[nerptastic]

This is what I’m noticing. At my workplace, we have 3 or 4 non-devs “writing” code. One was trying to integrate their application with the UPS API.

They got the application right, and began stumbling with the integration - created a developer account, got the API key, but in place of the applications URL, the had input “localhost:5345” and couldn’t get that to work, so they gave up. They never asked the tech team what was wrong, never figured out that they needed to host the application. Some of the fundamental computer literacy is the missing piece here.

I think (maybe hopeful) people will either level up to the point where they understand that stuff, or they will just give up. Also possible that the tools get good enough to explain that stuff, so they don’t have to. But tech is wide and deep and not having an understanding of the basic systems is… IMO making it a non-starter for certain things.

[animuchan]

What I see in the workplace is, people specifically outsource decisions to LLM. It tries to flag and explain all sorts of landmines, it really sometimes does, but the prompt is "make it work" and "be relentless", and the operator is barely even looking at the (conversational) output of the LLM, just the code (or other file) they asked for.

This is another difference to a largely organic developer: the ability to refuse a massively damaging or stupid task.