Comment by octagons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by octagons | Hacker News Reader

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I think the author’s intent is well-placed, but it does feel a bit sad that this subject is blog-worthy.

I’ve spent a lifetime teaching myself programming, computers, and engineering. I have no formal education in these disciplines and find that I excel due to the self-taught nature of my background.

I take a very metered approach to AI and use it for autocomplete while still scrutinizing every token (not the AI kind) as well as an augment to my self-pedagogy. It’s great to be able to “query” or get a summary from a set of technical documents on demand.

However, I don’t understand the desire to remove oneself from the process with AI. I simply don’t do anything that won’t teach me something new or improve my existing skills.

There’s more to engineering than simply programming. Both the engineer and the intended user base must also understand the system. The value lost is greater than the sum of all the parts when an LLM produces most or all of the code.

> I simply don’t do anything that won’t teach me something new or improve my existing skills.

Not trying to be rude but you either must not be a professional software engineer or your skill level isn't that high yet. You simply cannot always do things that teach you new skills or improve existing ones. In any sufficiently complex project, even the most novel ones, you'll do things you've done many times before.

I think professionals are almost always doing things that are at least 30% new...otherwise they've had a long time in one job which is a fortunate thing nowadays.

My last job started with "here's a book about go programming." 2 years later I was learning FastAPI. Now I'm programming in C again but I have spent most of my time learning about git actions and writing SCCS->git conversion software. I've never used SCCS before.

I'm a bit skeptical too, but I can understand his points. Most of what is rote is probably written somewhere and if you have a library of code and snippets (including the existing project), it's easy to copy and adapt it. And that activity is very inducing to flow state, so you don't mind the time spent.

I’m not a software engineer. Most of my work these days focuses on microcontroller exploitation. I have 15 years of professional experience as a security consultant/contractor.

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