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Comment by curt15 | Hacker News Reader

The people reaping AI's benefits today generally developed their skills as juniors through old-fashioned struggling in the pre-ChatGPT era -- actually reading docs and articles, trial and error, puzzling over mysterious bugs, and generally doing lots of mental lifting.

How will skill building happen when LLMs and coding harnesses seemingly provide all the answers at one's fingertips?

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That's what I wonder. I know to ask the right questions because I've been through the grinder. AI is beneficial to me. But where will the new knowledge come from if we stop learning? Stuck in this year of your deity?

> How will skill building happen when LLMs and coding harnesses seemingly provide all the answers at one's fingertips?

They don't provide all the answers. And are often wrong/mistaken. But they also produce stuff faster than you can consume it. This is great for when you know exactly what you want and can cheaply test the output and guide the LLM to the right solution. It is expensive (in developer hours) in other cases.

I have been building a new PL+VM this year and had to pause development on a few occasions because I have not had the time to go through the implementation because there are so many modules. But smaller tools (5-10KLOC), you can judge fairly quickly.

So, the answer to your question is: people need to discover the strengths and weaknesses of the tool on their own, decide what kind of expertise they want to attain, and if it is worth the effort.

That's a great question. I don't know what the future will be like, but looking into my crystal ball, I'm not seeing much hand-generated code. Very little (or no) human code review.

Having the taste and business sense to develop the right thing will be important. If it stops working, ask the AI to fix it.

> That's a great question.

People have been asking this for a couple of years already. I have yet to hear a real answer beyond "We'll cross that bridge when we get to it."

While this may be true, there are certain types of development (rockets and kernels come to mind) where you will always need highly skilled people willing to be responsible. LLMs excel at many logical tasks but they struggle with creativity and responsibility.

At least, so far.

How will people learn to ride horses, when everyone drives a car? They generally won't, because that is now obsolete.

The ubiquitous "LLM slop is the car and thoughtful development is the horse" analogy makes me think of Steve Jobs's "Bicycle for the Mind".

https://www.themarginalian.org/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle...

IMHO LLMs are more like "falling asleep on the bus and ending up in the wrong city".

How does it work when the skill is _thinking_, which is not so much a skill as a basic component of being a functional human?

Look at foot soldiers. One of the basics of their training is to stop thinking. I don't think that LLMs are doing our thinking for us, though. Not anymore than a calculator did before, at least.

Perhaps so for the most junior grunts, but officers with people under their command are definitely expected to think.

If you are in the military one of the most important things you need to be able to do is perform what someone higher ranked tells you to. Do not think about it, just do it. Doesn't matter whether you are at the bottom or a major. You are not there to question a command, you are there to execute it.

You can think about how to best execute the command and that's it. Without that you don't have a military.

That's not how the US military operates. The Marine Corps, for example, has an explicit concept of the "strategic corporal".

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