Comment by techgnosis
7 hours ago
Yeah I feel this. My strongest passion in computing is simply learning how the machine and OS work. The code I would write would usually be experiments, not projects or tools.
I'm less pessimistic than the author though. There is always room for people who know what they are talking about. Take a deep breath.
You act as if there's only two types of people, the ones who are competent and the ones who are not. But there are plenty of people who are competent at a certain task, which will no longer be needed soon. It would require extreme hubris to think that you are one of the few who is competent at some task that LLMs can categorically not perform.
I wish that I could agree with you that "There is always room for people who know what they are talking about." I think that you are right in the long term. Eventually we will return to a world that values people who know what they are talking about.
In the short term, I have seen a lot of managers and other higher-ups talk about how we do not need to worry about low-level details anymore. In their minds, we are now all designers and architects, so we do not think about the small implementation details that ultimately do matter for performance and reliability.
People who know what they are talking about worry about all of the details from the big picture down to the small scales. We can still operate using abstractions like designers and architects, but we must know enough to choose the right abstractions that account for the concrete details properly. I've discussed this point earlier this year [1] using the tree swing diagram [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_swing_cartoon
> I'm less pessimistic than the author though. There is always room for people who know what they are talking about. Take a deep breath.
But what will their day to day look like? Meetings?
Previously, I'd have to work days undisturbed to get important stuff out of the door. There was effort involved to reach an elegant solution that fit business need.
Now I'm a meat bag pressing enter on a "recommended" option Claude already figured out was the best approach.
> Now I'm a meat bag pressing enter on a "recommended" option Claude already figured out was the best approach.
And how long can that last? We’re expensive meat bags…
I couldn't possibly predict but I just doubt things will be as bad as everyone thinks, they never are.
Denial Anger [Bargaining] Depression Acceptance
> Now I'm a meat bag pressing enter on a "recommended" option Claude already figured out was the best approach.
If you are constantly thinking claudes approach is the best then perhaps you were not that good of an engineer to start with.
lmao
One suggestion for the feeling that has been great for me. Finding a hobby where you can focus on sweating the details. Detach it from economic imperative (the core definition of a hobby, you dont make money from it). Ham radio, maker and micro electronics, woodworking, calligraphy, music. Of course there are more technically advanced solutions to the problem, that's not the point. The point is the effort and discovery.
I was never the best programmer and never was to keen on building things or providing some value to users. I'm more interested in how systems work, especially computers and the OS, and so far, LLMs haven't taken that away from me. If programming and solving problems had been important to me, I'd probably have a problem right now. While I feel for OP, what interests him most—namely, understanding things and developing an intuition for them—is not a productive activity in the sense that it’s not about building or producing things. But the job of a software developer has always been exactly that and LLMs take an ongoing trend to the extreme. I think people like OP have no choice but to separate their personal interests from their job, as hard that may be.
Interesting. You don't feel like you were building an edge with your understanding of said systems or OS?
I'm very interested in systems as well, but being less sure about the future (on whether this is something I really need to think about, or whether I'll get opportunities to work much at this level), I started reading about such topics a fair bit less.
Room where? You're obviously not going to hire someone for their knowledge alone in late 2026... ChatGPT probably knows more than you know in every domain. What questions could I ask you that ChatGPT wouldn't be able to answer?
ChatGPT is a fantastic encyclopedia for knowledge retrieval and even is occasionally accurate!
It doesn't yet know when I brushed my teeth last, what specific foods in what quantities give me heartburn/indigestion, what that funky smell from my running shoes might be.
It can write pretty good code on a recursive loop when its provided a clear target. It can write better code when it has someone who understand architecture guiding it. It can review code reasonably well as well.
ChatGPT tied to robotics might even be able to do more interesting things!
It does pretty poor on highly specific knowledge where a RAG better supports -- something like Agent Search at GCP or AI Search at Cloudflare. But it can synthesize.
In effect, we've built an amazing library registry and need to up our librarian skills and the skills of people or systems that can use the information the librarian and their system can find.
The point of the knowledge is that it helps you ask the right questions, not so much the ability to answer them.
Knowledge has been available just by asking Google for decades now. The LLM makes it easier but it's a difference of degree not of kind
Until the models are 100% reliable knowledge will be required in order to quickly spot issues and work efficiently with the model to address them.
The room comes from recognizing that, in many many domains, you don't even know the questions to ask.
Beautifully said.
I do wonder though about the optimizations within it, what could be the most optimal way to achieve such room (ie. knowing which questions to ask)
Yes, learning and tinkering is still really the greatest way to achieve that
but I think what I am talking about can be better simplified with the analogy of a gym: previously what used to be necessary (manual work/labour) but when most people got into information work, even then there was/is a need for it (physical work), then we saw the evolution of machines specifically designed to optimize for it and we got machines specifically designed for this training, which helped push people's body to their absolute limits.
I do wonder if an hyper-optimized environment of learning and for asking questions (or more so knowing the know how on which questions to ask), this whole process might be optimized for it and what that process might would look like is a source of curiosity to me.
A relevant video which talks about similar topics: Bodybuilding for the mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0DtxUJ6rAc
You won’t hire someone to answer questions for you; you might hire someone to make decisions for you. And domain expertise is still very useful in both making good decisions and convincing other people to trust your decisions
Know what to ask is about as important as the answer. You can't do that very well without domain knowledge.
I'm not sure how it plays out in 5 or 10 years, but that's how it is now.
Maybe people will be hired for the question they can actually ask and not for the raw knowledge they have