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Comment by RealityVoid | Hacker News Reader

What do you think would be the effect on people that already have the skills and abilities. The LLM would build these systems using the skills that are largely understood by the programmer but piece them in new ways suitable for the system. This could lead to new enmergent behaviors that are not understood by the programmer.

I still think that you can build this model in your head even with LLM's but I'm not sure neither one way or the other.

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To repeat their last two sentences:

> Even before LLMs we were aware if it: we knew people moving to managerial/PM roles eventually get their coding skills rusted. Well, now we are all in those managerial roles...

There's always some component of a skill that is not merely knowing something but practising something seemingly procedurally. Even if I understand integration well and have done it thousands of times, if I don't continually practise it from scratch, I begin to forget tiny bits and pieces and that accumulates to an eventually lack of understanding. So it is true for all mental tasks. There really isn't such a thing as understanding something completely without working it out by hand, from scratch. AI exacerbates a lack of understanding in this regard, although admittedly layers of abstraction in the coding realm already do that to some extent...

It's simple enough: If you don't use it, you lose it.

The more you have, the more there is to lose and the longer it may take. But skills and knowledge fade, just as easily as fitness, or a tan.

It's an insidious rule too. Insidious in the sense that you may not realise you're not exercising a skill. You may think that your just doing it slightly differently, but you will adapt. In whatever way you made your life easier, that's where you'll pay, in strength, fluency, depth, whatever.

I don't know how much I agree, I've been in and out coding for different periods of my life.

At each point few days of practice brought me back where I was.

A few days multiplied by the number of skills I once had translates to well over two months of lost time.

The key is, as you said, practice. I think it's fine to use AI to write code for you, as long as you occasionally force yourself to write code manually. Not only does it help you retain your skills, but it feels more satisfying than prompting, even if arduous.

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