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Comment by ThrowawayR2 | Hacker News Reader

There's nothing to debate about "use it or lose it"; the reduction in numeracy after the adoption of pocket calculators is well established.

And "capability" is the measure of the mere assembly line worker. "Raw intellect" is the measure of the inventors and creators.

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I've also "lost" (or rather, never had) the ability to manually manage memory, and I have no idea what my machine code actually does once my program compiles.

Yet, I'd say my career so far has been very successful and personally enriching for me.

So what am I losing? I still use my intellect day in and day out, so it can't be that I'm not using my intellect at all.

I don't find this argument persuasive.

That attributes your success to the wrong cause. Your career (and mine) has been successful and personally enriching because of the colossal demand for software developers over the past 25 years guaranteeing employment to anyone who could write fizzbuzz. But demand for developers can now be filled by AI that does know how to manually manage memory and a whole lot more. Those deep technical skills may well be the only remaining value proposition developers still have to compete against AI.

And you, by your own admission, don't have them. "Game over, man, game over."

> But demand for developers can now be filled by AI

Oh? Is that so? I've yet to see any evidence of this.

I've seen big companies laying off developers with dubious claims about them being replaced by AI. None of them can prove their claims. Their software hasn't gotten noticeably better.

Jevons paradox appears to be in full swing. No sign yet of software slowing down. In fact, my company has continued to grow in demand over the past 2 years due to the fact that we can build better software faster. By any way I could attempt to measure my "value", it is increasing.

It only took about 10 years between the Linux 2.2 kernel, the first version that was really decent for server workloads, and Sun Microsystems, formerly the largest UNIX server vendor, to be sold to Oracle for peanuts.

Either 2025 or 2026 is the first year that LLMs got really decent so...

And yet the average intelligence continued to rise through the reduction in numeracy. What job do you have where your performance is graded by your "raw intellect" instead of capability? A student?

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