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Comment by adamtulinius | Hacker News Reader

Because the expert has forgotten. Skills that we don't use are forgotten, and there's nothing new in that. Except for the proverbial bicycle.

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Ok, if you think the expert has forgotten that a problem can be solved by a bash one-liner and instead think they need a whole extensive CLI with documentation, our viewpoints are too far apart for fruitful discussion.

and here I am reading an interaction and thinking you two are saying exactly the same thing. Language be, what it is I guess: open to interpretation.

The bash one-liner might be hyperbolic but with the advent of AI everything is artificially longer, stuffier, more complex and convoluted for no reason other than because the AI allows this increase in volume with little to no extra effort.

It used to be the proverbial one-liner with zero documentation because that was the best ratio of effort to results. Now the effort is on the AI and the results look more impressive. Today that will still impress a lot of people, bosses, colleagues. Very soon everyone will see through it and anything overly stuffy will have the opposite effect of looking low-effort.

Sure, I agree, but now longer/stuffier things cost half as much as shorter things. In most cases, that cost isn't worth it.

The AI output probably does the job just as well, maybe cheaper. But I'm talking about appearances and the impression the work leaves. Eventually bosses and colleagues will stop seeing "output volume" as a signal of being productive. It won't look special anymore, it won't give anyone an edge. People who can use their brain to come up with solutions might be held in higher regard than "prompt experts".

Let's wait one generation. Right now the best results are from putting AI in the hands of capable experts. Will a person trained entirely with an AI crutch ever reach the same level? We'll see.

Or maybe they just didn't have the time (left it to the last minute and ran out of it), and went with the first thing that AI proposed which was said CLI with documentation.

> Skills that we don't use are forgotten

I think, through these tools as accelerants, we’re finally getting to see the chasm between academic rote memorization of tech-work,

and deep, actual understanding,

that some of our colleagues have.

Folks have been noting a trend of mental abstraction away from the stack, & long-term thinking - that hasn’t changed.

It just has Turbo now.

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