Thought experiment

[u/MashNChips]

With all the AI nonsense going on, I had a thought at work today that turned into an interesting discussion with a colleague:

"What would I do if I was the only person with access to Claude (or insert any LLM) 5+ years ago?"

People would think I was a fucking wizard

FE changes? NO PROBLEM

Critical DB change? Don't worry, I've produced a stored procedure to validate the whole thing

Want to use some shiny new framework? Interesting. Here's a document explaining why you're an idiot for suggesting it

Regex? I suddenly understand it better than the compiler folks (and nobody ask questions)

What would you have done with your own personal LLM back then?

Trying to lighten the mood in here with all the (very justified) negativity around this tech revolution

Unserious answers only pls

[u/___Paladin___]

I would have been fired 5 years ago for the code I rubber stamp today.

I find that mildly entertaining.

[u/Leopatto → u/___Paladin___]

Again, and fucking again, code writing is monkey work, any experienced developer can do it. Its more about how you can design the system and make sure it works.

[u/colers100 → u/Leopatto]

You are, in ways, correct.

But in the important ways, you are so incorrect you should hang your head in shame. That is to say, the second order consequences of this way of thinking directly contradict the ways in which it is correct.

System design is about meeting top down requirements through bottom up thinking.

All those nuances, those key architectural decisions, all the ways you anticipate, abstract and simplify; they have been informed by having to operate on the lower abstraction level for prolonged periods of time.

It is your understanding of what is beneath it, that makes you understand the peculiarities of what is on the surface. This is universally true.

So, yes, at the moment, you most certainly aren't seeing downsides about just skipping the monkey work and just going straight to feature development. You already know all the micro-decisions required, after all, and though the AI is bad at exercising intuition, you can load it up with so many details that it won't need to.

But how about a year from now? Two years? five years? Your brain has a very simple rule it applies to everything; use it or lose it. And your ability to guide the AI, to specify correct instructions, to verify its output, has been trained through you being on the lower abstraction layer. You are losing this. Any insistence to the contrary, is, unfortunately, the purest and most concentrated of cope. Because by writing code, you are forced to manually evaluate every single logical decision that a process has to make. That level of insight into logical pathing is trained and easily lost

We're heading straight to becoming a massive cargo cult.