Hacker News Reader

Comment by antihero | Hacker News Reader

It’s good but I kinda disagree with them stuck issue. Getting stuck is frustrating and having an easy way to get unstuck seems good.

However, the skill of having to try many different things and have patience and deal with an unproductive day and sleep in stuff, being able to pull yourself out of a hole, bootstrap deeper understanding in times when you feel helpless…it’s character building and incredibly valuable.

I feel like AI will allow people to have less resolve and determination, like looking at the crossword answers.

View on HN

Yes, but they're still going to encounter those moments, just at different points.

The same way we never stopped encountering "Wait, what the hell?" moments when we had the internet and could search for problems instead of digging through textbooks or --help, they'll just run into those blocking moments at a higher level of abstraction, then have to backtrace the problem down to the level they need to understand to resolve the issue. Curious people continue to be rewarded with a higher ceiling, but the floor to get something functional is brought down.

The alternative is that AI just deletes software engineering as a discipline and everything gets vibecoded, which still seems unlikely even if the improvements continue to accelerate.

So even if the improvements continue to accelerate, even when you get to a point when an agent not just codes but also designs, optimizes for complexity and maintainability, you don't think software engineering as a human discipline gets deleted?

Yeah. I have worked with people who have a very low threshold for struggling and reach out the moment something isn't obvious. They never learn anything. They can go for years and years never growing or improving in any way.

The problem is AI lowers all barriers to reaching out. Previously you'd have to ask a real person, which might be embarrassing. I do wonder if I would have struggled as much if I didn't have to. I look at what's happened to people's bodies when they no longer have to do physical labour and I wonder if the same thing will happen to their minds.

The struggle is necessary to grow, sure. But we're free to choose and upgrade our struggles. After calculators and then computers, struggle in math levelled up.

I am in a similar position. My son is a talented high school programmer considering colleges. He has expressed Anti AI sentiment to me. This article gives us a useful lens and I appreciated it a lot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com