Comment by pmarreck
6 days ago
Skills atrophying in terms of what? Remembering specific API's that you always had to look up anyway? You don't lose developer intuition, analytical thinking or technical inclination, and those are the things that matter, anyway.
I recently did a fleetwide upgrade to Zig 0.16. Do I remember every single change from 0.15? No. Do I have to? Also no. Both because I can look it up if I need to, but also because the LLM already does.
If I don't look at a codebase that I myself haven't looked at in a year, I will not recognize some things when I return to it. Is this sense of "atrophy" meaningful when this was a problem long before LLMs came on the scene?
How do you deal with the lack of cognitive engagement? I think it is the primary driver of developing and maintaining skills as well as generating new ideas. Letting an agent do it for you will just get you average but well formatted code. Not something new.
I haven't cared about cognitive engagement in over a decade. Neither has my CEO.