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- Hacker News
- >LLMs are making me lose my savviness
preferred: LLMs are making me lose my savvy
by fsckboy - Lee Sedol, a top play of Go, quit playing professionally after AlphaGo. Others are still playing. I think this is a personal quest, and differs individually. There probably are similar stories at the start of industrialization.by anabis
- > I’ve experienced that great feeling of “this is a great idea” coming out of nowhere while doing unrelated activities, and having to rush back at my desk to write it down and implement it. That was great - it was rewarding, it was really meaningful.
This is it for me. It’s a pretty incredible tool but it killed the vibe and challenge of building things.
by cliche - I remember feeling a little bad the first time seeing AI create a UI as good as the one I did using a niche library and only a picture reference, when I focused on the feeling I realized it was an ego issue, nothing is stopping me from doing it by hand if I enjoyed it for itself, it's just that what I did was no longer scarce or difficult.
- Not sure it's an ego issue for everyone. If your job was fun and now it's not anymore, you're having 8h a day less fun.by ngruhn
- It's true that LLMs have trivialized some aspects of software development. (We're at the "software writes itself following natural language inputs" stage.)
What's nevertheless true is that they've hardly touched hardware hacking. There are so many interesting opportunities right now in robots, drones, materials, batteries, and custom embedded systems that still demand dirty hands and physical intuition. These still reward savvy, and they're fun!
by A_D_E_P_T - Begging the question here. Author is aware that they can choose not use LLMs and they... don't? It's like living at walking distance from town, being used to going in and around on foot, then electric scooters became available, so they start using them to get around while complaining that they aren't getting the exercise they want anymore.by skeledrew
- Prior to AI, I’d spend hours debugging and figuring how to make something work. It felt exciting in the end; the journey not so much. It was frustrating sometimes, and the overall output was not great. Sometimes I couldn’t try out all of my ideas simply because I had no capacity to do it. Anything requiring multiple months of work, I’d get burned out and never finish anything.
Now I delegate all the grinding to AI. I still feel accomplishment when I get the final result. But more importantly, I can now build something in couple of weeks that would otherwise take me half a year. I can focus now less on the for-loop vs while-loop and more on the big picture, like keeping things tidy and separation of concerns. The front-end and how end-users will interact with what I build is now more important to me, as well as the design. Previously, I had brain capacity only for writing my clever backend algorithm. Now I can make an equally clever front-end for it.
Maybe we never enjoyed the grind? We just came to accept it and convinced ourselves to enjoy it, because there was no other way. If you wanted something cool, it meant you had to put in hours. Now you just need to word it correctly and get the prerequisites.
by zerof1l - While I also griefed the years spent mastering craft being automated.
I also had a lot of ideas that I wanted to execute and I'm finally able to do so. Some of them are wild and big, unthinkable last year. I also really enjoy building product/software that people are delighted to use. So from my perspective, the net positive outweighs the losses.
My work position is less certain, I grief the years spent mastering things just to see AI doing it, but I went to software engineering because I enjoyed building products, from ideas to something people can play with, and this has never been easier.
by aogaili - Using AI can open up topics you couldn't work on before.
I think you're blaming tools for what are other problems.
No carpenter ever said "I used to plane wood by hand and carve magnificent pieces, now that I have an orbital sander and power tools, the love just isn't there".
I don't buy this argument at all.
by newsomix9xl - But that’s not the right analogy, in my opinion. It would be a carpenter saying “I used to carve by hand, but now I tell the carving machine to make a chair and it spits it out.”by mysterydip
- I think more apt analogy is that now I get random parts from Ikea and screw them together to something that resembles furniture. Just need to get enough parts and eventually they mostly fit. Customers really don't notice any difference.by Ekaros
- The only problem with this analogy is that LLMs are not orbital sanders... Or if they are, they are orbital sanders that operate correctly only 95% of the time. The other 5% of the time they do the wrong thing and cause you to do more work and/or damage the wood (not a great analogy though).by aninteger
- This is comparing apples and powertools. ;-)
Despite now having all these tools, a carpenter still needs a lot of skill to create something. If you hand me all the modern tools in existence, I'll probably still cut off both my thumbs and end up with a chair which breaks the moment I try to sit on it.
LLMs allow any person with no skills whatsoever to create almost anything they want. Quality is often good enough or doesn't matter at all. There's no skill needed because Claude will happily tell the person what they are missing and do it for them in the same step.
I totally feel what's expressed in the article: I've been in web development for 25 years now and I have never been this depressed in my life, because AI took most of what I cared for in my job and left me staring into a bleak future of becoming unemployed or pivoting into something I'm gonna hate doing for the rest of my life.
by soulchild77 - Actually, you'll find in this comment thread a lot of carpenters that prefer doing it "by hand": https://www.reddit.com/r/woodworking/comments/xvgynk/i_dont_...by sinsterizme
- > No carpenter ever said "I used to plane wood by hand and carve magnificent pieces, now that I have an orbital sander and power tools, the love just isn't there".
I would guess probably lots did say that?
At the very least I have no idea why you would be able to claim otherwise, we are far removed in time from when there were carpenters straddling the introduction of power tools.
- The example is not helpful though, probably a lot of carpenter said similar things. knowledge and attention to detail is absolutely lost with power tools and loud machines can take away a lot from the experience of working with wood. It also made the work more dangerous by instantly removing fingers and inhaling powder that was just not there before. It gave carpenters speed in return. Can you maybe give a better example?by croo
- It's like every time we discuss this on hn we have to go back to basics.
Builders/makers can be roughly subdivided into two camps: some like building for the final products; others like building for the process itself.
I'm in the latter camp. OP probably too. You probably are in the former.
And that's fine. But let's just stop pretending the other side doesn't exist.
EDIT: And this goes for OP as well. They forgot a lot of "for me"s in the article.
by klez - This is exactly my predicament of recent. I haven't necessarily feel like I've lost the savviness yet, but I feel I've lost the fun of the job. I guess it's the reality of life that all fun work eventually has its end of fun. Even the foot messengers of the past now probably load trucks/trains and sit the whole day, no longer feeling the fun of meeting people on the journey through whatever street or town they pass.by pintert3
- Have mathematicians become "less savvy" since the invention of the abacus or calculator? The invention of logarithms or analysis? In some ways, the answer is trivially positive. In fact, number crunching was, for most of human history, a key element of being a maths researcher.
However, when we look at the claim with a more critical eye, it becomes obvious that this view is myopic. In fact, current progress is in fact indebted to the invention various tools, which has led us to grand theories and hypotheses: things the Ancient Greeks could only dream about.
Is coding about writing assembly? Is it about writing boilerplate? About writing endless if-then statements? I would argue that it is not: it's about coming up with ideas, building products, finding customers, iterating, producing code that's easy to read, easy to understand, easy to extend.
Coding (at least the kind LLMs do) was never really the hard part, and I'd like to know specific examples of savvyness the author is losing. They've made me more critical of code and able to create better patterns, simply because I can iterate so quickly.
by dvt - I’d argue you’ve got a very VC focused view of coding.by grebc
- >Have mathematicians become "less savvy" since the invention of the abacus or calculator?
The abacus and calculator doesn't do high order thinking or prove theorems for you. Math as a field aren't about manually adding numbers together or doing simple algebra formulas, and wheren't that even 2000 years ago.
Those calculators are to math what something like an IDE or a helper library is to programming.
The analogy would be with theorem provers, and even better, with the exact same tool as in the programming case: LLM doing the proofs.
If mathematicians had LLMs and theorem provers do their job, they'd certainly have gotten "less savvy". And if they let them write their coursework, starting from university, they'd might never even become savvy enough in the first place.
by coldtea - I think he means the savviness in the art of programming the ideas. The skill and art involved in finding interesting and efficient ways to effect ideas and solutions to problems. It is(or was) fun for a good number of us who joined before AI changed the game. Now its dismissed tending to a waste of time, hence the supposed loss in savviness over time.by pintert3
- Did you study math? I did and I cannot relate to your comparison.
Mathematics isn’t about calculating numbers but formulas and proves.
I have to put it politely: until the advent of AI no machine ever “calculated” a formula for me, because I didn’t have to calculate anything.
It is like driving a Tesla and laughing about the manufacturer when he mentions how hard it is to get the product right, because you have an easy ride.
I can relate to the article’s AI depression sometimes.
Whatever comes to your mind, AI makes it happen in a couple of minutes in most cases no matter what you imagined.
You invest days and the AI just build it is a couple of minutes way better than you and your 10 teams together did before.
So much hard work and sacrifice - and now? Poof - there it is.
It is nice but also depressing. And not being challenged is the actual problem.
- > Have mathematicians become "less savvy" since the invention of the abacus or calculator? The invention of logarithms or analysis?
This is not a fair analogy. Those things are like compilers, languages, and type-checkers. They are deterministic, carefully proven, hand-crafted tools, that allow people to go safely to a higher level of abstraction and still make things in a deterministic way. The jump into the fuzzy world of LLMs is a completely different thing. It's different than the jump from assembly to a higher-level language.
by adamddev1 - It is opposite for me than what the author describes. With AI I can explore new areas far more effectively. For example, I have never been great with front end web stuff, but asking LLMs to generate something and then looking at the code they built is pretty cool.
Of course there are errors and gaffes and weird bits all over, but that helps keep me in the loop and understanding it better.
I can now (more) boldly go where I feared to tread before.
by Scubabear68 - Is reading example code uncool?by grebc
- I think the difference is that you read the code and get curious about it rather than glancing at the output and immediately telling it what to correct.by FinnLobsien
- Same here. It really helps me get deep into things that would have been daunting to start due to the boring research work required. I have heavy ADHD and high intelligence (not to brag, it is often more of a burden than a blessing!) so I can understand things really quickly but I have no patience for painstaking research or planning and documentation. I just want to build, to create and make my vision come to life but I'm really one-sided about that. I don't care about how it fits in the organisation process, the governance or where it should be documented.
And when I need to learn something new I hate doing courses because they're always too slowly paced for me. All courses are paced for the slowest possible participant. Especially those from the US where trainers have this "training voice" where they speak slowly and articulated and usually non-skippable which makes me scream in agony. My brain can't slow down to that level, I just lose focus then. It's like driving a ferrari at 5km/hr. Especially the non-IT courses are so slow and constantly repeat everything, as if I didn't fully understand them the first time, argh. So I tend to spend my time on these awfully designed mandatory HR courses trying to fuck around in developer mode and re-enable the skip segment features :) The more boring the training the more I learn about moodle and its frameworks.
I just love to dive right in and just do something but I often skip that first analysis of what method would be best. And I tend to stick with what I know. Which is often not the best way in a greenfield project. And often the boring first steps are so awful for me that I just put it off. If I do start I often do it half-assed. Then I run into a wall, have to regroup etc. I learn from that (mistakes are always a learing experience), but it's slow going because I take the wrong direction first.
AI really helps me get past that first step meaning I actually start it instead of procrastinating the research forever and move onto the next thing. And I can do great things because I know what I want and how I want it. It's a real enabler for me especially something like cowork. It helps me widen my horizon efficiently instead of wasting my time and energy like online courses do. It picks up things that my weak points are (patience) and feeds me information in a highly dense format I can easily digest. Helped by custom prompts of course ("don't tell me I make great decisions, evaluate everything on its merits, just tell me the meat of the content, don't elaborate"). I still work along with it and take ownership of its output, I'm way too much of a control freak to let the AI do everything without understanding it. But it gets me there quicker and it avoids procrastination by skipping the boring steps. I ask it to suggest methods and techniques, compare their pros and cons so I fully understand what I'm selecting for.
I have to say this was not really the case with early simple question/answer LLMs. The hallucinations were too bad, the searches too limited. The knowledge too hit and miss. It would come up with wrong stuff or overlook the best options. But the new high-context agentic technologies like cowork that really investigate the source material for the purposes I provide, they really are a game changer for me.
For example, I recently asked it about an obscure error I'd been having. Previous simple LLMs would just collapse into a directionless troubleshooting mode, "Did you try...?". Cowork actually went and retrieved all the relevant code from github without being asked to do so, and evaluated what would have happened in the background for that message to appear. Really good to see because it's exactly what I would have done. But I would have taken much more time to do it.
So no, for me it's not making me lose savviness. It's helping me grow it in exactly the way that's efficient for me.
by wolvoleo - Being able to ask the dumb questions but then get focused on something more technical is so nice. Get examples on demand.
It helps me pickup and understand new things pretty fast.
by duxup