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Comment by vrighter | Hacker News Reader

i recently heard a colleague telling another "vscode can't really help you when writing yaml files". I said that the yaml lsp supports loading a json schema, all you need is just one comment at the top to point the lsp to it, then you get reliable error reporting with red squigglies on every single keystroke.

He just shrugged and said "oh i just use ai".

What takes me one keystroke takes him a full minute. And he didn't even consider the use of actual tools

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The very existence of a “do anything” tool causes humans to forgo learning the multitude of tools we already have. I suspect there will be no next generation of software engineers.

The existence of a "do anything" IDE causes humans to forgo learning the multitude of tools we already have. I suspect there will be no next generation of software engineers.

People said stuff like that in the 90s. I was there.

There's actually zero difference between a bottle of water and a river reservoir if you think about it.

I am just saying that people have been making these sorts of shallow dismissive comments about people who use different tooling since forever. I remember a college professor snided at students who didn't know how to use vi.

In the same way that most people are no longer proficient in assembly, but it has not spelled doom for software engineering, some folks are now using AI tools, and it will probably be fine. The day to day work flow of a typical programmer will probably be different ten or twenty years from now, and we will all move on, as usual.

It's not about using different tooling. It's about using all the tooling available to you. An LLM can help you (I don't like them and don't use them but to each their own). It might be able to help you when you don't even know what you want to write. But you can't deny that when you're writing it, having indentation errors or misspelled keys highlighted instantly on every keystroke, and never making mistakes in that narrow scope, would make one even more effective.

It's not about different tools, it's about how the old tools are NOT obsolete either and have their place. One should still use them as well, even in conjunction with LLMs if one wishes to. (hell they could ask the llm to find the correct schema online and add that one comment at the top)

Its true that things change, but it's also true that there will eventually be a day when the last programmer is hired.

We don't have very many coopers left, either. Sometimes technological progress makes some occupations obsolete.

I don't think software engineering will disappear, but it could change a lot, potentially. More understanding the needs of the end consumer, more writing specifications, less raw coding and debugging. Maybe fewer programmers will be needed, and that would not be the end of the world.

How many buttons in your IDE's toolbar do you use?

Oh wait - that's an anachronism. The older generation of IDEs, like VS and Eclipse, had toolbars. VSCode doesn't have one.

I've seen people comitting to git using AI lol

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