[abricq]

> ML assistance reduces our performance and persistence, and denies us both the muscle memory and deep theory-building that comes with working through a task by hand: the cultivation of what James C. Scott would call

Imagine being starting university now... I can't imagine to have learned what I did at engineering school if it wasn't for all the time lost on projects, on errors. And I can't really think that I would have had the mental strength required to not use LLMs on course projects (or side projects) when I had deadlines, exams coming, yet also want to be with friends and enjoy those years of your life.

[munificent]

My kids are high school age. It's hard to convey the deep existential dread their generation has about the future.

* They are growing up in a climate that is worse than any prior generation had and getting worse.

* In the US, they are growing up in a time with less upward mobility and more economic inequality than the previous several generations had.

* Trust in social institutions and government is crumbling before their eyes.

* Blue collar jobs are already gone and white collar jobs have no certainty because of AI. Almost all of the money has already been sucked out of artistic professions and what little is left is quickly evaporating because of AI.

Imagine you're 17 like my daughter and trying to decide what to major in in college. You want to pick something that you think is likely to give you some kind of decent career and sense of stability. What do you pick?

Because, I'll tell you, she asks me and I have no fucking idea what to say.

[EvanAnderson]

I'm hearing this from my 12 y/o daughter and it's breaking my heart.

When I was in school (US, Ohio, 48 y/o) we got the "if you don't go to college you'll flip burgers" spiel from our teachers / guidance counselors.

Last week she got a variant of that except the teacher thoughtfully added "and burger flipping will be done by robots so you can't even fall back to that". The teacher threw in a healthy dose of suggesting creative jobs will all be destroyed and that "learning to manage AI" is the only viable future career path.

Trades are what my daughter brought up as a viable career path (and I was proud when she did). She also pointed out her school focuses heavily on "college prep" and is loathe to even mention that trades exist.

Edit:

I'm telling my daughter to lean on her interpersonal skills and charisma, and take every opportunity to lead groups. Being a physically present, inspirational, and effective leader is, I figure, a role that isn't going to go away any time soon.

I didn't go to college (beyond an Associate I grudgingly completed) and I didn't end up "flipping burgers". I concentrated on marketable skills in an industry that was growing, and I leaned into good writing and communication, and entrepreneurship. I've tried to hold this up to her, though I am quick to concede that the world is different now, by a large margin, from when I got started.

[yw3410]

I really don't see why you think trades are insulated; as someone who dabbles in plumbing, plastering and electrical wiring.

A significant amount of demand for both is due to knowledge barriers - and the fact that you need to certify work.

[EvanAnderson]

LLMs aren't going to remove the "moat" that comes from owning specialized tools (sewer and drain cleaning machines, pro-quality welders, etc), and having a procurement and service infrastructure.

Individual property owners who want to dabble already have that option from the myriad YouTube videos available to them (and arguably they're more trustworthy than LLM slop), just as they've had with books and other media in the past. I don't see LLM-based trade "knowledge" as somehow fundamentally different.

Commercial service and construction isn't going to get put out of business any time soon by "dabblers" learning from LLMs.

[yw3410]

I'm not sure where you're based, but having friends who are tradies most of the procurement and service infrastructure isn't owned by them at all.

Putting in a new kitchen or rewiring a house isn't beyond the physical abilities of most people and their customers tend to be the same middle class knowledge workers which AI is expecting to cannibalize.

As to your point about the knowledge being freely available; just as it's easier to ask an LLM about software questions, the same is true for other fields. It might not be accurate, but it doesn't really need to be - it just needs to lower the barrier for people to try.

Basically what I'm saying is that I absolutely expect secondary side effects for the trades if it has a big impact on knowledge workers as well.

[sneak]

> Blue collar jobs are already gone

This isn't true at all. There's never been a better time to be in the trades.

[munificent]

I should have been clearer, but by "blue collar" I was thinking more argriculture and manufacturing. Most of the farm jobs are gone from automation and most of the factory jobs are gone to China.

You're right that the trades are still an option and one my daughter is seriously considering. It's a mixed bag. Those jobs still exist, pay decently, and aren't likely to be taken away by AI soon. But many of them are brutal on your body and the sexism is rampant.

[sneak2]

Stop spam calling people you harasser

[sneak]

I’m not and never have - please contact me directly at the email address in my profile to give me more information about why you think I’m involved in such activities. I’d like to know if someone is joe-jobbing me.

[xienze]

> There's never been a better time to be in the trades.

I imagine it was _slightly_ better when you didn't have to worry about unlimited numbers of illegal immigrants ready and willing to undercut you.

[dalyons]

I feel for you deeply. I’m equally fearful of this for my children, but one small blessing of my kids being very young is at least the ambiguity will probably be over by the time they have to decide. I don’t expect there to be good choices, but at least it will be clear?

[tithe]

How about professions that require licensing to practice (civil engineering, accounting, insurance, actuarial science, law, medicine, pharmacy, nursing), or work in the government sector (defense, military, municipal/state/federal agencies)?

[pprotas]

I'd go with nail technician, barber, electrician, mechanic, beauty salon, plumber, coffee shop, window washer, construction

I see these types of jobs flourishing in my community. My barber is fully booked for the next month, and a hair salon owner in my street bought a new property and started a second hair salon... In the same street! And the second salon is also fully booked.

[i_love_retros]

I think being a chef is a pretty future proof career choice. For AI to kill that profession it would need a very dexterous robotic body and the ability to taste, and it would need the special something that determines good taste.

[munificent]

Probably future-proof in that it won't get any worse than it already is, but the food industry is notoriously miserable. Shit pay, bad hours, extremely stressful work environment, lots of drug use, etc.

[orangecoffee]

Nursing perhaps? It seems like caring for other people would be useful even in an otherwise runaway AI world.

[munificent]

My other daughter is likely to go into something medicine-releated. That's a good suggestion. My oldest daughter really doesn't like touching people, so medicine is probably the last thing she'd ever want to do.

[brotchie]

Yeah, I think about this a lot.

Those days of grinding on some grad school maths homework until insight.

Figuring out how to configure and recompile the Linux kernel to get a sound card driver working, hitting roadblocks, eventually succeeding.

Without AI on a gnarly problem: grind grind grind, try different thing, some things work, some things don't, step back, try another approach, hit a wall, try again.

This effort is a feature, not a bug, it's how you experientially acquire skills and understanding. e.g. Linux kernel: learnt about Makefiles, learnt about GCC flags, improved shell skills, etc.

With AI on a gnarly problem: It does this all for you! So no experiential learning.

I would NOT have had the mental strength in college / grad school to resist. Which would have robbed me of all the skill acquisition that now lets me use AI more effectively. The scaffolding of hard skill acquisition means you have more context to be able to ask AI the right questions, and what you learn from the AI can be bound more easily to your existing knowledge.

[leonidasv]

What strikes me is that AI can also be the best teacher in the world: your Makefile is not working, you ask the LLM what's wrong, you learn something new about the syntax, you ask for more details, you learn more, you ask about other Makefile syntax gotchas, etc. This is the most efficient deliberate practice possible: you can learn in minutes what would take hours of Googling, tinkering and scouring docs. You have a dedicated teacher you can ask your silliest questions to and have the insight you need "click" way faster.

The problem is: (almost) nobody does that. You'll just ask Claude Code to fix the build, go grab a coffee and come back with everything working.

[jakeydus]

You're not learning, though. So much of learning is going down the wrong path, realizing it's wrong, and retaining what you learned from that wrong path and realizing its applicability in the future. Being able to immediately find the correct answer doesn't teach you anything, it allows you to memorize the correct answer for this situation. It expands the depth of your knowledge graph (assuming you remember the answer) but you don't expand the breadth.

[dirkt]

> you ask the LLM what's wrong, you learn something new about the syntax

So if you have no LLM to ask, can you figure out on your own what is wrong? Just by reading documentation?

That's also an important skill to have.

[dehrmann]

> AI can also be the best teacher in the world

I just ran this for just that purpose.

curl http://<local-ollama>:11434/api/generate -d "$(jq -n --arg hist "$(history)" '{ "model": "qwen3.5:35b-a3b-q4_K_M", "stream": false, "prompt": "The following is my bash shell history. Are there any bad patterns I should fix or commands I should learn or master? \($hist)" }')"

[djaro]

I dont think that would teach you much. Theres a reason that math textbooks for high schoolers have one theorem, and then a whole chapter of practice problems. Simply reading how to do something doesn't teach you how to do it, you have to experience it again and again.

[4ndrewl]

There are two sides to each coin though. For an employer, that grind is just additional cost that could be reduced by "AI".

It's like the difference between hand-made furniture and IKEA.

Until OpenAI etc need to turn a profit.

[CJefferson]

I'm a professor at uni, and this is what is happening -- many students are never really learning. Then they crash into exams at the end of term when they don't have their AI, and they bomb, I'm seeing failure rates like never before.

Now, part of me thinks 'is not letting students having AI like not letting them have a calculator'. On the other hand, if I just let the AI do the exam, well I don't really need the student at all do I?

[koonsolo]

When kids learn calculation, they indeed are not allowed to use a calculator.

Same is true for your field now. When kids learn things the AI already knows, it's clear they can't use the AI.

If you want them to become smarter than the AI, they will have to pass through a period where they are dumber than the AI, and it's clear at that point they can't use it.

AI raised the bar, that's all. But it's still a bar that can be passed with human intelligence, and your job is to get them past that.

[rogerrogerr]

> it's still a bar that can be passed with human intelligence

Can you expand on this?

[koonsolo]

As a developer becomes better, they become better than an LLM, being able to deal with more complex things than what an LLM can handle. Some people will not be able to pass it, but others will.

When there will ever be AGI (I don't think this can be achieved with the current architecture, it needs another AI breakthrough), then we might not be able to surpass it, much like chess currently.

[ericmcer]

That is part of why I am not... too worried as an engineer?

Like years of manually studying, fixing and reviewing code is experience that only pre ~2020 devs will have.

The intuitive/tacit knowledge that lets you look at code and "feel" that something is off with it cannot really be gained when using Claude Code, it takes just 1000s of hours of tinkering.

It will suck if the job shifts to reviewing and owning whatever an LLM spits out, but I don't really know how effective new juniors are going to be.

[vlapec]

> but I don't really know how effective new juniors are going to be.

True. Pretty soon, pre-AI devs may be the COBOL/Fortran engineers of this era: niche and hard to replace.

[rogerrogerr]

And there are, like, six of them.

[ethan_smith]

This is the part that worries me most. It's not really about individual discipline - it's that anyone who chooses to struggle through problems the hard way is now at a measurable disadvantage against peers who don't. The incentive structure actively punishes the behavior that produces deeper understanding.