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Comment by arkh | Hacker News Reader

> I think it's weakening junior engineers' reasoning and coding abilities as they become reliant on it without having lived for long, or at all, in the before times.

Same as StackOverflow, same as Google, same as Wikipedia for students.

The problem is not using the tools, it's what you do with the result. There will always be lazy people who will just use this result and not think anymore about it. And then there will always be people who will use those results as a springboard to what to look for in the documentation of whatever tool / language they just discovered thanks to Cursor.

You want to hire from the second category of people.

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Quantity has a quality all it’s own.

That is to say, as we strive for better and better tools along a single axis, at some point the social dynamics shift markedly, even though it’s just “more of the same”. Digital distribution was just better distribution, but it changed the very nature of journalism, music, and others. Writing on computers changed writing. And the list goes on.

“This is just the next thing in a long line of things” is how we technologists escape the disquieting notion that we are running more and more wild social experiments.

> Same as StackOverflow, same as Google, same as Wikipedia for students.

Is it though?

If I used stack overflow, for example, I still needed to understand the code well enough to translate it to my specific codebase, changing variable names at the very least.

This is not the same. Because SO, google etc require actual research, introspection, prompting AI does not.

You're describing superficial behavior -- akin to taking the first match on Google or SO and saying that people are only doing that regarding AI prompts.

Good prompting _does_ require engagement and, for most cases, some research, just like SO or Google.

Sure, you can throw out idle or lazy queries. The results will be worse generally.

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