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Comment by gonzalohm | Hacker News Reader

Learning anything is worthwhile. Just because you code in Python it doesn't mean that knowing how instructions are processed in a CPU or the memory is managed is useless.

The excuse that we don't need to know how things work because AI will take care of it is going to bite a lot of people on their asses

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> The excuse that we don't need to know how things work because AI will take care of it is going to bite a lot of people on their asses

Abstractions always led to this sort of behavior. So many of my web development peers screamed at me for being curious about what happens behind/further down then the stack we were learning, and this was decades ago. Seems it differs a lot per person, and what I've found out only later, depending on the situation; nowadays I'm comfortable with both approaches of "this is below the abstraction I actually care about" and "No, I have to dive deeper to actually understand properly the abstraction level I'm at right now"

Abstractions are one thing, not putting any effort into learning is another. People worry about the latter.

Exactly. I'm not saying that you should go back to code in assembly. But, come on, you can surely dedicate 30 minutes of your time to read how a CPU works... Just have curiosity would be my advice

At the expense of what, though? That's 30 minutes not spent learning about the business, or talking to customers, or to your kids. Or watching the World Cup. Or reading Hacker News.

The extra 30 minutes will be spent chatting with the AI as if it's your best friend.

You may have to spend 4 hours in the future when something stops working and the AI can't fix it

i always hear this argument. and then those that proclaim it get stuck for a sprint trying to fit a square peg in a round hole

and then i get a ticket a month later because the customer reported the feature isn't working. all while they proclaim how much they care about the customer.

i'm not just talking about one person. i feel as if there's an archetype of programmer that thinks like this.

I'm not sure what archetype my comment makes me fall under, but my point is people spend time and effort learning about the things that are important to them. The things that are important to them aren't important to you and I'm saying that being interested in how a CPU actually works doesn't make you better or smarter than them being interested in how other parts of the business work.

>spend time and effort learning about the things that are important to them

But Earlier ...

>Or reading Hacker News.

Reading Hacker News is important to you?

it's not for you?

I’m a web dev but always curious. Which is why I figured out what was breaking the time calls (we’d switched from CENTOS to Red Hat which returned totally different v8 time strings from the underlying calls). You don’t need to know what’s going on underneath the mountain of code you rely on until suddenly you do.

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