[sanderjd]

I think I would have felt this way when I was younger. But after writing code for over twenty years, I'm very happy to let computers do the boring half of the thinking, so that I can think about more interesting things.

It is not intellectually stimulating for me to think about what the syntax for a dict comprehension is, or what exactly I'm supposed to do to map over the values of an array in javascript without screwing it up, or any of a million other kinds of minutia. Computers know the answers to these uninteresting questions.

[shanusmagnus]

That's what's been so striking for me -- the stuff that is fun and playful for me I get to do; and a bunch of stuff that I hated I can now offload, with the net result that I get to work at the level of abstraction that is most interesting and most human, vs acting like a human robot trying to unearth documentation, API examples, etc.

There's no question about this being the right way to use it for me, but I wonder if this could introduce something bad for someone just starting out, who hadn't first got all the reps with the drudgery over decades? Still mulling on that.

[sanderjd]

Yeah, I've said a bunch that I'm worried about people starting out from scratch. So much of what I do after I get responses from LLMs is best described as "taste", but how would I have developed that taste without the years of slogging through?

But I also think this is probably just a classic geezer's concern about kids being on my lawn, and it will probably work out just fine for these youths :)

[jprete]

Eh. I think the peak of computer ability was GenX. I’m not in that group but made up for it with sheer intensity. If you grow up on a phone you’re not getting any of the mental modeling to get close to what the machine is doing and you’re only going to be able to work with the limited tools of that level until you deliberately dive deeper.

[shanusmagnus]

I think both you and the GP are onto something important. I am one of the vaunted Gen-Xers (this is the first time someone has said anything nice about us, so thanks) and there is something to the idea that my understanding of systems goes down to assembly language (fully) and even CPU architecture (very sketchily) all the way up to, like, web frameworks. So for the stuff I'm usually doing, I understand several layers up and down, and that often seems valuable.

This strikes me as the essence of expertise, the difference between talking to someone who's read a book or a review paper, vs someone who is a real expert at that thing. You can be quite competent and insightful from having done a modest amount of reading and thinking, but if you're seeing the Matrix, and know how all these forces are interacting with each other, that's just a whole other level. It makes an impression when you brush up against it.

However: it always weighs on me how this is all a matter of framing. Like, I don't know the electronics. There's a level of metal that I don't get. Some of the really high-level stuff is now beyond me, too. I catch myself saying "I should really take x {weeks, months, years} and really grok that." And yet my actual experience suggests this is a mirage.

More briefly: there are always more layers for a fuller understanding. It's hard to see how many of them are really useful. Maybe the kid who is 10x better than me at LLM collaboration will benefit more than from having a deeper stack. It's interesting to ponder how these different consequences will play out.

[sanderjd]

FWIW I'm a (geriatric) millennial, and we were totally taught all that same stuff. And yeah, it totally feels important to me to have this mental model up and down the layers. But I also do wonder whether we're just wrong about that, merely falling prey to nostalgia.

My messy answer is that for many projects it's either neutral or an actual hindrance - I have to remind myself to pragmatically not care about stuff that won't matter for years at the project's expected growth rate - but for other projects it's very useful. I think the way to go is to seek out those kinds of projects, in order to avoid frustration all around.

[shanusmagnus]

Always important to be on guard for things amenable to self-congratulation. At least, I sure need to be on guard against it :)

[jprete]

I think a lot of the drudgery is lack of language quality. But this is still a better argument than I’ve seen before for using it.

[sanderjd]

I dunno, I've used all kinds of languages, from the ones people often consider lower quality to the ones people often consider higher quality, and they all have something like this.

And maybe there's some as yet unexplored design space out there for which this isn't true, but my prior is that we're actually just circling around some essential complexity at the core of the problem, which will never be eliminated.

[breckenedge]

It takes programming back to the pseudocode experience, but now the computer can fill in all the code bits really well about 75% of the time

[sanderjd]

Yeah, 75% seems a bit high, but it's a high enough percentage to be extremely useful to me.