Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
larsfaye.com58 points by larsfaye 28 minutes ago
58 points by larsfaye 28 minutes ago
100%
We're already seeing this at the enterprise level. Companies have dictates from leadership that "if you're writing code manually, you're doing it wrong."
Okay, that kind of works for a while. We are indeed producing a shit-ton of code, but the reality is that engineers are pumping out code faster than the humans can understand and (honestly) review it. That sounds great until you realize that "hey Claude, read this Jira ticket and implement the feature in this code base" isn't really worth $200K/year.
This is all complicated by the fact that we're also losing our grasp on reality from the other direction because we also have leadership air dropping AI generated manifestos on the product owners and product owners having to use AI to transmute all that shit into 1,500 word Jira tickets that are 10% necessary feature work and 90% LLM boilerplate.
So now you have software engineers whose job has changed radically to the point that the hardest part about being a software engineer is just filtering through AI generated artifacts from all directions just to try to get a feature out the door.
So far I think I have learned far more from LLMs than I've lost to them. I forget some syntax, definitely. But I now reach for a much wider range of tools that I have become familiar with because of LLMs.
So, partly agree, partly disagree.
The snake eating it's own tail for llm software development has really been met with a shoulder shrug whenever it gets brought up. At best you might have a small cohort of developers that don't cook their brains with AI and their reward for that appears to be having to review terrible AI code written by people who have cooked their brains.
Completely unsustainable.
I'm looking forward to having the same experience as COBOL engineers did after retirement: companies backing up the brinks truck to anyone with the skills to keep the lights on.
It's like I said in another article, I've spent my life in C# and JavaScript. I'm a low-level programmer now, did even have to learn C.
Saw a quote comparing pre-LLM code to pre-WWII steel, low-background steel, essentially.
Does anyone else feel like the web has become so "readable" it is illegible?
I have such a hard time quickly reading pages like TFA. Headings, bullets, line-spacing, width, link hover animations, even the font. Even reader mode defaults aren't great for me.
Compared to, for example, https://www.paulgraham.com/best.html
Coders should be treated as as well as as other software users. Tools like Claude code, Antigravity, and others are applying AI to solving that problem.
I know how to create a multi year P&L projection from scratch. It gives me some insight into how much capital a startup will need to get to breakeven. A good AI tool that creates that same spreadsheet in minutes should also be able to explain why different businesses have different shaped cash flow troughs. I don't think people using tools like that is bad even if they don't gain deep insight.
I'm seeing it happen in real time. I've seen several folks claim they "vibe-coded" something and upon review it's some seriously low quality garbage. Unfortunately it's just "functional enough" where it's encouraging the one who talked to the robot to continue thinking they can code for some reason.
It is important to ensure that any LLM code is named and shamed.
Very few people know how to hand set typography anymore, but many of the conventions still exist and people don't have to understand the origin of a lot of them to use them properly.
Going to? It already is.
And math skills are going to collapse from calculator reliance.
Actually, they have for a large majority of the population. And fun fact: that debate is still going on, and the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) enacted a rule prohibiting calculator use in AMC.
https://ivyleaguecenter.org/2024/03/12/over-reliance-on-calc...
Math fosters critical thinking, and we've been in a critical thinking deficit for decades and decades. I don't think we can afford to sink even deeper...
No.
With a calculator you still need to understand the fundamentals of mathematics. You also need to understand how to operate a calculator and know its functions.
With an LLM, you don't even need to know anything other than asking the robot to perform. You don't understand the output, nor can an unskilled person explain it.
A more apt analogy is the diminishing understanding of assembly language and machine instruction sets. I love programming and something got lost in both transitions, first to high level languages and now to coding agents. I am quite sure some contexts will require programming by hand for a long while as there are still people who are writing amd64/avx512/sass by hand. I hope in time we will find new ways to enjoy solving problems with this new programming modality. By now, I am pretty sure it is here to stay and evolve from its current crude form.
That's a very good point. People don't pull out their calculator in the grocery store to do analysis of unit costs or whatever, it's too much of a hassle for that small kind of analysis. But calculators have robbed us of the need to be good at doing that math in our heads. So the math doesn't get done.
Many grocery stores will already give you a per oz or per unit price so you can compare pricing for different brands that have different sizes. It's a very handy feature.
I have heard stories of cashiers being incapable of giving correct change. So yes it has happened.
Nah, the difference is your average calculator doesn't take over executive function.
This is more like paying someone else to read your math homework and then submit the answers on your behalf.
Math skills had never anything to do with arithmetic. Maybe Ramanujan discovered a couple of theorems by dealing with numbers themselves. That is it.
Online discourse though is collapsing under dumb AI talking points.
"Mental math skills" literally did collapse tho??? "Math skills" to write proofs (which a calculator cannot do) is a fundamentally different skill set than that "math skills" of mechanically doing arithmetic (which a calculator does do).
Seems like critical reading skills have already collapsed.
They probably have though.
Seems like we're doing fine though, yeah?
Could be a doing a whole lot better. Do you think there's an abundance of critical thinking in society? Because math skills aid in that.
I honestly can't tell what reward there is for this "critical thinking" since the entire world is bathing in "AI will replace you"
what point is there to be a human calculator if nobody rewards you for it?
and I'm not talking about wealthy Bay Area tech workers doing it so that they can write their substack blogs but rather the average person
When I look at the state of software engineering, "fine" is not the word that comes to mind https://xkcd.com/2030/.
If we're going to be the last generation that understands code at this level, we need leave it in a much better state before we die.
This is the same kind of analogy people make when they "poo-pooh" any sort of technological advance, especially with AI.
"Oh, that old simple device didn't displace anything, so this one which is now quickly taking over every job will be just like that simple one". So I guess people today know how to sew and knit and bake bread?
"Oh, humans were always needed, so it'll be the same this time." Is that true of horses and oxen after cars and tractors were invented?
Your calculator isn’t designed to keep you addicted to it and doesn’t have baked in orders like “be humorous and irreverent when appropriate.”
Also, yes I am dependent on a calculator.
> it and doesn’t have baked in orders like “be humorous and irreverent when appropriate.”
It does, you just have to enter the number "5318008" :)
This is exactly the right analogy. Granted LLMs are a more sophisticated calculator and engineering is still adapting to this wonky/evolving technology. But to pretend it's a coming catastrophe is to ignore every past parallel development - where this has not happened.
Math skills are at their lowest point ever in modern society, and many are still advocating for the reduction in reliance on calculators for this reason.
https://ivyleaguecenter.org/2024/03/12/over-reliance-on-calc...
It may bifurcate the average skill from the skill of figuring out new solutions.
Are engineers still making 100s of thousands a year still just for vibe coding while a nurse and other skilled / highly trained medical professionals working their butt off make half of that?
Do we think there is going to be a correction for the vibe coders?
Pardon I know such question is controversial but thinking ahead.
There's something weird about nurse pay where it doesn't seem to raise even during large shortages of qualified nurses. I think it's artificially lowered by hospital admin, with temporary traveling nurses acting as "scabs" to avoid the normal wage increasing
The Labor Theory of Value was defeated decades ago, get with the times
I'm solving harder and harder problems for real users/customers than I was a year ago and our sales are increasing as a result.
Are you saving lives?
Is it my job to make sure that nurses are paid more than I am?
I'll readily admit that they deserve it, I'm a lazy dickhead and they help people, but I think your blame is misplaced if you're insinuating that software engineers are to blame for nurses being paid less than ourselves.
Ah yes. Selling courses is the oldest grift in town, which is what the author here is doing.
Coding expertise is going to collapse from compiler reliance (1985 Turbo Pascal detractors)
I'm also concerned about people asking an opaque machine for an answer and stopping there instead of going to different sources, evaluating their credibility, exercising their own ability to construct their own worldview from disparate facts and opinions.
I learned BASIC, Pascal and x86 Assembly language by the age of 14-15. None of which I remember (nor care to). The strict instructions (aka language) we gave the compiler was not the point. Those experiences taught me how to think logically, and over time develop a taste/structure for how software should be built, as well as foot guns to avoid. I don't know how you teach that without coding, but the "coding expertise" was always a means to an end. LLMs are just another abstraction layer above programming languages, machine language, etc.
In contrast with Pascal, I could see in my mind the PDP-11 instructions behind my C code. By the time I started running code on x86, there were debuggers that could step through source code, and I didn't really want to think like an i386.
> I don't know how you teach that without coding
That's the neat part: you don't!
Even Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin, who's as AI pilled as they come and doesn't read code any longer, says that junior developers shouldn't even look at AI tooling for the first three years:
We don't teach kids math with access to calculators, and so on. Making students code by hand at first is a very moderate proposition
> LLMs are just another abstraction layer above programming languages, machine language, etc.
Programming languages are (largely) deterministic. LLMs are not. The boundary between an abstract concept and something executable sits comfortably in the mind of the programmer in non-LLM contexts. This boundary shifts when using an LLM and becomes shared between the programmer and the matrix multiplication machine.
The "layer of abstraction" analogy is therefore technically true but essentially false. "Just another" papers over how seismic of a paradigm shift all of this is.
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Not to mention the idea in the article has kinda been beaten to death
Not quite, but maybe some day, an AI company will succeed in cornering the market of competence to haul in their impossible returns.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it