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Comment by idopmstuff | Hacker News Reader

Some people talk like skill atrophy is inevitable when you use LLMs, which strikes me as pretty absurd given that you are talking about a tool that will answer an infinite number of questions with infinite patience.

I usually learn way more by having Claude do a task and then quizzing it about what it did than by figuring out how to do it myself. When I have to figure out how to do the thing, it takes much more time, so when I'm done I have to move on immediately. When Claude does the task in ten minutes I now have several hours I can dedicate entirely to understanding.

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You lose some, you win some. The win could be short-term much higher, however imagine that the new tool suddenly gets ragged pulled from under your feet. What do you do then? Do you still know how to handle it the old way or do you run into skill atrophy issues? I’m using Claude/Codex as well, but I’m a little worried that the environment we work in will become a lot more bumpy and shifty.

> the new tool suddenly gets ragged pulled from under your feet

If that happened at this point, it would be after societal collapse.

I don’t even wanna think about that scenario, maybe he gets averted somehow.

> however imagine that the new tool suddenly gets ragged pulled from under your feet

When you have a headache, do you avoid taking ibuprofen because one day it may not be available anymore? Two hundred years ago, if you gave someone ibuprofen and told them it was the solution for 99% of the cases where they felt some kind of pain, they might be suspicious. Surely that's too good to be true.

But it's not. Ibuprofen really is a free lunch, and so is AI. It's weird to experience, but these kinds of technologies come around pretty often, they just become ubiquitous so quickly that we forget how we got by without them.

The "infinite patience" thing I find particularly interesting.

Every now and then I pause before I ask an LLM to undo something it just did or answer something I know it answered already, somewhere. And then I remember oh yeah, it's an LLM, it's not going to get upset.

Asking infinite questions about something does not make you good at “doing” that thing, you get pretty good at asking questions

Understanding is not learning. Zero effort gives zero rewards, I ask Claude plenty of things, I get answers but not learnings.

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