[moron4hire]

> Encouraging people to understand the layer of abstractions they're building on is helpful, doesn't matter if they do it by hand or with clankers.

But we know that long term use of LLMs does not lead to better understanding, it leads to reliance on the LLM for the person to be able to function at their job.

[Pannoniae]

You also depend on {computers, the internet, electricity, groceries, etc.}, that's not the discriminating factor.... the question is, are you actually better at your job using it, and are you stunting your own growth?

I'm not claiming to have a definite answer to either, but I think the right question to ask is - are you going to benefit from using it in the long run? If yes, carry on, if no, re-evaluate what you're doing :)

[moron4hire]

Early in my career, I had a consulting job where the client wanted me to work on their system using their tools. They had nothing and would not provide anything. No compilers, no runtimes, nothing but a regular, run of the mill, desktop office workstation. Instead of performing the task in Visual Studio with .NET like we had planned, I did it in Excel with VBA macros.

If you come to rely on specific tools such that you can't do your job without them, you're no longer doing the job you think you're doing, you're now just a tool operator. If I don't have a computer of some kind, I'm not writing software, I'm just a manager. If my team can't work because GitHub is down, then we've done a bad job of being software developers.

The experience taught me that there are two kinds of tools: those that are necessary and those that are nice to have. Yes, that job sucked, and yes, I quit that job, but more because they refused to pay me the overtime I needed to get it done with such crappy tools.

I had another job where we were one client of many on site with a vendor for a training event and the vendor couldn't get a system configured correctly for our cohort to continue on. Part of the problem was their configuration system was garbage, very easy to get wrong, very time consuming to manually edit. While they were dicking around with throwing edits against the wall, I wrote an HTML page with JavaScript to make a UI to edit the data in an much more natural way and then generate the config file. It took 10 minutes and saved us hours of waiting so that we could continue on with the training. Perhaps the takeaway from that experience was that Valve's engineers write shitty config systems. All I know is we got the training event done and I walked away with a piece of paper that said I was now a Certified Hardware Vendor, which we then used to sell more contracts on our own.