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Comment by dpedu | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand this comment. At worst, we're just back to the baseline - working without AI help.

Yes, that's what the comment means.

We are back to the baseline. The availability of our tools isn't adding anything in the long term because the productivity increase we get from the tooling is negated by the time we're back to doing it the old fashioned way due to downtime, so there is no claimed productivity increase espoused by the pontificators of the tooling.

This is an argument for returning to living in caves and hunting mammoths for fear that our modern civilization becomes unavailable for a day or two.

I'm down

Dating was so much simpler back then, too ..

The bunch of MD files in the codebase is becoming "tech" debt. It's just English prose, sure, but thousands of lines of English prose. Terse. Succinct. Difficult (if not impossible) to maintain manually without LLMs. That's not "baseline"

Developers having a troubled relationship with documentation isn't new.

At some point it won't be true. Same with handwriting, nowadays I feel like a 7 y/o when I need to write something on a piece of paper...

With atrophy to our not-AI ability to do things

I don't buy it. Literacy rates have been increasing even after the invention of text to speech.

> Literacy rates have been increasing

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/09/whats-driving...

https://literacybuffalo.org/2025/01/23/adult-literacy-rates-...

Both articles use 2017 as the turning point date. TTS is a lot older than that. It's not difficult to find data to fit the desired point if you choose a narrow enough time range. Or location selectivity - both of those are just about the United States.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cross-country-literacy-ra...

The baseline is forever gone. Good luck convincing people to contribute to StackOverflow v2 after this.

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