In theory wouldn’t atrophied coding skills not matter if models are sufficiently good at coding? I mean isn’t whats left just design and architecture and testing?
Sure, if LLMs are producing shit code you need to have an understanding of what it should do instead. But I think that day is already gone.
Its hard to think of a skill that you’d need to build with an LLM that requires writing meaningful amounts of code by oneself. From my end all the complexity is business logic and system design.
No, because good understanding of design comes from programming experience. Atrophied skills mean you lose touch with the actual nuts and bolts of what you are building.
This is also the worst kind of lock-in you can imagine, by outsourcing all of your understanding of a codebase and your skills you are now completely at the mercy of LLM providers. Even if you switch to open weight models you're at the mercy of graphics cards producers and scalpers.
> Sure, if LLMs are producing shit code you need to have an understanding of what it should do instead. But I think that day is already gone.
Maybe your standards are too low. By my standard, they still produce shit code and require lots of iterations to get reasonable designs (I often end up just rewriting the bits that are obviously wrong rather than trying to figure out how to "prompt engineer" the right output).
They do often produce passable code but my experience is the longer you spend reading the code the more things you find wrong with it, almost like an uncanny valley.
At least that's my experience with Opus and Fable. Maybe it's too old-fashioned at this point to complain about code quality, but I find it very strange how many people have started proclaiming that their code quality is good.
“Programming” is a bit loaded. Do you mean thinking through and typing everything out yourself?
What design skills specifically can you only develop from continually programming in this way? I fully grant that you need to know how to code yourself to build things with models but what specific ability to use models atrophies alongside your no AI coding abilities?
Personally I’ve found the opposite to be true. As writing out code myself has shrank to nearly 0, I now do way more designing. There is a much shorter feedback loop on design now. You get a lot better at design when thats basically all you are doing, and seeing feedback on your design in minutes rather than weeks or even months.
Weeks and month for to wait for a feedback in developing software? Are you the sloth in zootopia?
The longest cycle for feedback for me has only been hours. And that was about redesigning the core architecture of an app. Otherwise, it’s like 10 minutes cycle if it’s edit-compile-run, 5 minutes if it’s REPL (lisp, bash, python,…).
As I write code myself I continously take into consideration stuff like following the consistency of the entire design, whether what I'm doing is efficient, etc. LLMs are terrible at this and I don't see how you could develop such skills by prompting only.
For example, I would never produce designs that require degenerate db access patterns (linear scans, etc.). Everything I write myself always takes into account using db & network efficiently from the ground-up. Every query is an index lookup, every api request is rate limited, everything is batched and cached, so on and so forth.
LLMs meanwhile don't care about any of this. I just had Claude happily try to fetch youtube page html because the api didn't expose something. Great idea, I'd love to be banned by google for scraping.
Designing with performance in mind is black magic too, I need to notice myself that stuff that I think has no reason to be slow (pretty much nothing does) is slow and hammering the llm to finally come up with a non-stupid design that's not ridiculously slow and wasteful. Yeah, why don't we pull 2.3mb of html to update a list, sounds good.
The best part is, LLMs are very obedient. If you tell them to make you a design that's inherently wasteful of resources and slow they will happily oblige, and since you have no programming experience to know better, you won't even know how bad what you're asking for is.
You don't expect everyone to stop wanting to do those just because they can be automated more or less effectively, right?
Please reread my comment and the one im replying to. That’s not what I’m addressing.
I am begging HN users to understand that some people enjoy writing software themselves
Agents make it too easy to gloss over too much. They're great at work where i care about productivity but I've zero interest at home where the point is learning and having fun