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Comment by NichoPaolucci | Hacker News Reader

There are big differences in what people call "tinkerers". Some are INTERESTED in building things, give it a little shot and find it to be daunting, and push it no further.

True tinkerers have no problem with this, because they enjoy learning how things work. Installing Linux, Steam, Portal are all relatively straightforward tasks for someone who uses computers on the regular - but to some people this is just something they've never done, are scared to do, or just don't want to learn. (Which is fine, but they'll never pick these agents up and run free.)

Barrier to entry used to be blog posts, documentation, watching poor quality Youtube videos of a thing that SEEMS related to what you're trying to do. Now we're getting that spoon fed to our particular case, so the friction is essentially just "follow the AI directives". (However, the depth of understanding probably struggles.)

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You can get pretty dang far asking the AI to explain things and show you where it got that info, especially with IT/DEV stuff. Thing that has been very useful to me is specifically asking AI for that vocabulary. AI is suprisingly useful for giving a vague description of something you want and asking for possible words that match. But you have to KNOW to try that. A tinkerer might have started that convo with the chatbot by asking "What are web pages built from" "Can we use those building blocks to make our own simple app" and gotten there from a place of low expertise in web development but juicing out the knowlege from a place of low expertise is itself a skill.

I know you are not arguing from bad faith, but you are making an assumption along cultural lines, which is a mistake of missing the forest through the trees.

The vast majority of people (blanket statement, I know..) do not come from a culture where embracing curiosity, asking questions, or trying to break things down is the norm. Developers, tinkerers, etc., sure... you can reasonably make that assumption. But not everyone. A cultural practice of critical thinking and problem solving is HOW you KNOW to ask WHAT questions need to be answered FIRST, in order to solve a problem or progress toward a solution (if more information is needed).

You might even make the argument that everyone should have these skills, and I would agree with you. But the missing link here is a culture or cultural practice that provides those things (the WHY), and an AI/LLM will not provide those things in absentia, without "prompting", or build up that infrastructure in meatspace for a given set of users. Ignore this at your own risk.

for a lot of lower barrier to entry tinkering, for years i felt it was mostly just google a thing and follow directions. Feel like the only thing that really changed is the initial query can be a mess of kinda nonsense and still give you those nice directions, and you can instantly get clarity on a single direction if you get stuck.

So the barrier is still kinda there to just grab the instructions and follow them, its just incredibly easier to follow them.

> only thing that really changed is the initial query can be a mess of kinda nonsense

Little known fact maybe, but Google (also YouTube) search has been pretty great at this well before LLMs got really popular. I think it already started when they were changing from "keyword search" to "ask us a question search" but I'm not sure.

At some point I figured, if they want me to type a whole question, I might get even better answers if I ask the question like I was a complete idiot.

> https://www.google.com/search?q=pls+how+to+make+the+steam+pl...

> https://www.google.com/search?q=i+wnt+terminal+to+say+where+...

I don't think it actually gives better answers but it sure makes me grin every time

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