Comment by ori_b
14 days ago
Doing it yourself is how you build and maintain the muscles to do it yourself. If you only do it yourself when the LLM fails, how will you maintain those muscles?
14 days ago
Doing it yourself is how you build and maintain the muscles to do it yourself. If you only do it yourself when the LLM fails, how will you maintain those muscles?
I agree, and I can actively feel myself slipping (and perhaps more critically, not learning new skills I would otherwise have been forced to learn). It's a big problem, but somewhat orthogonal to "what is the quickest way to solve the task currently in front of me."
> but somewhat orthogonal to "what is the quickest way to solve the task currently in front of me."
That depends on if you ignore the future. You are never just solving the problem in front of you; you should always act in a way that propagates positivity forward in time.
Some jobs require investment in the future. Some do not. That’s just reality. Not white how I feel about it personally, but I think there is a fair amount of the developer trade that is operational.
Which needs to be balanced with "How do I maintain my ability to keep solving tasks quickly?"
The thing i struggle with is I feel like it’s hard to lock into which skill to learn properly. Which so much changing so quickly and it becoming easy to learn things superficially.
By moving up a level in the abstraction layer similar to moving from Assembly to C++ to Python (to LLM). There’s speed in delegation (and checking as beneficial).
Moving up abstraction layers really only succeeds with a solid working knowledge of the lower layers. Otherwise, you're just flying blind, operating on faith. A common source of bugs is precisely a result of developers failing to understand the limits of the abstractions they are using.
We only need to do that when it’s practical for the task at hand. Some tasks are life-and-death, but many have much lower stakes.
So we can all only succeed if we know how CPUs handle individual instructions?
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If the LLM is able to handle it why do you need to maintain those specific skills?
Should we not teach kids math because calculators can handle it?
Practically, though, how would someone become good at just the skills LLMs don't do well? Much of this discussion is about how that's difficult to predict, but even if you were a reliable judge of what sort of coding tasks LLMs would fail at, I'm not sure it's possible to only be good at that without being competent at it all.
> Should we not teach kids math because calculators can handle it?
We don't teach kids how to use an abacus or a slide rule. But we teach positional representations and logarithms.
The goal is theoretical concepts so you can learn the required skills if necessary. The same will occur with code.
You don't need to memorize the syntax to write a for loop or for each loop, but you should understand when you might use either and be able to look up how to write one in a given language.
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Should you never use a calculator because you want to keep your math skills high?
There are a growing set of problems which feel like using a calculator for basic math to me.
But also school is a whole other thing which I'm much more worried about with LLMs. Because there's no doubt in my mind I would have abused AI every chance I got if it were around when I was a kid, and I wouldn't have learned a damn thing.
3 replies →
> I'm not sure it's possible to only be good at that without being competent at it all.
This is, in fact, why we teach kids math that calculators could handle!