> How juniors and fresh grads do that with AI that is designed to give you whatever answer you need in a given moment is unclear to me. I don't see how that's possible, but maybe I'm thinking too myopically.
The contradiction is resolved by your employer pushing professional development into "your own time."
And they'll do that by being totally stupid and unaware: they'll push you to maximally use AI tools, but judge you for the skill deficits those tools create.
Socrates wrote about what was being lost as philosophy was becoming written rather than oral...and he was right.
We can't even understand what was lost. Many methods of learning and thinking became entirely lost. You could say they were redundant, and they were. But... writing largely replaced oral traditions. It didn't just augment them.
He was that old school coder who had the skills to do philosophy and be an intellectual without writing. Writing was an augmentation for him. But for the new cohort... it was a new paradigm and old paradigm skills became absent.
It is very hard to imagine skilled coders becoming skilled without need pressing that skill acquisition. The diligent student will acquire some basic "manual coding" skill... but mostly the skill development will be wherever the hard work is.
Dr. Steven Skultety & Dr. Gad Saad discussed this in a recent video / podcast.
This link is time stamped to the topic https://youtu.be/7mcQf9E3YRo?t=1058
With any new technology, subsequent drudgery depends on the technology, its concomitant economics, and the imagination of the people using it.
I can live a happy life without struggling for basic needs and without playing golf all day long. If you strip off every obligation from life, then you exist, not live.
Facing challenges and overcoming obstacles, friends and family is what makes me happy. When you’re rich, most people only care about your money, not the person you are. And I think that’s exactly what a happy life is about.
I can imagine I could be perfectly happy with a life full of challenges of that kind, instead of being forced to work at given scheduled times which often imply I spend less time with my son than I would like, including days I don't feel like it, and including boring tasks (I love my job, but like almost every job, it also has its paperwork, pointless meetings, etc.), knowing I depend on that work to live.
In short, I think we all do need the challenge, the struggle, the successes and the failures, otherwise life would just be boring and pointless. But I don't think we (or at least I) need the obligation component and the high stakes.
What you mention about the rich attracting people focused on money rings true, but it would be moot if AI led us all to lead lives more similar to the rich, which was the point here. (Of course, there's also the issue of whether there is widespread or unequal access to AI, but that's another story...).
That is a bold and frankly unsupportable claim.
We seem to be insatiable inquisitive.
Curiosity doth struggle many cats.
Interestingly, he placed a lot of importance on memory... where you emphasize manipulation of concepts.
The idea that there will be less to think about seems a bit short-sighted. Humans are very good at moving to higher levels of abstraction, often with more complexity to deal with, not less.
BUT, BUT! I keep the index.
My favourite quote from Donald Rumsfeld (a very bad human being, but this is still good)
> Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.
What I optimise for is to have as many "known unknowns" as possible. I know a concept, process or a tool exists, but don't understand it or know how to do it. But because I know it exists, I won't start inventing it again from scratch when I need it.
Like if one needs to do some esoteric task, they might start figuring it out from scratch. But because the index in my brain contains a link ("known unknown") to a tool/process that makes that specific thing a LOT easier, I can start looking into it more.
Or I might need to do something common like plumbing or some electrical work at home. Do I know how to do that? No. But I Know A Guy I can call, again externalising the knowledge. Either they come over and help me do it or talk me through the process of adjusting the thermostat in my shower faucet (you need to use WAY more force than I was comfortable with without an expert on the phone btw... there are no hidden screws, you just rip the bits off :D)
And we don't need words to think; cognitive problem solving and language processing are separate processes [1]
We will shift the problems we need to think about. Same as always; humanity isn't really solving building stone pyramids. Did we stop thinking? No just thought about a different todo list.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/you-dont-need-wor...
If I am free as “rational I,” then the rational in me, or reason, is free; and this freedom of reason, or freedom of the thought, was the ideal of the Christian world from of old. They wanted to make thinking – and, as aforesaid, faith is also thinking, as thinking is faith – free; the thinkers, the believers as well as the rational, were to be free; for the rest freedom was impossible. But the freedom of thinkers is the “freedom of the children of God,” and at the same time the most merciless – hierarchy or dominion of the thought; for Isuccumb to the thought. If thoughts are free, I am their slave; I have no power over them, and am dominated by them. But I want to have the thought, want to be full of thoughts, but at the same time I want to be thoughtless, and, instead of freedom of thought, I preserve for myself thoughtlessness. If the point is to have myself understood and to make communications, then assuredly I can make use only of human means, which are at my command because I am at the same time man. And really I have thoughts only as man; as I, I am at the same time thoughtless. He who cannot get rid of a thought is so far only man, is a thrall of language, this human institution, this treasury of human thoughts. Language or “the word” tyrannizes hardest over us, because it brings up against us a whole army of fixed ideas. Just observe yourself in the act of reflection, right now, and you will find how you make progress only by becoming thoughtless and speechless every moment. You are not thoughtless and speechless merely in (say) sleep, but even in the deepest reflection; yes, precisely then most so. And only by this thoughtlessness, this unrecognized “freedom of thought” or freedom from the thought, are you your own. Only from it do you arrive at putting language to use as your property. If thinking is not my thinking, it is merely a spun-out thought; it is slave work, or the work of a “servant obeying at the word.” For not a thought, but I, am the beginning for my thinking, and therefore I am its goal too, even as its whole course is only a course of my self-enjoyment; for absolute or free thinking, on the other hand, thinking itself is the beginning, and it plagues itself with propounding this beginning as the extremest “abstraction” (such as being). This very abstraction, or this thought, is then spun out further
- The ego and its own, Max Stirner
Software code is on the other hand extremely formal, and either it works perfectly as intended, it works crappily and keeps breaking in various edge cases or just doesn't work (last 2 are just variants of same dysfunctionality, technically its binary state). There is no scenario where broken code somehow ends up working and delivering, or maybe 1 in trillion, sometimes.
Also the change is so fast that the failure is immediately obvious to everybody, its not gradual change of thinking over few decades/generations.
LLMs are getting impressive, but anybody claiming there is no massive long term harm to getting to what we call now proper seniority is... don't know, delusional, junior who never walked that long and hard-won path, doing PR for llms at all costs or some other similar type. Or simply has some narrow use case working great for them long term which definitely can't be transferred on whole industry, like 1-man indie game dev.
Because the easier path seemingly delivers what's expected of them. Sigh, they may even be demanded to take the faster path.
I've seen many junior unable to walk that necessary path before LLMs were a thing.
Quoting my boy Max Stirner who also fking hated these guys
“This war is opened by Socrates, and not until the dying day of the old world does it end in peace.“ - The Ego and its Own, Max Stirner
Combine this argument with the fact that LLMs are reliant on what information they've ingested; they'll only give you responses based on what already exists. The creativity needed to make something (worth making) is missing there. You'd hope that the humans using the AI fill that role, but comments like this one and others lauding praises on AI and vibe-coding give me serious doubt. We could argue instead that SWE is a misnomer for this field, but that's a separate conversation.
In my opinion, SWE should prioritize true innovation, which AI isn't designed for. (IMO, AI is better suited for fast info lookup rather than key production tasks) Without creativity in SWE, the industry bloats to a unsustainable mass of cloned/useless apps and startups just hoping to be eaten (bought) by a bigger fish, with investors/customers repeatedly being promised "something better is right around the corner!" ...and it just never comes, and the whole thing just collapses on itself.
Will large scale construction projects ever be started with AI made blueprints?
There's probably more to the whole engineering discipline, soft- and hardware, than you give it credit for here.
To be comparable, they would have to go through the same university degree and professional certification, instead of doing a JavaScript training and call themselves software engineers instead of coders.
They are getting the blueprints from architects and senior devs, and putting those bricks into place, and carrying buckets.
and that's bc SE education FAILED BADLY... almost nothing of what's useful is thought in schools and nothing of what's thought is useful
instead of FIXING education and theory, software engineering marched on forcefully without it
now we need to go back and properly fix education, because an intern should absolutely be required to have the "advanced" skills that we imagine in our deluded minds that only "10+ ys of industry experience" should confer, and that are absolutely required to be even a junior AI-augmented SE
SE/CS education should be rethought from scratch to distill, purify, and teach in 3ys max the concepts that used to be acquired through 10-30ys of experience - it 100% CAN be done, and we should wake tf up and DO IT instead of complaining about it - "advanced enterprise systems" architecture require nothing more than mid-highschool math and can be thought on symulated systems in sem 1 of year 1, it's just some of the "teachers" would have to actually put in the 80hrs-weeks of work to do it in due time
Nowadays we don't build bridges to suit the site, we choose sites to accommodate bridges that we basically build identically via a few designs.
Connecting back to s/w AI can do the standard stuff ok as long as you test around the outside of it, so you might want to hone your judgment about how you build systems so it uses the stuff AI can do well, vs "building for the site". The gains are productivity. The losses are efficiency (the problem must go through some extra steps to meet the process where it works). Same as any engineering problem at scale.
It's not by writing syntax that you get there. It's by creating software and gaining the experience of seeing it go wrong.
"Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement."
AI just shortens the cycle without needing to type out syntax, so you get even more iterations, faster, and learn the lessons more quickly.
Some do not learn from that experience. They were never going to learn without AI either.
Writing syntax is still an important part of the experience. It is valuable because it requires you to spend time immersed in the nuts and bolts that hold software together. I'd compare it to cooking, if you have an assistant or a machine do everything and you never actually touch a knife or stir a pot, you'll lose your touch. But there is also something valuable about covering more ground and the additional experience that brings.
But the larger scale system design is stronger than ever. Today, distributed systems, version control, including branching, stacked PRs etc., VMs/containers, idempotency, multimaster ACID databases, all of these things were probably never achievable in the world when the best devs had to spend their time poring over assembly language every day. Losing that skill allowed them more time to build other ones!
i don't understand all this fear projected as if people won't have agency of learning just because LLMs make it easier to do certain things. i don't think it's contradictory at all. half the people here will never have to wrangle the bullshit i dealt with 20 years ago and i'm sure when i was dealing with it there was another 20 years of bullshit before me lol.
if you vibe code your app with no regard for the underlying code you will pay the price for it at some point in the future, anybody worth their salt will slow down enough to figure it out the "artisanal" way.
I think this extends to other parts of life, too. I still remember that I fondly played a game over and over again back in high school, when I did not have the Internet and had to borrow CDs from my friends — but when I went into the university and had access to pretty much every game freely on the Intranet, I rarely do that anymore. That’s why I always think an abundance of X may not be the best option for me. That’s why probably includes money, too.
Engineers sucked then as much as they suck now
Well this is true, but that doesn't mean that there isn't any other way to acquire this knowledge. Until now, this way of gaining deeper understanding was simply the most practical one, since you needed to write lots of code when starting out as a software engineer.
But it's just as well possible to gain knowledge about useful abstractions and clean code by using AI to do the work. You'll find out after a while which codebases get you stuck and which code abstractions leverage your AI because it needs fewer tokens to read and extend your codebase.
Study of senior drafter "red lines": what and why they changed the initial drawing, RFI response etc. Reverse engineering good work. Failed design studies etc.
SWE equivalents: PRs, code review, studying high quality codebases (guess what: LLMs are amazing at helping here), pair programming (learning why what the LLM did was wrong, how to improve it, etc), customer support, debugging prod incidents, studying post mortems etc
We don't hire juniors and throw them boilerplate and tiny bugs while expecting them to learn along the way ad hoc through some pair programming and the occasional deep end. We give them specific tasks and studies that develop their domain understanding and taste, actively support and mentor them, and expect them to drive some LLMs on the side to solve simple issues that still need human eyes on it.
Is that generally the case though? I'm about two years into my first job in the industry and that's exactly my experience, and certainly frustrating...
Even in a world where there's a lot of AI generated code there can still be people that have enough exposure to doing hard things. Definitely at this point in time where AI can't really do all those hard things anyways - but even after it'll be able to.
you are thinking too myopically.
We have people who can still do maths well after the introduction of the calculator. We have people who can still spell after the introduction of spell check.
The junior only need to train without using AI to gain the skills needed - that's called education. If they choose to rely on AI solely, and gimp their own education, that's on them.
Of course there are people who do maths after the introduction of the calculator Just like there are more people who program after the introduction of the electronic computer.
I assume by "do maths" you mean doing simple calculations, like adding a bunch of small numbers, in one's head. That's because in many situations it's more convenient to do so, than using a calculator. So the skill is preserved / practiced, because a calculator is too cumbersome to use. The skills of most people settle at the equilibrium where it takes the same effort to take out the calculator and focus on typing, as it would to strain the brain doing it without a calculator.
> We have people who can still spell after the introduction of spell check.
When using spell check to fix your document, you automatically learn to spell. Your skills improve by using the tool. A better analogy to AI would be an email client with a "Fix all and send"-button, where you never look at the output of the spell checker.
Both require manual "labor" which leads to learning.
Also to note. Calculators merely solve intermediary steps. LLMs are increasingly designed to do a one shot full blown work. Longer context, deep thinking, agentic loops.
In practice, what this means is that you can read some subject many times, but you would still struggle to reproduce the content by yourself. That is why, when learning, it is not sufficient to just read the material several times.
Arithmetics is a very, very small subset of math.