Comment by Todd

7 months ago

This is called cognitive offloading. Anyone who’s spent enough time working with coding assistants will recognize it.

Or working as an engineering manager.

It's the inevitable consequence of working at a different level of abstraction. It's not the end of the world. My assembly is rusty too...

  • I don't think not using assembly is going to affect my brain / my life quality in any significant way, but not speaking / chatting with someone is.

  • If LLMs were as reliable as compilers we wouldn’t be checking in their output, and I’d be happy to forget all programming lore.

    The “skill domain” with compilers is the “input”: that’s what I need to grok , maintain , and understand . With LLMs it’s the “output”.

    until that changes, you’re playing a dangerous game letting those skills atrophy.

    • Isn't it both on LLMs? The input is your ability to craft a prompt, the output is checking if the prompt worked.