Comment by ithkuil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ithkuil | Hacker News Reader

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> The fact that millions of people are now using them, with varying degrees of success for various reasons, is a testament of this.

I do agree with you that by design this new tool lowers the bar to entry etc.

But I just want to state the obvious: billions of kids are playing with a ball; it's not that hard. Yet far less people are good soccer players.

> The goal is to replace all cognitive work. Just because this is not entirely possible today, doesn't mean that it won't be tomorrow. > [..] > I'm of the opinion that this goal is unachievable with the current tech generatiom > [..] > In the meantime, your own skills will continue to atrophy the more you rely on this tech [..]

Here I don't quite follow.

I agree that if this tech is ready to completely replace you, you won't need to use your brain. But provided it is not there yet (like, at all), your intellect is needed quite a lot to get out of it anything more than toys.

The question is: do you benefit from using it or not? can you build faster or better by applying these tools in the appropriate way or should you just ignore it and keep doing things the way things used to be done up until a few months ago?

This is a legit question.

My point is: in order to anwswer this question I cannot base my intuition only on some vague first principles on what this tech stack ought to be able to do, or what other people say it's able to do, or what I suspect it will never be able to do: I need to touch it, to learn how to use it, just like every other tool. That's the only way I can truly get a sensible answer. And like any other skill, I'm fully aware that I can't devote just a few minutes trying it out and then reaching any conclusion.

EDIT: I do share a general concern about how new generations are going to achieve the full-picture understanding if they get exposed to these tools as the main approach towards software production. I come to this after a long career in system programming, so I don't personally see this as a threat to atrophy my own skills; but I do share a quite undefined sense of concern about where this is going

> billions of kids are playing with a ball; it's not that hard. Yet far less people are good soccer players.

I agree, but I don't see how that negates what I said.

Following your analogy, what's currently happening is that kids playing with a ball are now allowed to play in the major leagues. Good soccer players still exist, and their performance has arguably improved as well, but kids are now entering spaces that were previously inaccessible to them. This can be seen as both a good or a bad thing, but I would argue that it will mostly have bad consequences for everyone involved, including the kids.

> The question is: do you benefit from using it or not? can you build faster or better by applying these tools in the appropriate way or should you just ignore it and keep doing things the way things used to be done up until a few months ago?

That's a false dichotomy. I would say that the answer is somewhere in the middle.

These new tools can assist with many tasks, but I'm still undecided whether they're a net long-term benefit. On one hand, sure, they enable me to get to the end result quicker. On the other, I have less understanding of the end result, hence I can't troubleshoot any issues, fix any bugs, or implement new features without also relying on the tool for this work. This ultimately leads to an atrophy of my skills, and a reliance on tools that are out of my control. Even worse: since the tools are far from reliable yet, they provide a false sense of security.

But I also don't think it's wise to completely ignore this technology, and continue working as it didn't exist.

So at this point, the smartest approach to me is conservative adoption. Use vibe coding for things that you don't care about, that won't be published, and will only be used by yourself. Use assisted coding in projects that might be published and have other users, but take time and effort to guide the tool, and understand and review the generated code. Use classical programming for projects you care about, critical software, or when you want to actually learn and improve your skills.

I doubt this approach will be adopted by many, and that's the concerning part, since the software they produce will inevitably be forced on the rest of us.

What's really surprising to me is how many experienced programmers are singing the praises of this new way of working. How what they really enjoy is "building", but find the classical process of "building" tedious. This goes against most of the reasons I got into and enjoy working in this industry to begin with. Delivering working software is, of course, the end goal. But the process itself, pushing electrons to arrange bits in a useful configuration, in a way that is interesting, performant, elegant, or even poetic, learning new ways of doing that and collaborating with like-minded people... all of that is why I enjoy doing this. A tool that replaces that with natural language interactions, that produces the end result by regurgitating stolen data patterns in configurations that are sometimes useful, and that robs me from the process of learning, is far removed from what I enjoy doing.

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