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by p1esk 70 days ago
This is true in many industries. Try to build a house without tools.
2 comments

That's why AI isn't really a tool here. You can buy a new drill. If you replace all your house builders with a house factory then you're utterly reliant on the company that makes the factory.
AI coding assistants haven’t been available for very long. If someone forgot how to write code manually already then they have bigger problems.

I don’t think the house factory analogy makes sense for multiple reasons. I subscribe to multiple LLM providers and switch between them all day. I could sign up for a dozen more to provide GLM 5.1 if I wanted to as well. I can even run lesser models locally on my machine.

This is nothing like a single factory because I can switch to a new provider in minutes with a credit card.

Or you can code without AI you know? If the company that makes the factory goes down you can fall back to the previous method.
The claim is that some people have deskilled so rapidly that they actually can't. Or maybe they're new and never learned the old way.
Yeah, completely analogous. Physical tools aren't subscription-based and prone to outages. Except when they are, but that's – luckily – still something that people feel strongly negative about.

And if my IDE or compiler (or computer!) stopped working because it requires a connection to the mothership I'd be livid. But I guess the cloud-everything, subscription-everything model has successfully made people accept an objectively worse world.