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- Hacker News
- Of course. If you don’t use something it atrophies not only in non use but in losing interest in keeping up with the state of the art in said tech.
What we gain though is for people don’t possess that knowledge in the first place, now have this superpower. I know several individuals who have vast experience in specific disciplines and they are now able to solve real problems where there were previously struggling and having to make existing solutions work.
In the context of software engineering it allows people that have great institutional knowledge bypass the software market and construct stuff on their own - or at least prototype something and turn it over to an SE if the situation dictates.
I’ve been using CC for several months now and have noticed an increasing quality of output - Fable 5 I think was 85% there. At 95% SE’s are going to be increasingly looking for work to do.
To the title though, I’ve noticed while my desire to actually write code is decreasing CC is forcing me to improve my high level thought processes in the context of overarching goals in a project through discussion with CC. The software often introduces things that had escaped me or just think more outside the box.
My concerns are that this technology will be restricted at some point and the people making the restrictions will have a lot of control - and we know how that works out. But I believe they are inevitable, first obvious example being Fable 5. Are guardrails needed - yeah sure. Common sense says that I don’t want someone able to concoct an easily transmittable Ebola virus that has a 90 day incubation period in their kitchen but I do want an entrepreneur to be able to build a competitor to MS Office, or a cure for Ebola, for example.
by roamerz - All the benefits you're describing apply to the present moment; people with knowledge, self-discipline and expertise can leverage LLMs to great effect.
How many people like this will exist in a decade? Two?
by mpalmer - > What we gain though is for people don’t possess that knowledge in the first place, now have this superpower.
Indeed. The great innovation of AI is giving people with wealth access to vast amounts of knowledge, while limiting the amount of wealth that people with knowledge can access.
It's completely bass-ackwards.
by vkou - Is this a situation where AI will go away and we will regret the loss of skills? At worse, we will be forced to use open weight models instead of the cutting edge, so I don't think it's a big deal. I'm sure people got worse at arithmetic after the invention of the calculator.
- At worse you suffer from cognitive atrophy. Become more dumb and lazy.
- Did the entire history of computing prior to 2023 disappear? Are we really that boned?by xantronix
- > I'm sure people got worse at arithmetic after the invention of the calculator
For LLMs, we can see this sentence but replace "arithmetic" with a variable X
I'm sure people got worse at X after the invention of LLMs"
The problem isn't that X skills atrophy necessarily
The problem is that for LLMs, X is "basically all knowledge and communication skills"
Can we really tolerate a society where "basically all knowledge and communication skills" are atrophying?
- I don't think the real threat is at the individual level, but at the societal level.
Building skills over time leads to insights that lead to innovation.
AI does many interesting things, but it doesn't innovate (yet).
The real threat isn't that we'll all lose our skills (possibly) and then lose access to AI (unlikely), it is that AI will remain at roughly currently levels and we'll dull our skills due to reliance on it and innovation will stall because we've offloaded too much of the thinking to the non-innovative machine.
I'm not saying this is what definitely will happen, but it does seem like a very possible outcome.
by georgemcbay - Oh ho ho....looks like I'll need to update my essay! The evidence is mounting higher and higher.by larsfaye
- This is hardly surprising. Think about Staff+ engineers: their work is a lot like commanding AI. Most climb the corporate ladder through hard work, excellent engineering skills, soft skills, and a bit of luck. But as their companies grow, they gradually spend less time coding, debugging, or doing deep design.
Instead, they act more like highly technical product managers. They help VPs plan and write high-level product requirements sprinkled with technical terms. They draw boxes on whiteboards and create pretty slides. They write polished documents that keep their leadership happy, and they are either in meetings or on their way to the next one. When they have a technical idea, they dispatch a team to test it out.
Naturally, they still feel deeply technical, until the day they have to resolve a production issue, pass a technical interview, or write extensive code. That is when they realize their skills have grown rusty.
I point this out not to criticize, but to highlight a genuine career challenge. As an engineer, I would rather hone my technical skills. Yet, if you want to climb the corporate ladder, you have to take on more organizational work. The only solution I can think of is to become more like a researcher or a professor. Over the years, good professors spend less time writing papers or deriving formulas. However, their insights are so deep that they still produce amazing results by advising PhD students. But that path is much easier said than done.
by hintymad - Back in the mid-90s I was doing desktop support. It was a lot of work because PCs were relatively new (and they were garbage!), and people broke shit all the time. Sometime around '96 a disk-cloning utility called Ghost was released. It was great - one could provision a fully working PC with all required apps and config settings in minutes! Sounds lame now, but back then it was revolutionary. It had a dark side, though. After about a year most people I worked with had lost the ability to troubleshoot even the most basic problems. The solution to every problem was to just re-apply the standard Ghost disk image (we called it 'Ghosting' back then) ... Can't print? Ghost it! Not receiving emails? Ghost it! Word is too slow? Ghost it!by jimt1234
- Happened with all of tech support, really, or at least in my corner of the world: you take your PC to a technician and you receive in return a fresh Windows install, a folder with most of your files (including a copy of "C:\Windows"), and none of the programs or shortcuts you had before.
- The biggest negative I'm seeing is that people are moving _too fast_ to evaluate the stuff they're slinging. When you move too fast, you do not take the time to build up your taste or appreciate the nuances of different approaches to the same problem.
I am using LLMs quite a lot, but the amount of time I spend sitting on some slopped out code is I think on average much longer than a lot of my peers. What I've found is that while the original thing "works", it usually winds up being another 2-3 cycles of iterating on the original idea after I've let it settle in my head before I actually feel confident about merging.
As a result, when I add it all up, for actual "this is important" design-level concerns, I do not feel significantly more productive.
by devin - Tool use typically follows this curve. If you want to preserve a skill you have to actually preserve it. This isn't inherently bad by itself, tools enable us to do much more than we can without them and its a point of contention whether or not any skill is inherently important when a tool comes along that does it for us.by ianbutler
- The difference if this is okay is how reliable the tool is. If it is a calculator or compiler it is okay. The example in the article also sounds okay (machine learning image classification), though I am not sure.
LLM output is unreliable, so we still need to judge it. If I want to be able to judge code, I must have worked with it to a certain extent. So the unreliable tool does not help me much if I don't want to accept the unreliability.
by luke5441 - Sure. But if you don't own the tool and it is held by a cabal of centralist (even political state-adjacent) parties, you're having a bad day when computer says no.
- The huge problem in this specific case is that to use this tool well you also need the underlying skill to be developed and preserved. It's very different from a power drill.by tripleee
- One of the challenges here is that the skillset we are in danger of letting atrophy is essentially unbounded. It’s not a specialized tool like a calculator, where you have a well scoped domain of problems you are offloading. granted, in practice many people are using ai for specialized domains (like coding or producing visual designs). But whatever level of abstraction they are currently working at is not, in principle, something that they couldn’t also offload to ai.by alpinisme
- Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old. New sports, new businesses, new academic pursuits. Technology is a lever and AI is the biggest lever we've ever had. It enables laziness or incredible productivity. Choose your own path forward.by hodder
- >Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old
Are you learning, or are you simply consuming?
I think we're missing long form studies that show if it's possible to learn deeply from compressed AI generated summaries of topics.
by jplusequalt - You think you're learning things at a pace you never imagined, but all you're really doing is learning superficially. You never really go deep into things, and it "seems" like you're learning faster, but how much can you actually recall of the things you learned? By the way, I'm saying all this because this has been my experience. I can prompt like no tomorrow asking questions, but I forget most of it because it's not deep learning. I'm not actually thinking myself, I'm allowing the AI to think for me.by saadn92
- I actually agree with you; I definitely feel I'm able to use LLMs to learn and explore concepts, but I've always been a self-taught and highly motivated person in the first place. Everything technical that I know, I know because I put in the work to learn it on my own. That's why I wish these tools were being advertised as models that help you do BETTER work, not MORE work. They're using them as excuses to lay off swaths of workers, instead of allowing them to uplift people's skillsets. And, of course, it invited a whole mass of individuals who use them to artificially elevate their perceived skills.by larsfaye
- How exactly is AI helping you with sports? Have you become a better athlete? Have you learned more about the strategy of each sport from the perspective of a coach for example? Care to elaborate?by elorant
- Are you actually learning them or are you just letting the AI kinda do them for you? There was a time I knew how to take a path integral, but kinda-sorta knowing what something is and how to ask a calculator for it is different than knowing yourself.
- You're not learning them. You're being told about them and given a hammer to leverage them with mediocre to low skill level.
Learning requires a huge time investment. Using an LLM doesn't shorten that.
by cryo32 - > Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old.
You aren't learning anything. Learning involves doing.
We've known this for ages: simply reading a maths book without drilling on the problems will not get a student to pass.
Best case scenario, you're reading stuff. For users of coding agents, they're not even doing that.
by lelanthran - I don't know this applies to you, but I've had several friends who convinced themselves they're exploring the frontiers of science, and it always turns out that their conversations spiraled into some sort of weird quantum-metaphysical gobbledygook.
LLMs are sycophants, and in long conversations, their sycophancy produces a positive feedback loop: the context window contains affirmations of incorrect interpretations / analogies, so the chatbot continues down that path because, well, that's the most likely completion of previous text. And before you know it, you're discovering the hidden fabric of the universe, which is always some Minkowski fractal spacetime tensor lattice manifold with subharmonic DNA nanotubes.
That is to say, unless you have a robust way to evaluate what you're learning, and to confirm that you're actually learning, I'd tread carefully.
by zerobees - This is new, the scope of it, its not just about individual "skills" because its all of them; we are being challenged at the very fundamentals of our ability to think deeply and widely and persistently. That has never happened before like this.
It is quite extraordinary and breath-taking at times to see the agents in action; the flipside is that very power renders us both vulnerable to its seduction and enfeeblement on an equal scope - its almost hard-drug like in its potential long-term psychological effects.
by mellosouls - > we are being challenged at the very fundamentals of our ability to think deeply and widely and persistently. That has never happened before like this.
Social media and content algorithms come to mind as an early wave that changed the landscape here that defines the horrible status quo leading into the AI era.
These days it's trivial to slide into an echo chamber and very hard to break out of the silo.
There might be a double-edged sword here where AI, trusted by most people as an omniscient oracle, can offer the only pushback we encounter on positions we picked up passively by scrolling social media, Youtube, TikTok.
For example, ask Claude, ChatGPT, and even Grok about the "space lasers" that started wildfires in Hawaii in 2018, something people like Marjorie Taylor Greene floated on social media. It quickly debunks it as bullshit.
Now, maybe it will pan out such that everyone will have their own AI that tells them what they want to hear. But so far I've watched people abandon arguments on Twitter because Grok rejected their claim. So it feels like there's a glimmer of hope.
by hombre_fatal - > That has never happened before like this.
You should possibly spend some time reading what people used to say about the invention of Radio and Television.
> It is quite extraordinary and breath-taking at times to see the agents in action;
So is any magic trick. The unsettling notion that it may all just be an illusion that you've failed to correctly understand doesn't seem to weigh on people.
> its almost hard-drug like in its potential long-term psychological effects.
That might have more to do with how the owners of these products choose to market and deploy them. Perhaps if they peeled back the covers just slightly your euphoria would change to dread. There's an Upton Sinclair moment coming.
by themafia