Comment by lelanthran | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lelanthran | Hacker News Reader

> If the assumption is that AI is going to radically simplify the technical portion of the role, then the people who have started their careers with AI will be in the best spot once they have acquired the experience.

This doesn't make sense - AI is to allow unskilled people to produce what was previously only produced by skilled people.

IOW, how does having 2 years of experience using an LLM to generate code beat having 2 months of experience?

The whole point of using the LLM is that very little skill is involved; how does starting earlier with it provide an advantage? If it's as good as it is claimed to be, starting later with it won't make a single iota of difference to the generated results, compared to someone who started earlier.

I think it’s an oversimplification to say that using AI for se dev is a trivial skill. You can see it even now with some people chatting with Claude and others running multiple agents in a loop. There’s skill in that.

But I agree that now it’s something people can catch up. The point is that I think it will make a difference if you’re someone that never coded manually vs someone that is (un)learning after having a full career pre-AI. Is not much different that people who started working with computers and others who had to learn how to deal with them late in their career.

> There’s skill in that.

Yeah, but it's a trivial skill that the people who learned it took maybe a week to learn it.

Unless LLMs never improve, the odds are good that even less time would be needed to get up to speed in a 2030 SOTA.

I mean, the whole reason for LLM usage is to produce something with little to no skill needed. That's literally what they are designing it for.

So it's unlikely that having a headstart using LLMs leads to any advantage.

I'd say I'm in a better position by mostly ignoring AI so far - I haven't wasted any time or effort working out the current week's fashion in AI prompting methods that will be out of date by next week.

The paradox of AI. The better it is the less benefit there is to being an early adopter.

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