation when it becomes more valuable

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But as it gets better, it'll also get easier, be built into existing products you already use, etc. So I wouldn't worry too much about that aspect. If you enjoy tinkering, or really want to dive deep into fundamentals, that's one thing, but I wouldn't worry too much about "learning to use some tool", as fast as things are changing.

I don't think so. That's a good point but the capability has been outpacing people's ability to use it for a while and that will continue.

Put another way, the ability to use AI became an important factor in overall software engineering ability this year, and as the year goes on the gap between the best and worst users or AI will widen faster because the models will outpace the harnesses

I mean, right now "bleeding edge" is an autonomous agents system that spends a million dollars making an unbelievably bad browser prototype in a week. Very high effort and the results are jibberish. By the time these sorts of things are actually reliable, they'll be productized single-click installer apps on your network server, with a simple web interface to manage them.

If you just mean, "hey you should learn to use the latest version of Claude Code", sure.

I mean that you should stay up to date and practiced on how to get the most out of models. Using harnesses like Claude code sure, but also knowing their strengths and weaknesses so you can learn when and how to delegate and take on more scope

Okay yeah that's a good middle ground, and I'd even say I agree. It's not about being on the bleeding edge or being a first adopter or anything, but the fact that if you commit to a tool, it's almost always worth spending some time learning how to use it most effectively.

That’s the comical understanding being pushed by management in software companies yes. The people who never actually use the tools themselves, but the concept of it. It’s the same AGI nonesense, but dumped down to something they think they can control.

why does every AI skeptic assume that everyone is lying to them. theres millions of developers using AI to be more productive and you just keep plugging your ears and screaming, claiming its only dumb managers, meanwhile Linus Torvalds is vibe coding stuff.

Who said anything about that? The argument was "if you're not using AI RIGHT NOW, you will fall behind forever"

This is the nonsense management and CTOs are pushing. Use it now if you want, I do. Wait for things to cool down if you want. You'll be fine either way. The comical view that it'll be a "winner takes all" subset of developers who some how would have figured out secret AI techniques that make them 10Kx more productive and every other developer will be SOL is laughable.

> Put another way, the ability to use AI became an important factor in overall software engineering ability this year, and as the year goes on the gap between the best and worst users or AI will widen faster because the models will outpace the harnesses

Is it, lol? Know any case where those “the best users of AI” get salary bumps or promotions? Outside of switching to the dedicated AI role that is? So far I see clowns doing triple the work for the same salary.

have fun keeping a job doing 1/3 the work of people getting paid the same as you :)

I’m from Europe, so I’ll do just that. Thankfully labor laws are strong enough here to withstand this absurdity.

I mean if the capacity has outpaced people's ability to use it, to me that's a good sign that a lot of the future improvements will be making it easier to use.

The baseline, out-of-the-box basic tool level will lift, but so will the more obscure esoteric high-level tools that the better programmers will learn to control, further separating themselves in ability from the people who wait for the lowest common denominator to do their job for them.

Maybe. But so far ime most of the esoteric tools in the AI space are esoteric because they're not very good. When something gets good, it's quickly commoditized.

Until coding systems are truly at human-replacement level, I think I'd always prefer to hire an engineer with strong manual coding skills than one who specializes in vibe coding. It's far easier to teach AI tools to a good coder than to teach coding discipline to a vibe coder.

I wonder if psychology plays a role here. An engineer with strong manual coding skills might be hesitant to admit that a tool has become good enough to warrant less involvement.

Why should I worry about lacking preparation in the future? Why can't I just learn this as any other skill at any other time?

You'll be behind by a few months at least, and that could be anywhere from slightly harmful to devasting to your career

How so? Why would a couple of months break in employment (worst case, if I truly become unemployable for some reason until I learn the tools) harm or destroy my career?

Lmao, this is your brain on brainrot LLM FOMO. Better not waste time on HN, you’re wasting precious minutes getting ahead of (imaginary) competition!

> If you're not using it now you may end up lacking preparation when it becomes more valuable

How's that? If it ever gets good, it seems rather implausible that today's tool-of-the-month will turn out to be the winner.

It won’t, the state of the art is changing so quickly it is near impossible to stay on top of. Right now claude code is doing stuff for our team that was impossible with ai coding six month ago. Probably a year from now it will be something else. I think that if you are not staying on top of things though, you will discover that you should have stayed more on top of things the day you get fired.

We’ll see.

I have noticed a troubling skill atrophy in some people who heavily use LLMs (this is particularly concerning because it renders them incompetent to review ‘their own’ PRs prior to submission). I’m… not keen to sign up for that for no reason, tbh.

> you have to account for the fact that AI will get better rapidly

that's nowhere near guaranteed

Nothing gets worse in computers. Name me one thing. And if the current output quality of LLM stays the same but speed goes up 1000, quality of the generated code can be higher.

Hot keys. Used to be, you could drive a program from the keyboard with hotkeys and macros. No mouse. The function keys did functions. You could drive the interface blindfolded, once you learned it. Speed is another one. Why does VSCode take so long to open? and use so much memory and CPU? it's got a lot of features for a text editor, but it's worse than vim/emacs in a lot of ways.

Boot time.

Understandability. A Z80 processor was a lot more understandable than today's modern CPUs. That's worse.

Complexity. It's great that I can run python on a microcontroller and all, but boring old c was a lot easier to reason about.

Wtf is a typescript. CSS is the fucking worst. Native GUI libraries are so much better but we decided those aren't cool anymore.

Touchscreens. I want physical buttons that my muscle memory can take over and get ingrained in and on. Like an old stick shift car that you have mechanical empathy with. Smartphones are convenient as all hell, but I can't drive mine after a decade like you can a car you know and feel, that has physical levers and knobs and buttons.

Jabber/Pidgin/XMPP. There was a brief moment around 2010? when you didn't have to care what platform someone else was using, you could just text with them on one app. Now I've got a dozen different apps I need to use to talk to all of my friends. Beeper gets it, but they're hamstrung. This is a thing that got worse with computers!

Ever hear of wirths law? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

Computers are stupid fast these days! why does it take so long to do everything on my laptop? my mac's spotlight index is broken, so it takes it roughly 4 seconds to query the SQLite database or whatever just so I can open preview.app. I can open a terminal and open it myself in that time!

And yes, these are personal problems, but I have these problems. How did the software get into such a state that it's possible for me to have this problem?

> Wtf is a typescript.

A godsend.

> Native GUI libraries are so much better but we decided those aren't cool anymore.

Lolno.

Native GUI libs look like shit out of the box, and are terrible to work with when you want to make something that doesn't look like out of the box tkinter/swing/qt/winforms Windows 95 looking crap.

Windows

Software has gotten considerably worse with time. Windows and MacOS are basically in senescence from my point of view. Haven't added a feature I've wanted in years, but manages to make my experience worse year to year anyways.

CPU vulnerability mitigations make my computer slower than when I bought it.

Computers and laptops are increasingly not repairable. So much ewaste is forced on us for profit.

The internet is a corporate controlled prison now. Political actors create fake online accounts to astroturf, manipulate, and influence us.

The increasing cost of memory and GPU make computers no longer affordable.

Even if the models stopped getting better today, we'd still see many years of improvements from improving harnesses and understanding of how to use them. Most people just talk to their agent, and don't e.g. use sub-agents to make the agent iterate and cross-check outcomes for example. Most people who use AI would see a drastic improvement in outcomes just by experimenting with the "/agents" command in Claude Code (and equivalent elsewhere). Much more so with a well thought out agent framework.

A simple plan -> task breakdown + test plan -> execute -> review -> revise (w/optional loops) pipeline of agents will drastically cut down on the amount of manual intervention needed, but most people jump straight to the execute step, and do that step manually, task by task while babysitting their agent.

> If you're not using it now you may end up lacking preparation when it becomes more valuable

You think it's going to get harder to use as time goes on?

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