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Comment by prettyblocks | Hacker News Reader

> I can’t help but wonder whether constant use of “agent” harnesses will lead to an atrophy of the software engineering (or really any field) muscles.

It will, but I'm not sure the impact of this will be all too great. We suffer from not knowing how to use an abacus because we have a calculator, and people who feel a pull to keep their low-level chops up will do so anyway.

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Now imagine if your calculator billed per button press.

And imagine you can't own a calculator because owning one outright requires too much hardware (or whatever).

This is just a repackaged argument against SaaS and cloud infrastructure. Every business could be using subscription free spreadsheet software and storing all of their data on prem and employing an IT team to manage the servers and data but the majority choose to pay a third party to handle all of that. Hell, they could even go so far as to do it all manually with written records and filing cabinets. All of those workflows still exist in varying degrees scattered across the myriad of businesses, the existence of SaaS doesn't eliminate the others. AI seems to be playing out in a very similar way with the big providers, local models and die hard human programmers.

> This is just a repackaged argument against SaaS and cloud infrastructure.

Which, ironically enough, is still a terrible idea for a lot of businesses. But it's trendy, so they go with it.

The crazy thing is how cheap it is to spin up a cloud server, but how little actual processing power you're getting for your money. Even if the business manages to keep their cloud spend in check it's probably going to be at the expense of a terrible user experience because everything in the web app will feel slow and all that matters is individual P95 request latency is within some arbitrary number of seconds.

The exact same arguments were made against electronic computing in general, in the early days. Pearl clutching is a very human thing to do as new technologies are integrated and become common place. A whole generation or two of developers are going to have to pass away before we stop hearing incessant diatribes about LLMs.

Don't use calculator as an analogy, then.

Calculators are a simple machine that implement very basic rules.

LLMs are in a different category. The parallels you can draw between LLMs and calculators.. just don't make sense.

> The parallels you can draw between LLMs and calculators.. just don't make sense.

The technology doesn't matter, you can compare to say the power loom from the 1700's. I'm comparing the reaction of humans; human's haven't changed that much. They always react the same when they feel threatened and emotionally challenged by a technology.

And someone else always cries luddite if anyone says, “Hey guys, this isn’t what the salesman said.”

What matters is the reality of the thing… which is exactly what everyone is discussing.

As they should. We need more conversations like this, early. It could have saved us decades of bad practices with impossible expectations (see: agile).

But people can't separate their emotions from the "reality". The reality is, this technology has strengths and limitations. It has benefits and it has negative consequences. We can and will discuss all of that. But many people aren't operating from a detached analytical viewpoint. They're operating from an emotional, self-interested, defensive stance. And granted, there are just as many people operating from a utopian, rose tinted, self-serving, evangelical position.

In the end, the technology will get used where appropriate. And more importantly many of its weaknesses will be overcome and replaced by new challenges.

It's just a bit tiring to hear the same denouncements repeated over and over. Everyone knows them all by heart now. They're not wrong, they're just not helpful or accomplishing anything. The technology marches forward and will develop naturally. If you personally don't want to use it, then don't.

> They're not wrong, they're just not helpful or accomplishing anything.

I think what it accomplishes is developing a shared understanding of the pros/cons of the tech, the risks associated, how we should mitigate those risks, where the tech is appropriate vs. not appropriate, etc.

It feels very dismissive to say that these conversations aren't worth having. Or that we're thinking about these things too much.

I get that it's tiring, especially in the HN echo chamber. But the conversations are still worth having IMO.

There are conversations worth having. But it feels very dismissive of the obvious power of the technology to constantly focus, in an unbalanced way, on the challenges. People are biased heavily by irrational emotion, on both sides of the debate. It's all just getting a little tedious. I'm all for rational discourse and debate, but it's hard to find through all the vitriol and contempt.

> The technology marches forward and will develop naturally. If you personally don't want to use it, then don't.

The debate marches forward and will develop naturally. If you personally don't want to read it, then don't.

One up.

To Aristotle and Plato. Where Plato was against writing because people will become forgetful if they don’t train their minds remembering things.

It was Socrates that was skeptical about writing. We only know this because his student Plato wrote it down.

Exactly, looks like I should have written that down for myself instead of relying on LLM or even better, train my memory instead of depending on crutches ;)

I don't think this is equivalent. The calculator won't occasionally hallucinate a wrong answer. LLMs are a far leakier abstraction which means skill atrophy impacts evaluation and verification ability.

They're not an abstraction at all until we're committing prompts instead of code.

We might as well be committing prompts given how little review happens to much of this code.

But many people are doing just that, automating workflows through prompt templates and skills.

We will suffer from not knowing how to add. You could still argue "so what?"

Systems aren't a single addition. They are compounded operations with sprawling complexity. What happens when you can't reason through the system? What happens when you start asking for the wrong things? What happens when saying "fix it" on loop stops working?

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