I remember as the internet took off and you could just search for things, I thought it made programming too easy. You never had to actually learn how it worked, you can just search for the specific answer and someone else would do the hard work of figuring out how to use the tools available for your particular type of problem.

Over the years, my feelings shifted, and I loved how the internet allowed me to accomplish so much more than I could have trying to figure it all out from books.

I wonder if AI will feel similar.

There's no equivalent mandate for software engineers. Nothing stops you from spending years as a pure "prompt pilot" and losing the ability to read a stack trace or reason about algorithmic complexity. The atrophy is silent and gradual.

The author's suggestion to write code by hand as an educational exercise is right but will be ignored by most, because the feedback loop for skill atrophy is so delayed. You won't notice you've lost the skill until you're debugging something the agent made a mess of, under pressure, with no fallback.

Honestly, I don't really know what to do. I spent my whole life (so far; I'm still very young) falling in love with programming, and now I just don't find this agent thing fun at all. But I just don't know how to find my niche if using LLMs truly does end up being the only way for me to build valuable things with my only skills.

It's pretty depressing and very scary. But I appreciate this article for at least conveying that so effectively...

My biggest lessons were from hours of pain and toil, scouring the internet. When I finally found the solution, the dopamine hit ensured that lesson was burned into my neurons. There is no such dopamine hit with LLMs. You vaguely try to understand what it’s been doing for the last five minutes and try to steer it back on course. There is no strife.

I’m only 24 and I think my career would be on a very different path if the LLMs of today were available just five years ago.

BTW - my coworker is not AI. It is a flesh-and-bones SWE.

This is what I am still grappling with. Agents make more productive, but also probably worse at my job.

How is this any different than building Ikea furniture? If I build my "Minska" cupboard using the step-by-step manual, did I learn something profound?

  > I do read the code, but reviewing code is very different from producing it, and surely teaches you less. If you don’t believe this, I doubt you work in software.

If I am fixing bugs in my own (mostly self-education) programs, I read my program several times, over and over again. If writing programs taught me something, it is how to read programs most effectively. And also how to write programs to be most effectively read.

But I don’t think the answer here is to double down on reading the code and understanding that deeply. We’re rapidly moving past this.

I think the answer is to review the code for very obvious bad choices. But then it’s about proper validation. Check out the app, run the flows, use it for real. Does it _actually_ function?

Or that’s what is working for me. I cannot review all the LOC and I’m starting to feel like I don’t want.

If the LLM is indeed such a master at complex coding tasks that we don't understand, why not ask it some questions about how the code works?

You can even ask directly about the concern. "I am worried that by letting you do everything I am not learning how the system works. Could you tell me more about what you did and how I might think through it if I needed to do it myself?"

Maybe he meant "reviewing code from coding agents"? Reviewing code from other humans is often a great way to learn.

  [...] since I work at an AI lab and stand to gain a great deal if AI follows through on its economic promise.