[Levitz]

>Conversely, I also am a user of LLMs (true shocker these days, I know), and am noticing a speedup in areas I was already familiar with, and a quicker introduction to new ones. The obvious benefit cannot be denied, and doing so regardless makes you look uninformed.

My largest concern comes from something tangential to this: I'm not sure we're all that good at deciding what should be learned and sticking to it.

Silly example: regex. LLMs are, as far as I know, well above the average dev when it comes to writing regex. Regex is also one of those things that for many people goes unused for months, but then you encounter the occasional perfect regex problem, and it's really easy to just lean on the LLM to write the regex for you rather than spending some time tinkering and testing. Regex can be frustrating and fickle, I think we've all been there.

But then, you just don't learn regex. So where does the intuition for what regex can do come from? Do you just become unable to write regex with no LLM? People stop writing resources for regex I guess?

My concern is that there's stuff I feel I can just chuck onto the LLM but I'm sure my judgement is not perfect. It's still probably worth it, all in all, but I'm not even sure of what I might be losing along the way and that's an uneasy feel.

[xnorswap]

I've been using regex decades, but it never really stuck to do anything too complex, it was the perfect intersection of difficult and infrequent. ( And also variable - PCRE vs others customisations / non-regular parts, etc ).

I am very glad that I can now just ask claude for a regex to achieve my intent.

Does it mean I'll never master regex? Yes it does, but decades has shown that was unlikely to ever happen anyway.

[tonyedgecombe]

How do you know that what it produces is correct?

I’m wondering if by the time you have been explicit enough in your prompt you might as well have looked up what you needed.

The expression is always terse so it’s not as if you are saving much typing.

[km3r]

Automation. And i think that vastly overestimating the time it takes to write explicit prompts.

[jmartrican]

Regex came up so infrequent that I found myself referring to documentation whenever I needed to use it. But I always wondered, what are the jobs or roles that use it so often that they have mastered it.

[Terr_]

That's somewhat alien to me, I suppose because over the years I just never stopped using regex in search/replace tools, which is daily exposure regardless of what code needs to be written.

Sometimes the patterns are dirt-simple, like `/\bfoo/` to find things that start with foo, or a `/foo.?bar/i` to try to find multiple variations of FooBar and fooBar and foo-bar and FOO_BAR. Other contexts outside an IDE include browser dev-tools, exploratory SQL queries on the database, searching centralized logs, and occasionally turning lines of text into spreadsheets via CSV.

None of that guarantees deep expertise of the weirder tricks, but it absolutely keeps the general knowledge "warm."

[parineum]

anything with large amounts of user text input.

[rmarshallATD]

> But then, you just don't learn regex. So where does the intuition for what regex can do come from? The training data is there for regex and it's unlikely that regex will experience massive changes but your concern makes sense. I had to learn before LLMs handled that part, the "when to use this" intuition. My guess would be that the logical conclusion is dependence on LLMs to make that determination increasing over time, both for when and how to use regex, for better or worse.

[ambicapter]

We're talking about validating the regex, which you have to do with your own skills, while LLMs are still wrong, some of the time.

[fragmede]

In the era of vibecoding, there are people creating software that haven't ever heard of a regexp. I learned regexps when Perl was popular. It's a useful skill that has served in me well in my career, but if the industry's moved on from a place where regexps and Unix knowledge are useful because this new tool has replaced me, well shit. I'm excited for the future, but also that's not a great feeling to have.

[michaelsalim]

I love AI but one thing that is a bummer is: Skills that used to be straightforward but people generally never took the time to learn are now trivial with AI.

Things like regex and CSS are not that hard if you take some time to study them. People don't though. Now I don't have that advantage anymore since AI can do them so well. Or... Maybe that could be an advantage since there will be even less people learning it.

[jghn]

They were also easy to look up on the fly as one needed them too. So really really knowing them was never a true advantage. For me it wasn't that I never took the time to learn them. I realized long ago that it wasn't worth my time to keep that information in my brain, and I offloaded it to google 100% of the time it came up in my day to day life. Now I offload it to Claude, same thing.

[michaelsalim]

I do agree with that. I wouldn't say I really really know them either. I know enough to sound competent and be relied upon, and then I can google them to remind myself of the details.

[jghn]

I realized later you likely meant the latter anyways and yeah that's much different. It's important to know what these things are, how they work, and why one would need to tweak them. It was never important to have the syntax on instant recall.

[27183]

If you don't know regex--how to write them, how to use them, what they're good for, what they're not good for--what makes you think you're competent to review a PR containing one?

If you don't know how to regex and you let your imaginary LLM friend write one for you, and you foist that upon your colleagues for review, you've just abused their trust. Because they, being ethical, honest engineers, must now do all the work you neglected except they're doing it at review time instead of at the time of writing.

Or maybe they're dishonest and unethical and they'll just maliciously or negligently approve the PR without actually reviewing the regex.

Either way the situation is completely rotten. You can never ethically use an LLM to do something you're not competent to do yourself.

[Rumudiez]

Knowing what to learn has always been an implicitly vital skill to career growth. Maybe it’s all right fewer people will know regex, just like as each year passes relatively fewer people know about var hoisting in JS

What does the business benefit from you handwriting regex vs a clanker?

[skydhash]

The benefits of knowing regex is not about the syntax (that’s what docs/google/books are for), but knowing when it’s right to use it.

Immersion with the codebase is not about coding and syntax (which is actually very easy for me). It’s about being able to intuit that a particular combination can result in a buggy state and provides the wrong result downstream. You lose that you stay in the dreamland of specs.

[jghn]

That's fair. This all feels similar to the shift that happened when Google came on to the search scene. To use your example, people realized they no longer needed to memorize syntax. Instead they only needed to ensure they understood the big picture concepts, and they could fill in the blanks on demand with Google. This is all just moving that layer of abstraction one level higher.

[skydhash]

Not really. Before google, we had (and still have) books. What the internet and later google changed was the availability of information (If I had to rely on libraries and bookstores, I'd never be a programmer today). The job was never about memorizing knowledge, only the application of it. That has not changed since the dawn of computing.

[jghn]

Sort of. As a developer I had my stack of reference books, man pages, etc. I’d try hard to memorize syntax as it was a pain to look things up. And I also devoted some memory to remembering where in a book to look, which set of man pages to use, etc

With google that mostly went to the wayside. I just needed to know something existed and I could pull together far more information faster than I was spending before to just do quick lookups

I didn’t say the job was about memorization back then. Rather I found that each of these new abstraction layers made it easier to go broad with one’s on hand knowledge instead of deep