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Comment by baxtr

6 months ago

Did you build the house you live in? Did you weave your own clothes or grow your own food?

We all depend on systems others built. Determining when that trade-off is worthwhile and recognizing when convenience turns into dependence are crucial.

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baxtr

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shaky-carrousel  6 months ago

Did you write your own letters? Did you write your own arguments? Did you write your own code? I do, and don't depend on systems other built to do so. And losing the ability of keep doing so is a pretty big trade-off, in my opinion.

  • djray  6 months ago

    There seems to be a mistaken thought that having an AI (or indeed someone else) help you achieve a task means you aren't learning anything. This is reductionist. I suggest instead that it's about degrees of autonomy. The person you're responding to made a choice to get the AI to help integrate a library. They chose NOT to have the AI edit the files itself; they rather spent time reading through the changes and understanding the integration points, and tweaking the code to make it their own. This is much different to vibe coding.

    I do a similar loop with my use of AI - I will upload code to Gemini 2.5 Pro, talk through options and assumptions, and maybe get it to write some or all of the next step, or to try out different approaches to a refactor. Integrating any code back into the original source is never copy-and-paste, and that's where the learning is. For example, I added Dexie (a library/wrapper for accessing IndexedDB) to a browser extension project the other day, and the AI helped me get started with a minimal amount of initial knowledge, yet I learned a lot about Dexie and have been able to expand upon the code myself since. If I were on my own, I would probably have barrelled ahead and just used IndexedDB directly, resulting in a lot more boilerplate code and time spent doing busywork. It's this sort of friction reduction that I find most liberating about AI. Trying out a new library isn't a multi-hour slog; instead, you can sample it and possibly reject it as unsuitable almost immediately without having to waste a lot of time on R&D. In my case, I didn't learn 'raw' IndexedDB, but instead I got the job done with a library offering a more suitable level of abstraction, and saved hours in the process.

    This isn't lazy or giving up the opportunity to learn, it's simply optimising your time.

    The "not invented here" syndrome is something I kindly suggest you examine, as you may find you are actually limiting your own innovation by rejecting everything that you can't do yourself.

    • shaky-carrousel  6 months ago

      It's not reductionist, it's a fact. If you, instead of learning Python, ask an LLM to code you something in Python, you won't learn a line of Python in the process. Even if you read the produced code from beginning to end. Because (and honestly I'm surprised I have to point out this, here of all places) you learn by writing code, not by reading code.

      2 replies →

    • bluefirebrand  6 months ago

      > The "not invented here" syndrome is something I kindly suggest you examine

      I think AI is leading to a different problem. The "nothing invented here" syndrome

      Using LLMs is not the same as offloading the understanding of some code to external library maintainers.

      It is offloading the understanding of your own code, the code you are supposed to be the steward of, to the LLM

  • danenania  6 months ago

    Unless you're writing machine code, you aren't really writing your own code either. You're giving high level instructions, which depend on many complex systems built by thousands of engineers to actually run.

  • sekai  6 months ago

    > Did you write your own letters? Did you write your own arguments? Did you write your own code? I do, and don't depend on systems other built to do so. And losing the ability of keep doing so is a pretty big trade-off, in my opinion.

    Gatekeeping at it's finest, you're not a "true" software engineer if you're not editing the kernel on your own, locked in in a cubicle, with no external help.

    • shaky-carrousel  6 months ago

      That... Doesn't even begin to make sense. Defending the ability to code without relying on three big corps is... absolutely unrelated with gate-keeping.

Draiken  6 months ago

We're talking about a developer here so this analogy does not apply. If a developer doesn't actually develop anything, what exactly is he?

> We all depend on systems others built. Determining when that trade-off is worthwhile and recognizing when convenience turns into dependence are crucial.

I agree with this and that's exactly what OP is saying: you're now a cog in the LLM pipeline and nothing else.

If we lived in a saner world this would be purely a net positive but in our current society it simply means we'll get replaced for the cheaper alternative the second it becomes viable, making any dependence to it extremely risky.

It's not only for individuals too. What happens when our governments are now dependent on LLMs from these private corporations to function and they start the enshitification phase?