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Comment by bigfishrunning | Hacker News Reader

I think the "meat proxy" people are mediocre regardless of whether or not the were brilliant pre-AI. They've reduced themselves to a copy-paste go-between for claude and slack (or github or jira or whatever) and are mediocre now. If only they could turn back the clock...

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Some skills are easy re-pick-uppable, like bicycling. Mathematics is probably more challenging. Not sure about programming, especially "borint" business-like programming.

There's a reason games like Factorio or Exapunks are so popular among engineers!

Especially if you get a little burned out and can't bring yourself to contribute to a side project, but still want to do programming-ish things that get your brain moving

Try the Factorissimo mod - it lets you make subroutines.

Nah.

After you have those skills, they don’t go away.

Math: the most important stuff is the biggest picture. If you learned it properly (not just memorizing), that’s the last to fade.

With programming, the details change but the fundamental skill doesn’t. Or hadn’t as of a few years ago.

Does that really matter though if people aren't using the skills, and are just copying and pasting slop?

Quick, solve a double integral by hand!

The fundamental skill can evolve. It used to be OOP mania as promoted by Uncle Bob, now it's Casey Muratori DOD. At least that's been my perception. I'm sure there was sometimes before Uncle Bob too, but I wasn't alive. I did however learn OOP in school, class collaboration cards or whatever they're called, and then learn why it all needs to be thrown out the window after finishing school.

Casey also pointed out three kinds of programmers: those who just want to get something done and will use an LLM because it's faster, those who actually like programming, and those who actually like LLMs. Last group always gets left out of these discussions.

(Just as importantly to note - Bob-style OOP was just fine on microprocessors of the 80s with no caches. The state of the industry has changed.)

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