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Comment by nomel | Hacker News Reader

I think there's going to be the exact and precise range of people there has always been: some people are curious, and want/need to understand what they're doing, some people are not and just want to do. That want/need is a fundamental personality trait what makes an expert.

LLM are a dream come true for these curious types. They'll only be accelerated by them. I don't think there's any real "loss" out there, just a bunch of people that don't care boing things easier. Good for them, good for the curious people. Net win.

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I guess I'm both people, depends on what it is and what other things I'm doing. Sometimes it's fun and interesting to delve deeply (oh no he didn't) into something for long periods of time, just for the sake of exploring and understanding. Sometimes I'm not curious about why something specifically doesn't work, I just need it to work so I'll hack around it any way possible so I can move on with what I really wanted to do.

I find that LLMs are useful for both cases in the end.

Some people will probably be curious regardless of their environment but I think there are others who could be swayed into developing curiosity (or not) by life experiences. And an ever-present "just gimme the answer now" button could be a powerful force pulling them toward the "incurious" side.

The issue is that there are now different expectations surrounding velocity and apparent productivity. Previously an individual new to web development might have genuinely needed to develop an understanding of web protocols, HTML and other stuff in that domain in addition to actually wanting to wrap their head around it. Nowadays spending the time required to understand how a website works carries a heavy opportunity cost, at least in the short term.

An organisation which lets a person release a website without understanding how the web works is just asking for trouble. This was true before Transformer LLMs and is true after them.

LLMs probably just let those organisations make a larger and more load-bearing website faster, so that poor decisions speed the time to catastrophe.

What's changed is the minimum amount of knowledge required to release a website.

> Previously an individual new to web development might have genuinely needed to develop an understanding of web protocols, HTML, and other stuff in that domain

That hasn't really been my experience, at least not for a long time (decades+). At least since jQuery's been around. There's always been a large group of people whose approach to software development was basically "run these commands, don't worry about why they work".

The tendency to treat tools as black boxes over time isn't new, I don't think.

A silver lining here is that in my experience the non-curious tended to stagnate over time and the curious tended to succeed, but obviously there's more to it than just that.

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