Ask HN: How to avoid skill atrophy in LLM-assisted programming era? Will technical skill even matter at all? |
Ask HN: How to avoid skill atrophy in LLM-assisted programming era? Will technical skill even matter at all? |
If you're letting LLMs do more than assisting, don't. That's my advice. But if like you're title they're just assisting you, then what skills are atrophying? You still review the code and understand it right? You still second guess the LLMs proposed solutions and look for better approaches right?
Articulating how LLM assistance is different than junior programmers writing code and assisting would be useful, everyone has different setups and workflows, so it's hard to say in my opinion.
1. Ask AI to come up with the different options and let you review it
2. You think about the options and ask AI for feedback
#1 is much faster but results in atrophy (you are not critically coming up with the architecture changes)
#2 uses your and AI skills but it's gonna be slower.
which one will you choose? currently i'm doing #1
Well for once, tech companies are still at large hiring via leetcode/livecoding interviews. I feel much less prepared now that I was a year ago.
Learn to wrangle your agent better than everyone else. Don't rely on the chat too much, break up your project into tasks, learn to use sub-agents.
Learn to use the new tools well.
This tool seems obvious but its message is really that what you prompt is profoundly important.
https://developers.googleblog.com/conductor-introducing-cont...
If you don’t have ideas, spent more time away from the screen, they will come.
Love that, and you stated a fact. Or, rethink other products!
Ask HN 1920: How to avoid losing farrier skills in new automobile era?
Ask HN 1980: How to avoid losing typewriting and shorthand skills in new microcomputer era?
Ask HN 1990: How to avoid losing assembly language skills in new C++ era?
Ask HN 1995: How to avoid losing DOS TUI app dev skills in new Windows era?
Ask HN 2000: How to avoid losing Visual Basic skills in new web application era?
(The answer, btw, is if you are still interested in such niche skills, then you just have to practice on your own, or find a niche product or marketplace).
1996 - C and Fortran on DEC VAX and Stratus VOS mainframes
2001 - C/C++ on PCs and mainframes and starting to work on VB
2006 - JavaScript/C#/some Perl
2011 - C# on Windows ruggedized devices
2016 - .NET Core
2021 - Working as an L5 at AWS (ProServe)
2026 - staff consultant at a 3rd party consulting company. Every single project I’ve done has had Bedrock (AWS service that host most of the popular models) and I constantly have three terminal sessions open - one to run code, one running Codex and the other running Claude.
You're losing if you're handing your brain over to LLMs right now, because companies would prefer to hire someone with more up-to-date coding skills, even if they then force them to use LLMs. So the winning move is to resist using LLMs for as long as possible.
Stop fanboying the industry's attempted commodification of your work, and get back to the basics.
I have no interest in SWE - I focus on other fields. But, LLMs are a complete disaster of a product, as the more you use them the less you are engaging your own brain to tap into the knowledge you have to get shit done and move fast. LLMs are a mirage and the fatal flaw of a human is laziness.
This lack of brain engagement is deadly. People dont realise how tough it is to get back once you've started to lose it. Its akin to the gym and muscles.
2. If you think LLMs cannot help with navigating ambiguity and requirements, you are wrong. it might not be able to 100% crack it (due to not having all the necessary context), but still help a lot.
That stance honestly sound like me not using a compiler and doing everything in assembly like I did 40 years ago in my bedroom in 6th grade on my Apple //e.
I might be an old guy at 51. But I’m not that old guy. I’m the old guy who didn’t have to worry about “ageism” in 2020 when I got my first (and hopefully last ) job at BigTech in 2020, another after looking for two weeks in 2023 (with 3 offers) and another in 2024 when looking just by responding to an internal recruiter - I’m a staff cloud consultant (full time) specializing in app dev.
Not claiming I’m special. But I like to eat, stay clothes and stay housed. I do what it takes
What change are you after?
As far as #2, I came into a large project at my new at the time company last year one week before having to fly out to a customer site. I threw everything I could find about the project into NotebookLM and started asking it questions like I would ask the customer. Tools like Gong are pretty good to at summarizing calls. I agree with you on #2.
I am at a point now where I am the first technical person after sales closes a deal and I lead (larger) projects and do smaller projects myself. But I realize remotely, my coworkers from Latin America are just as good as I am now and cheaper.
I’m working on moving to a sales role when I see the time coming. It’s high touch and the last thing that can’t be taken over.
I would never have trusted any L4 or L5 SWE I met at AWS anywhere near one of my customers (ProServe). But they also wouldn’t let me put code into a repo that ran an AWS service. Fair is fair
If I remember correctly, the leveling guidelines were (oversimplifying).
An L4 should be able to handle a well defined story
An L5 should be able to handle a well defined Epic where the what is known bit not how
An L6 should be able to lead a more ambiguous longer term project made of multiple Epics.
For context, the software developer market in the US is very bimodal, most developers are on the enterprise dev side (including most startups like YC companies). I’m referring to this side - not FAANG and equivalent
By commoditization back then, I knew there was nothing I could do on that side of the market that would let me make more than around $150K-$165K. My plan then was to get on the other side of the market in 2020 after my youngest graduated and out of enterprise dev.
“Commodization” now means too many people chasing too few job. In 2016, I could throw my resume up in the air and get three or four random enterprise dev job offers within less than a month - now not so much.
I discovered AWS belatedly later that year and my thesis was changed to I want to do #1 that you said above - customer focused, using AWS as a tool, and bringing a developer mindset to cloud implementations.
It just magically happened in June 2020 that both felt into my lap - cloud consulting full time opportunity at BigTech (no longer there thankfully).
I personally rarely have been paid for productivity. How fast I can put out features rarely earns me extra money. What people want is someone who understands what they want and finds a way to deliver when we agreed to and spots pitfalls along the way.