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Comment by pton_xd | Hacker News Reader

We'll just move to a higher level of abstraction; thinking will be like efficiently coding in assembly, no longer necessary in today's world.

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People say this constantly, but it's a qualitatively different jump from all previous abstraction layers. Previously, the part of your brain you had to use, and the way you had to think, changed from old layer X to new layer Y, but they were still very similar qualitatively. A person who was good at and enjoyed layer X either naturally was good at and enjoyed layer Y, or they could achieve both of those things after a little time. But with LLMs, the jump is much more lateral.

To do the thing I hate and use an analogy: It's not like asking a furniture maker to start using power tools; it's like asking a furniture maker to start telling a robot to make the furniture, in English. Yes, the people who were already good at furniture-making will have an advantage in how to direct the robot - but the salient point is that it's a recipe for misery for many people.

Hmm. I use AI to write almost all my code, and I feel that the "part of the brain" I use is mostly the same. Pre-AI I spent a lot of time thinking about code architecture, schemas, APIs, etc. Post-AI I spend a lot of time thinking about essentially the exact same thing. Yea, there are some things that I used to think about that I don't now - the fiddly bits, like why my parentheses weren't balanced or what field I was missing that was causing a 3rd-party API to fail. But the work feels more similar than different.

You should've turned the sarcasm detector on.

A higher level of abstraction that doesn't require thinking? Did you mean to write thinking here?

Putting info into a spreadsheet is a higher level of abstraction that doesn't require thinking. There are many concrete representations like that. LLMs don't use them much. This is a lack.

Can you point a LLM at a body of code, and tell it "give me a concise UML chart of what this does"? I'm not advocating humans writing UML, but some representation like that may be useful to AIs. Except that they don't really do graphs very well. We may need a specification language intended to be read and written by AIs, readable by humans but seldom written by them. Going directly from natural language specifications to code causes the LLM blithering problem to generate too much code.

I’m not sure you and the parent are talking about the same thing.

I think they were making a joke about us getting dumber that I am confused about the premise of.

You seem to be suggesting we are going to fill spreadsheets (which claude already does pretty well) and that spatial reasoning is an insurmountable problem instead of just something that doesn’t emerge naturally from training on text/code corpi.

Higher levels of abstraction require more complex levels of thinking. Why do you think it won't?

The entire point of abstraction layers is that they require less thinking most of the time (and, usually as a tradeoff, more thinking a minority of the time).

I'm not sure I agree with this at all.

I don't think I think less when writing Clojure or Rust than I would writing raw assembly code, I just broaden the scope of my projects to fill up my thinking capacity.

The point of abstractions are to do more work because the lower levels are done kinda in the background with less energy

Like GC langauges help me do more productive work by hiding useless info about memory

Reads like great satire to me.

Welcome to Costco. I love you.

> ...like efficiently coding in assembly, no longer necessary in today's world.

Assembly is a stretch (albeit a few applications still need it), but otherwise that sentiment (and people who actually believe it) speaks a lot to me about what makes today's PCs slower, more latent, and less enjoyable to use than the machines of the past. Today's world sucks.

I've been thinking a lot about the new primitives and paradigms we'll see.

Care to share some of these thoughts?

1. we will be thinking at the level of systems like services and DB's and forget about inconsequential things like methods, classes, variables

2. we will think of verification loop more - tasks will be chosen that have more ability to be easily verified

3. the concept of the difference between "generation" and "verification" will be more mainstream [1]

4. spec driven development will become more common

5. scenario testing will become mainstream

i have few more predictions like these.

[1] I wrote a blog post on this explaining why I keep this generation vs verification difference in many parts of life https://simianwords.bearblog.dev/the-generation-vs-verificat...

> 2. we will think of verification loop more - tasks will be chosen that have more ability to be easily verified

> 4. spec driven development will become more common

I do believe both of these, recently someone created an rar open source alternative for all its version using LLM agents because of that specs and in some sense verification/easy debug (or compile time) aspect.

On the other hand, I was making a GUI application (a rough scratchpad app) in Odin and there were so many bugs that I had to explain it and even then it was like lottery or just about unpredictable would be the better word as it would fix one thing and break another or just not fix it.

At the end of the day for GUI apps, it just doesn't have any way of testing them that greatly perhaps. There are many GUI things which I feel like LLM's are still underwhelming in, especially if you wish to create a GUI in say any niche language.

It can do that but the workflow is so bad that it might just not be worth it. i do wonder if GUI development becomes the one thing that AI can't do and their software development jobs are safe.

I was just scrolling upwork randomly and I saw tons of flutter & wordpress jobs.

I've had pretty good luck with using playwright mcp to test web front ends. I think LLMs can totally test GUIs. Either via vision and computer control or via reading the GUI node tree (e.g. DOM) used by whatever you built the GUI with.

Ha ha ha... actually in the last 20-30 years most people learnt programming in assembly no for the sake of building programs in assembly - it was tought so you can have a grasp of microprocessor architecture. Instructions, interrupts,registers and all that. It means being fully aware of your environment. Without this knowledge of our environment, not only in our jobs, but also generally in life, what are we? Not more than wild animals surviving on instincts and an occasional burst of conciousness. Well, no thanks - I don't want to be an Eloi.

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