AskHN:How do you handle skill atrophy from using coding agents? It's impossible to retain a skill if you dont use it. I've reached a point where I use AI exclusively for all tasks, because it's far faster and efficient to do so.
What kind of activities do you do to retain cognitive skills? |
It persists in asking questions at deeper levels until you arrive at the answer yourself. This forces you to think hard about a problem, and this effort helps with understanding, learning and retention. Of course I made a Socratic-quiz skill for this, to use with any coding agent or similar:
https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/plugins-detai...
For example I’ve used this to better understand counter-intuitive things about diabetes/insulin, dopamine and motivation, catching up with a codebase, Claude’s implementations, etc (to combat so-called cognitive debt).
Strong LLMs are surprisingly good at this type of quizzing, they display a semblance of “theory of mind”.
As someone who is and always has been a very unapologetic skeptic, I am still surprised by the number of capable people who can't accept that things are changing.
It can't be either none of it matters, or all of it matters. The truth lies in the middle somewhere.
Harness engineering is a skill insofar as it's not a trivial engineering problem. It's not super hard to get a simple one running, but an effective one can be quite in depth.
What I do to compensate:
- make it my duty to own every change, i.e. cognitively debt-free:
- write summaries on every new thing I do (blog post, memo to colleague)
- contribute documentation to the open-source projects I rely on
- practice for CKA/CKAD certificates which require pre-LLM muscle memory
- build interactive learning material for what I’m trying to learn
- work with things that LLMs don’t yet trivially solve
- repeat or reconstruct my recipes to perfect workflows,
As if for example someone's skill lessened if they switched from assembly to a higher level programming language over time (like, does it matter?)
If you for some reason had to go back and program more manually, then you could do so as the need arises
Otherwise, LLMs appear to be here to stay and you don't actually need those skills that are even possibly admittedly "atrophying"
I guess we'd need a detailed pinpointing of what skills exist or existed and to identify if they actually ateophy (I guess I'm not sure if skills are really atrophying, or even if they are if it matters)
Edit: here's an idea or exercise or projects to work on. Maybe people should find clear documentation of pre-AI processes in case you need to go back and learn them. Or create such documentation if it doesn't exist (which would be an exercise to practice your skills to make you remember them).
There is a meta-argument about whether companies should interview about hand-coding anymore, but... the skills do atrophy. I've been mixing hand-coding into my routines ever since to try to keep those skills lukewarm. I'm not yet sure if I am wasting my time doing so or not.
$0.02
In my personal life, I am making tools to support hobbies. I typically tackle architecture and design myself and sanity check with an LLM, then Codex does all the programming work.
I'm more interested in making sure the apps I make have the content I want and functionally meets my needs than actually writing the code myself. Making fine detail tweaks are not something I need to do past review and pointing them out to to the LLM.
I think they’re wrong, but also that even if they were right I wouldn’t give money to some assholes that stole every book, movie, piece of art, and published line of code. To me it seems clear that a company “forcing you to use AI because efficiency” is exactly the same as “welcome our new external team you’ll be interfacing with! They’ll write that pesky code.” Fuck that, I’d bail, I can read the writing on the wall.
Also these AI data center pricks want to drink up all the water and make us compete on our power bills with Google and Microsoft. That sucks. They suck.
You can watch your coworkers de-skill themselves in real time. Why would you not want that? Less competition - if you think it’s still a valuable skill.
I do.
Either you are doing something guiding the AI or you are in your hammock doing nothing. If you’re in a hammock find a crossword puzzle.