Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by notepad0x90 148 days ago
What skills are atrophying that would be useful in the future?

If you're letting LLMs do more than assisting, don't. That's my advice. But if like you're title they're just assisting you, then what skills are atrophying? You still review the code and understand it right? You still second guess the LLMs proposed solutions and look for better approaches right?

Articulating how LLM assistance is different than junior programmers writing code and assisting would be useful, everyone has different setups and workflows, so it's hard to say in my opinion.

3 comments

Let's say you want to make an architectural change. There are two options:

1. Ask AI to come up with the different options and let you review it

2. You think about the options and ask AI for feedback

#1 is much faster but results in atrophy (you are not critically coming up with the architecture changes)

#2 uses your and AI skills but it's gonna be slower.

which one will you choose? currently i'm doing #1

I agree... I think the process of coming to a conclusion yourself is different than having that solution proposed to you and accepting it.
> What skills are atrophying that would be useful in the future?

Well for once, tech companies are still at large hiring via leetcode/livecoding interviews. I feel much less prepared now that I was a year ago.

Were you really using anything in your day to day work that had any relevance to preparing for tech interviews?
In my experience, many heavy LLM users do not review their own code. They'll blindly open PRs full of slop, making it the reviewer's problem.