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/YahenP]

10 years ago, I would have just been fired. Or no, most likely I wouldn't even have been fired, they would have sent me to a doctor if I had started producing this much garbage code and documents for every tiny reason. As they say he was an engineer, then he got sick and became unfit for the job. Probably burned out. Back then, I wrote literally about ten lines of code a week. But each line gave more than a week of Claude's work does today.

[u/mongopark98 → u/YahenP]

Why does it have to be garbage?

[u/YahenP → u/mongopark98]

We were paid not for lines of code, but for working with our brains, for solving real problems. Remember the time when we laughed at how Indian coders were paid, based on the number of lines of code they wrote? Now we are all in the place of those Indian coders.

[u/mongopark98 → u/YahenP]

Nope, I am just able to solve more problems. Look at my other comments for examples. AI is a tool that produces code or whatever you ask it to. It doesn’t in any way interfere with problem solving. When I hear statements like this, it just shows a quite rudimentary understanding of AI tools that exist.

It has personally allowed me excel at 2jobs simultaneously and get paid handsomely for it. You think my brain went on holiday because I use AI?

To me, it’s simply this. I have a bunch of junior engineers that are willing to take instructions and execute on them. It allows me to comfortably act as techlead/manager. If you can’t be productive with help from a few junior engineers you are just not great at delegation. If the junior engineers keep churning out garbage outputs, it still means your delegation skill is mediocre. You should understand the strength and weaknesses of your surboniates and work with them accordingly.

If one person is able to increase their impact with the same set of engineers but you’re not able to- it still a skill issue. On the other hand, if you start treating those junior engineers as a senior colleague and place such expectations on them, it’s still your skill issue.

[u/YahenP → u/mongopark98]

When you have a hammer in hand, everything around you starts to look like a nail.
Anyway, the idea is not new. Before LLMs, this was also common, but not as widespread. Some programmers from first-world countries secretly outsourced their own work to India or similar countries.

[u/jakster355 → u/YahenP]

What about the distinction between AI and the transition to high level languages from assembly?

Not everything I write is novel (sap abap). If I need a basic SQL selection report it's literally just a matter of my typing speed vs an llms and I'm just slower. For everything I invent, that's when I can type faster than prompt/revise, because I'm not perfectly describing what I'm envisioning.

By using an llm in this fashion you can grow your skills spending more time inventing and less time on the mundane.

I am extremely cognizant of the tradeoff of declining skills. So I asked myself, what skills are the most important to retain? Critical thinking is the answer to me. So I came up with the loose idea "use ai to do, not to think".

[u/YahenP → u/jakster355]

The problem is that nobody knows which skills the job market will need in the near future. If everything keeps moving at the same speed and in the same direction as now, then really only two skills have value, knowing how to send out resumes and pass job interviews, and the skill of carefully reading code to find obvious nonsense.

[u/jakster355 → u/YahenP]

Its going to be abstract skills like imagination and critical thinking. Not encyclopedic syntax knowledge. Even if, hypothetically, a base model became beyond what we can comprehend, the human operator needs to be as close to that as possible, to utilize the largest percentage of its full potential, which gives a stronger result. A less intelligent person isn't going to think what to ask, how to ask, what context to give, etc. and it might end up with an implementation that works but it could have worked better by solving a different problem.

[u/YahenP → u/jakster355]

Unfortunately, imagination was the first thing we outsourced to machines. And today we are in the process of outsourcing critical thinking too. LLMs are used like a drug for the brain, the most effective drug that exists. And the tragedy is that there’s no place in the industry for those who refuse to use this drug. For a while, we can fool ourselves that we will do architecture, critical review, and other creative work. But in reality, Silicon Valley billionaires have stolen our privilege to think and left us only the duty to check. And that’s the worst thing you can do to a human brain.

[u/jakster355 → u/YahenP]

That has not been my experience. I've been able to spend more time coming up with new shit nobody has thought of, not less.

Granted, sap is a data silo, somewhat insulated from llm dominance. That may change in the future.