The problem is that if you take away the LLM, all of a sudden you can't do any of the things you "learned". It's confusing familiarity with understanding.
I finished the project out feeling pretty confident in my photoshop abilities. Then I did a similar project later and realized I had to open up the LLM again as there were still a ton of holes in my knowledge. After this second time though I'm feeling confident enough on my own that referring back to the LLM is increasingly less common, as it's just a waste of time if I already know what to do.
It seems we're about to get a massive stress test of such a theory.
Sounds like you’re attacking a strawman
LLM is an issue (to most of us) when it replaces exploration, thinking and effort to aquire skill. Whether it's vibe-coding an app, or thinking through a math problem. Jury is out this will atually dimish the next generation of thinkers. But seems like a valid concern to me.
2. This particular case of LLM usage (to teach us photoshop) is replacing traditional tutorials. It can help people learn things. This is also valid to me.
The existence of 2, doesn't eliminate 1. Existence of 1 doesn't eliminate 2. There's no strawmans here. I also think it's fair that the promise of LLMs (and AIs), isn't to replace tutorials, but to displace and automate much more.
The paradigm shift on how every medium+ size FOSSS repo needs to take in PR submission?
The increase in bot activity in social media/
Who's the ones saying this is actually creating higher quality products? No one talks about quality anymore: only speed.
IE: Model do this for me vs teach me.
Enough that I know people who have built businesses purely training people.
Instead it's created swamps in the art community, choas and bloat in the FOSS communities, a stronger sense of mistrust with traditional search, a deepening of the Dead Internet Theory, more broken tools to scrounge through... where is this supposed "benefit" I'm getting out of this?
Or, better, the global menu search. Intellij's shift+shift shortcut is great.
What’s different after LLMs for me is that there are some things that just don’t care about and I’m fine if they are a black box that the agent handles for me. I didn’t have that luxury before.
Just like if you pressed a button to wipe out our main language stack at our job, yeah none of us would know how to do anything with assembly or machine code.
All the devs would spend a couple weeks learning assembly and go on coding. And all the non-dev vibe coders would be unable to continue.
So I don't think it's quite the same.
A couple weeks?! Really slacking, why not a few hours?
Add the violin and calculus while they're at it.
You'd probably use the first months/years to rewrite c and such anyways.
Likewise, *many* vibecoders would absolutely fail to adapt, and some would adapt, with this being their first experience. Just think of how many people started coding by using old gamemaker tools or scratch, or playing silly games. It is not the same as an LLM, but the idea that it is a gateway is definitely there. I wouldn't call LLMs "programming", because they're doing more: they're building products, which involves a lot more than programming -- hence why the skills to really thrive with LLMs are not just those of a good developer or engineer.
But weeks? I'd say less than 10% of the devs I've known my entire life would develop properly in assembly (and I'm being quite generous). Memory management, pointers, registers...just to name a few.
I think far too many people fail to realize that, with LLMs, the brain of a good problem solver, especially one with engineering background, gets much better results than someone with different characteristics. Similarly, the mind of a good product developer (and even someone with good UX inclination) does a much better job and building usable products.
This idea that LLMs are doing all of the work is frankly mind-boggling to me. It must stem from vastly different experiences of what LLMs do or whomever is using them around who says these claims. Obviously they do a lot of work, especially in the development prototyping, architecture and even ideation parts. But they only do (almost) "all of the work" in very simple or bad apps.
I've seen loads of terrible vibe-coding jobs: UX is terrible, bugs everywhere, clearly no consideration at any point for architecture (and thus the product is barely holding on). And I've seen the opposite: products that feel and act like premium stuff, because they were built by people with true love for what they do, sometimes even with a very good problem solving mind to add to that (leading to a not-so-terrible-albeit-still-barely-holding-on-but-thats-clearly-good-enough-for-the-product architecture). For every good app there are maybe 100 lovable apps that all look the same and break the second you do the wrong sequence of clicks, but the good ones do exist.
It's a tool that enables mediocrity to exist where it didn't previously, but it also empowers so many people in incredible ways. Still, you definitely need to be good at using the tool, and it definitely doesn't just happen overnight.
I imagine that was x86, which was relatively easy but also horrible. Very few people are writing assembly today because you'd need to be able to do x86-64 SIMD, ARM64, and maybe RISC-V, which are all quite a bit more complicated.
Now retired (come join the dark side, we have cookies) but still a few years away from what people would call "retirement age"
It's vaguely similar to how JS and Node enable so many people to flood the market without really knowing the underlying technology. Many of those would definitely not pick up assembly (which is the entire point I was trying to make)
0 mathematics, 0 algorithms, 0 formal languages.
Universities are pumping out "professionals" like crazy, plus nowadays they are replacing courses with new courses about AI (which might be machine learning in the best case or just prompting in the worst case).
The result is that you need to go and ask what courses where in a degree, and even then it's not really a guarantee of anything (I've met master student with bachelor in computer science who were completely unable to find the smallest number in an array).
And yet: I have not written assembly since school except for one Advent of Code challenge, and I expect it would take me quite a while to pick up a productive level of facility with it.
You're assuming people already know how to code. That's not built-in with vibecoding.
Sure, there are similarities, but while we're figuring out a FOSS solution that will run on your machine and we'll have access to more than the weights, the abstraction ladder isn't as equivalent as we think they are.
Neither is likely to go away. I do not expect it will ever be difficult to access an LLM in the forseeable future, barring massive legislation + enforcement to entirely ban them (I can run several capable coding models locally)
Nor is it likely that for developers at most companies will not have access to at least some LLM of comparably intelligence to those we have today (more advanced models may be restricted or too expensive) - right now large parts of the world economy are retooling to expand ai inference volume, not decrease it
This seems like "what if you don't have a calculator!" - and like with a calculator, there are benefits to learning things without the tool aid of course, n(including developing a sense for when things are wrong) but professionals are using the right tools for the job
Do you think its likely ?
If you scope LLM's to "frontier models", I do expect it to be an ever-growing moat. Maybe not if you work at BigCo who will pump out $X0 million/yr to gain access to it, but definitely for the singular use cases of people navigating to Claude.ai and asking a quick question. That's assuming the companies stay afloat long term to begin with.
If you open it up to open-weight models, then I question how many this will filter out. Will it be a tool valuable enough for people to overcome the large starting hump like Photoshop? Or will some future company come in and streamline the UI/UX to make them as intuitive as possible? Those are the truly interesting questions in my mind.
Are you suddenly a history expert because you listened to every Hardcore History podcast? Better to read 1 book on a subject than listen to hours of podcasts. I gaurentee more is remembered from the book.
After this I realized why I personally choose LLM to write code: it is simply more convenient.
As a parallel, once you learn how to drive you stop walking, as for the primary mode of transportation.
Is this the reason people prefer to drive, or is it due to city planning, societal expectations, etc.?
Plenty of people who live within cities don't own a car, or if they do, walk more than they drive.
If I could, I would certainly walk everywhere.
Cars:
- create environments we hate being in
- directly impacts public health
- widens inequality
- makes us productively go faster through the terrible environment we’ve set up
LLMs:
- create markets we hate being in
- directly impacts public health
- widens inequality
- makes us productively put out slop faster through the terrible market we’ve set up
Was this unintended satire?
you must be USAnian. I don't know a single person this would apply to
If I use an LLM to create something in a programming language I'm not an expert in, I still have a reference point for later use. And that reference should drastically speed up the process of learning how to use said language myself later.
reading code is not the same as writing code, the second one is much harder.
"Please download the ability to do X"
Just that there is still a big latency. Its smaller than finding the correct information on the web, but you can do so. Especially with MCP. The question is when this goes over into the physical world.
Watching Youtube videoas about anything that requires skill does the same.
What? That is absolutely not true. I've been using LLMs for language learning, math/physics, clarify home improvement best practices that I now regularly think about, etc. and that knowledge is not LLM-bound at all. Instead of acquiring from a regular textbook, I acquired it from a model.
Even if that were true, LLMs aren't going away, so that isn't a problem.
And it depends on the stock market continuing to go up relative to inflation (real inflation, not measured) and the labour market being strong enough to employ people. Which in turn relies on the USA's exorbitant privilege, which relies on all other western countries generally trusting it.
Human memory is shite. Understanding, and knowing what you need to reference, is ludicrously more valuable than rote memorization.