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Comment by rbalicki | Hacker News Reader

The skill atrophy point strikes me as tenuous at best. Obviously, the plural of anecdote is not data, but I find myself able to work on projects of greater complexity than I would have been able to otherwise. 90% of my time is spent going back and forth on Markdown files, discussing the architecture, trade-offs, etc. I don't think it's necessarily impossible to use all this newfound power to ship more sloppier code. It's clearly possible to use all this newfound power to ship better code too.

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> I find myself able to work on projects of greater complexity than I would have been able to otherwise

Yes. Now turn off the LLM and make an improvement to that code.

Exactly, this is like watching youtubers code, ie backseat coding. It’s easy to follow along but taking control midway is anything but, especially in a codebase that has been written by an agent and you don’t have any muscle-memory in.

I think what you're implying is that the agent ships unmaintainable slop. Certainly, if I don't pay attention and review the code line by line, it will ship slop. And even sometimes, when I'm certain that it is implemented one way, I'll come back to the code many days later and discover that it went a completely different route than I expected. Very frustrating.

But it doesn't have to be that way. You just have to put an effort into shipping fewer, better features as opposed to more features. The projects I'm working on (e.g. agent orchestration, because who isn't nowadays) have a small surface area and high payoff and thus are uniquely well positioned for this.

If I couldn't use an LLM, I would still work on this, and it would have roughly the same architecture. But because I'm able to go probably 100x as fast, I'm able to be much more ambitious. Or rather, I'm able to discover that my initial ideas were not on point and pivot, and not have any sense of sunk cost

Anyway, to each their own.

No problem. 30+ years of experience isn't going to disappear any time soon.

No one says it's going to disappear overnight, they're saying it's going to atrophy.

Totally agree with this taking on projects of greater complexity. I honestly feel the sloppier code thing is going to die soon. People make mistakes too. Always see people holding the machine to like this totally different standard.

I agree. I think we simply don't have the tools yet to hold agents to that high architectural standard. It simply takes a lot of focused effort and berating and close comprehension of the code at the moment to ship anything good, but there are lots of people (myself included) working on that problem. I'm pretty sure in a matter of months it will be solved.

Months! That's not a long time.

a real study from Microsoft + Carnegie Mellon University with 319 study participants

> while GenAI can improve worker efficiency, it can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

it's a real problem when applied to a population.

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