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Comment by asdfman123 | Hacker News Reader

But the AI transition is different than old technological changes in that you don't really have to learn anything. You don't have to memorize keywords and new concepts like you'd have to for, say, a new JavaScript framework. If you don't know something about AI, you can just ask it and it will tell you.

Basically the only hard part for old people is getting USED to using AI. Some haven't, but it only takes a few weeks to do. After that, experience and taste really comes in handy and that can't be developed overnight.

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Yeah that's my feeling about it. I don't code much these days so have not used AI very much in that respect, so for me it's basically a superpowered search agent that can formulate relevant answers based on the details I provide, without the "why do you want to do that" or "tell us what you're really trying to achieve" that you'd so often get on tech forums.

But if I had to use AI for coding I don't think that it would take me very much time at all to get into the swing of it. I wrote code by hand for decades, so I know how to judge whether it's producing something that looks reasonable.

Yep, that's been my experience of it.

Fun note though, my work these days often involves telling AI to solve a problem and me asking it why it wants to do something a certain way.

It often has to patiently explain something like why the bazel rules need to be modified to accomplish my ends goals, and has to reiterate key concepts about a part of the codebase I'm unfamiliar with these days.

Really the only reason I'm there is to make sure it makes the changes as clean and efficient as possible, without unnecessary complexity that's hard to read.

> telling AI to solve a problem and me asking it why it wants to do something a certain way

Just keep your guard up for when the answer to "why" may be just a post-hoc "rationalization".

>If you don't know something about AI, you can just ask it and it will tell you.

If your questions are sharp, probing for detail, and intelligent. Have you seen how people question AIs? It's as if they can't even conceive of the AI being able to supply specific detail.

I'd love to see examples of that! Just from debates on HN alone, I get the idea that there's huge deltas, and I'm getting really really curious.

Point of order: On the one hand I'm not sure people quoting output from software where relevant is entirely what the 'no ai' rule is about. But it's arguable, fine.

For this kind of task, is linking to pastebin etc acceptable instead?

Either way thank you tstrimple for going in and looking!

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