[ang_cire]

> "but if we don't know how to shoe our own horses any more because we got cars, soon nobody will know how to shoe horses!"

No, this would be more akin to saying, "if we don't know how to change our car's oil anymore because we have a robot that does it, soon nobody will know, while still being reliant on our cars."

For your analogy to work, we would have to be moving away from code entirely, as we moved away from horses.

> It means that I never need to write tests any more. If I do need to write tests, for some reason (maybe because the LLM is bad at it) then I won't forget how to!

Except that once you forget, you now would have to re-learn it, and that includes potentially re-learning all the pitfalls and edge cases that aren't part of standard training manuals. And you won't be able to ask someone else, because now they all don't know either.

tl;dr coding is a key job function of software developers. Not knowing how to do any key part of your job without relying on an intermediary tool, is a very bad thing. This already happens too much, and AI is just firing the trend into the stratosphere.

[stavros]

> we don't know how to change our car's oil anymore because we have a robot that does it

OK, are we worried that all the robots will somehow disappear? Why would I have to change my own oil, ever, if the robot did it as well as I did? If it doesn't do it as well as I did, I'm still doing it myself.

[ang_cire]

> OK, are we worried that all the robots will somehow disappear?

No, you should be worried that you (or devs who come later, who never had to 'change the oil'/ write tests themselves) won't know if the robot has done it right or not, because if you can't do the work, you can't validate the work.

And the robot isn't an employee, it's just a tool you the employee use, so when you are asked whether the test was coded correctly, all you'd be able to say with your 'atrophied' test-writing skills is, "I think so, the AI did it". See the issue now?

> If it doesn't do it as well as I did, I'm still doing it myself.

I thought your unnecessary skill atrophied and was forgotten ? How are you going to do it yourself? How do you know you're still as good at it as you once were?

[stavros]

> See the issue now?

No. I use a calculator, and I don't have to second-guess it. It just works. If it didn't work reliably, I would use it.

> I thought your unnecessary skill atrophied and was forgotten ?

Again, either I didn't need to do it because the AI did it well, and I forgot the skill, or it never did it well, I always did it myself, and I never forgot it. I don't understand why you're assuming that the AI will do it well enough at first that I'll forget how it's done, and that it will then somehow get bad at it so I'll have to start doing it myself again.

[ang_cire]

A pro baseball player can tell if someone is throwing a baseball well by watching them do it. Baseball training camps like pitching workshops often bring in pro players to coach new players on technical points of pitching.

If those pro players go 10 years without ever pitching a ball, they'll still know all the rote technical details on an academic/ theoretical level, but their actual pitching ability will have diminished, because skills are perishable. Coding is a skill.

Observing someone else code is not practice for coding yourself, and will not maintain (nevermind improve on) your coding skills.