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Comment by marjann | Hacker News Reader

The rise of tools like Cursor reminds me of the Industrial Revolution in France. When machines first appeared in factories, unskilled workers who didn’t understand how they operated often got injured - sometimes quite literally losing fingers. But for skilled craftsmen, these machines became force multipliers, dramatically increasing productivity and improving overall living standards.

The same applies to software development. If you lack the fundamentals - how memory, I/O, networking, and databases work - you’re at risk of building something fragile that will break under real-world conditions. But for those who understand the moving parts, tools like Cursor supercharge efficiency, allowing them to focus on high-level problem-solving rather than boilerplate coding.

Technology evolves, but the need for deep knowledge remains. Those who invest in learning the craft will always have the advantage.

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> When machines first appeared in factories, unskilled workers who didn’t understand how they operated often got injured - sometimes quite literally losing fingers.

Factories were extremely dangerous because the machines had no safety measures. And they continued to be dangerous, for everybody skilled or not, until the introduction of workers rights, regulations and enforced safety measures and protocols.

> But for skilled craftsmen, these machines became force multipliers, dramatically increasing productivity and improving overall living standards.

Skilled craftsmen continued working as they traditionally did so much so that up to today it is possible to find craftsmen that use traditional tools.

> Those who invest in learning the craft will always have the advantage.

I agree with your conclusion, thou.

I like your comparison. A related thought: what should be really valuable right now for Cursor, Windsurf etc is figuring out who the skilled users are and further training their models based on their usage. In fact, actively courting skilled devs would give them very high quality data to finesse the tools further.

If I could honestly say I was any good at coding I'd be using this as an argument for unlimited free access to these platforms!

Well it’s a good point that proves at least two things. First in the industrial world machine have not yet replaced man after decades. Still a force multiplier.

The second point is the one who control « what » produces value wins it all. In France we had amazing industries and some were deported offshore. Maybe some genius thought that only the brain mattered. Now countries have to rely on other countries to build or make products evolve and those countries can make their own products now and can charge us whatever they want (I’m simplifying) because we don’t know how to build things anymore, tools and craftsmanship is gone and not learned anymore. I feel the article pin points exactly the main idea behind AI : who will have control and who will be able to decide that the API price can be x100 ? If no one knows how to code, that is very dangerous and what happened in the industrial world shows it’s dangerous. Companies have an endgame of power and as a developer deciding to not learn or delegate my know how makes me at mercy in the end

> machine have not yet replaced man after decades

When I look at fields like car manufacturing, which is mostly robotic, it seems that nowadays humans are force multipliers for machines rather than the other way around.

Yeah but there isn’t one self operating supply chain that makes cars. We make more cars of ship them faster.

The day machines 100% replaced humans throughout the industries it will be an other problem because capitalism is built upon the premise that man is paid because he brings value. Once that’s over and you don’t have money the things you’ll consume less are the nice to have so whole countries might be in trouble. So either we all be able to bring other kinds of values, either the system will have to change not to collapse ?

But the usual way of learning the craft is broken. Experienced developers will now work with AI instead of hiring junior developers. Some exceptional individuals might still learn on their own, but the path from junior to senior, learning by doing, could vanish. That's my worry.

> Some exceptional individuals might still learn on their own

And people with money/means. Children of software engineers may be able to learn the profession easier than others. The same goes for children with affluent parents that can pay for many years of education.

It seems a retreat back to a more medieval economy that excludes large parts of society.

The free content to learn how to code is still available on the Internet and it won't go away.

SE is one of the few professions that one can _learn_ for free, by themselves.

It could take longer than going into a fancy university, and it won't open corporate doors as easily, but basically anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can learn SE.

Probably too B&W. But I’ve had a lot of discussion about this recently and the general consensus is that there’s something to it—especially developers who just got into the field solely because it’s where they thought the money was.

And what's wrong with that?

I'm not making a judgment, just describing a dynamic a lot of people claim to be seeing. One can reasonably assume that the most junior tier (for whatever combination of education, genuine interest, etc.) could potentially feel the impact most to the degree that LLMs really do have a disparate impact on junior people. It's a continuum of course. There are plenty of competent people who enter many fields because it's a job.

I'm also at least somewhat cautious about making "passion" (or whatever) a prerequisite for working in general.

You’re right, many, many people choose the path of least resistance to learn. Instead of digging a subject it’s easy to see the answer unfold …

As a skilled craftsman I have to say Im underwhelmed.

It's not that theyre not useful at all it's just that they look more like a step change dressed up as a revolution.

aye, to me they’re just a different interface to the same information publicly available via a search engine.

for folks who haven’t spent the last 15 years honing their finding out technical information with a search engine craft i can see why they might be useful.

but a search engine won’t sometimes mangle the output and provide an incorrect answer — it only provides a link to the raw data (webpage), rather than trying to create a paragraph of text about it.

i’d rather have access to the raw data guaranteed unmangled. i’m fast enough using that method.

> But for skilled craftsmen, these machines became force multipliers, dramatically increasing productivity

Until they eventually and inevitably got injured themselves. Factories were just dangerous (and still are in many many places around the world).

    > But for skilled craftsmen, these machines became force multipliers, dramatically increasing productivity and improving overall living standards.

I don't know if I agree with this line of thought (is there evidence this is true?). Once you have a metal press, you precisely no longer need a blacksmith skilled at swinging a hammer; in fact, all you need is someone that can be trained to read the manual and follow the instructions -- the exact opposite of a skilled tradesman.

I do think it is like an industrialization of software engineering[0], but I don't think it favors the skilled craftsman; rather it shifts the sets of skills required and focuses more on reading code rather than writing.

[0] https://coderev.app/blog/ais-coming-industrialization-of-cod...

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