Its probable that AI will roll out much faster than humans can develop that skill of using it in a way that increases not decreases human knowledge over time.
The current slew of excellent LLMs will probably cause a decades long dip in human cognitive ability.
If social media on smartphones had an impact of ability of students to concentrate, LLM AI will likely have a much greater negative impact on education.
There are trillions of dollars of investment pushing for humans to trust whatever an LLM says, and very little money behind encouraging people to tackle hard problems themselves and train themselves to think.
I have to say honestly, that AI looks like an apocalypse for human thinking [ Im glad Tao is warning people, I just dont think many people will listen ]
And this on top of the economic apocalypse of removing a lot of jobs and not creating any new ones within a society that doesn't seem to function without money flowing.
If the average human in twenty years isn't far more cognitively capable than the average human now, I'll eat my hat (assuming of course, we don't all die).
Between biology advances remediating disabilities, customized outcome-driven education, potential advances in drugs that regulate executive function/memory/etc., improvements in nutrition, improvements in access, reductions in stress, I think we'll see people flourish.
And that's completely ignoring the more out there biological/computer merger style Sci-Fi outcomes, which I believe have a non-zero chance of occurring.
I'll be the negative nancy and say that I think it's more likely we see an acceleration of the current trend. If we're talking about students, the top students will be doing as well or better than today but the median might see a big regression.
I have friends who work in primary education and they say there's definitely been some sort of decline in cognitive skills. A lot more kids struggle with holding attention and thinking outside of the box.
I think too much screen exposure has been terrible for the average child.
> If the average human in twenty years isn't far more cognitively capable than the average human now, I'll eat my hat (assuming of course, we don't all die).
You do know that educational results based on the best evaluation we've created so far, PISA, have been dropping since 2015, roughly when smartphones and social media became widespread?
What makes you believe that LLMs from more or less the same companies will be any different?
I'm not entirely sure what your hostility is founded in or why you think it's appropriate for a forum that's supposed to promote the direct engagement of ideas.
What aspect of my comment, specifically, do you think should embarrass me? Address the content, not the person.
Do you think we're not going to make any advances in medicine that promote a higher baseline level of cognitive function? Do you think society will entirely lose interest in educating its citizenry and will completely forgo using these tools to improve education? What's your core contention here?
I'm not as completely optimistic as you seem to be about the future of humanity with AI (I think it will probably be a huge benefit, but with immense disruption and a non-zero chance of a Skynet-like event), but I didn't see anything embarrassing about your comment at all.
Yeah like are we all supposed to guess at what the quiet wise elders are saying or can they grow some balls and be loud leaders. Idiot bullies are getting to be in charge
Folks back in the early 1900s had from 10 to 30 points less IQ than today, as old renomalized test results reveal. Ellis Island even had an admissions test, and they rejected a significant number of people.
To me, it is not the right advice. "Stop using that tool, that tool will make you lazy" means we would be digging holes by hand instead of using shovels, then excavators.
The "lazy answer box" is a tool, learn to use the tool, understand its limitations, as act accordingly. If you prefer not to use it because you like coming up with answers yourself, because it is against your principles, or because you can do better without it, that's fine. Hand tools still have a place in the workshop after all, and craftsmen know to use them. But if AI is helpful to you and lets you spare some cognitive load for other tasks, by all means use it, it would be stupid not to.
After working with a few people with what I can only describe as "AI psychosis", it seems to me that even excellent frontier models are pretty quickly lobotomized if sycophancy is rewarded and builds up in context.
I don't know if I would call resisting this a skill, but it does take persistent intention and willingness.
Can you describe the symptoms of that 'AI psychosis' youve observed ?
Yeah, considering how hard it is to food-diet or social-media-diet .. I think it requires immense resolve to LLM-diet or use it in a non-binge way that develops ones own depth of understanding.
Its going to require just far too much mental energy to push back against an LLM that is correct 92% of the time.
I go back and forth on this. For awhile yes it took a lot of workflow tweaks and finesse to get directionally correct outputs (thinking back like mid 2025). I invested time in figuring that out, mostly because I was interested, but those skills are all obsolete now, you don't need to worry so much about context management and special instruction recipes or anything these days.
The meta at this point seems to be mostly around "knowing what to ask for". Eg: I suck at prompting for specific design tweaks, because I don't have the design vocabulary to be specific and articulate what I want. It's a lot of trial and error. I hear people who are developing full scale applications without a tech background run into the issue writ large. For now, I have an advantage over these people when building applications. But perhaps that's just one round of RL away from being obsolete too. Supposedly the model will eventually have such good taste in design/architecture/whatever there will be little point in asking for tweaks.
The only thing that seems relatively future-proof is just being able to communicate clearly what you're trying to do. Not how to do it, or even what success looks like. Perhaps an element of it is even as basic as being honest with yourself.
I think there are a lot of people using AI who aren't as familiar with these tools as us. We stop noticing a lot of the complexity when we pick it up gradually. There are so many powerful capabilities built into codex/ claude code that have little or no UI affordance.
it's tons of small things like choosing the right effort level for a task. or knowing when to ask for subagents. oh, you can have two threads working at the same time and communicating with each other? you can do /side to parallel path and fold that back into the main thread?
which of these things happens automatically, and which do you need to ask for? and does any of this still work the way it did a few months ago?
the list goes on forever. many users of AI are only just now getting comfortable with skills (and probably still writing bad skills unfortunately hah).
A lot of the specific things you learned may have become obsolete. But there's still a gap between what these tools can do and what most people know how to get them to do. Keeping up with that is a skill too, but perhaps not forever.
> and does any of this still work the way it did a few months ago?
For me this is why it's not worth it investing much time and effort learning any specific AI workflow. Remember "prompt engineering"? Remember "Ralph loops"?
I'll play with various harnesses but until things settle down in a few years I'm not going to learn Claude Code the way I learned SQL.
Agree. Maybe such soft skills will become a lot more important soon, for instance also the ability to translate feelings into useful information, since LLMs cannot feel as humans do.
Personally I've been very hesitant to deep-dive into putting together the perfect AI-workflow, I've been sticking to just using the conversational/chat modality for pretty much everything, usually that gets me as far as I need. It's just really hard to justify spending time on it when it all potentially gets turned upside down next month again.
It seems unlikely a few rounds of rl are going to fix the following problem: most things are more complex than they seem on the surface, and decisions to be made. There are always trade-offs.
> The meta at this point seems to be mostly around "knowing what to ask for"
We came full circle on the problem that also exists with Google Search, and why so many people don't get good results out of it.
> For now, I have an advantage over these people when building applications. But perhaps that's just one round of RL away from being obsolete too.
I don't have a crystal ball, but my eggs are in the basket of "It isn't, and it won't be"
> The only thing that seems relatively future-proof is just being able to communicate clearly what you're trying to do
This somehow contradicts the previous statement. The advantage you have is, because of domain knowledge expertise, you're able to articulate what you want. It's not that you knowing what LazyLoading is that you now can describe it better, you can immediately tell that when your Frontend stalls for 5 seconds after hitting the "Load" button, perhaps it eagerly loads and blocks.
I think the knowledge is one level higher at this point. It’s not LazyLoading that you need to know about, it’s just that it can and should be faster. That you can demand more (and sometimes you can’t). It’s hard to know the difference when you’re not in your area of expertise.
Fair point on the contradiction. I don’t have the answers either.
i have been vibing out a godot game which is a 3d voxel map thing lately. i had it on software webgl compatibility output and just demanded it figure out what the slowdown was on the simulation over 3 days of back and forth. it turned off backfaces and invisible geomeetry and locked render resolution at 1080p and built in diagnostic telemetry and chopped up the level where doors separate rooms until now, still with no hw acceleration, the framerate is in 60fps with some frame drops, it started at 12 fps.
brute forcing performance optimization for a personal project by having only handwavy tricks ive read about from online and repeatedly setting targets until the magic box gives me what i know it can do means that eventually the game did what i wanted with those. yes baked lighting was needed.
next, i an going to aim for 60fps on a windos xp box just for the challenge. we had quake and such run blisteringly fast on weaker boxes than those, surely my empty museum tour of a 3d game can do the same with the graphical voxel and crappy looking models it does now.
real pro grade work is beyond vibing out and not caring about poor quality. but it scratched my itch and gave me the computer software i wanted and with way less effort than doing it for realz would require. i love programming itself on its own time (going to learn nasm and someday do a hexagonal architecture with actor model in idris just to add up my nerd trophies together) at times, but using llms lets me do my random hairbrained ideas much more easily for what i put into it than not existing in the past.
Well, that’s true to an extent, but sometimes you need to ”play” a bit before you (or the model) can “work”, if that makes sense. And it’s hard to know the right kind of “play” without experience in the area, this is something the models can’t yet do.
As Nader has said: Saying software is dead because anyone can build it is literally saying professional photography is dead because everyone has a camera in their pocket.
Professional photographers are different to everyday phone-photo takers because they have the experience built up over so many years in that sector, same as AI SWE, where the humans in the loop need experience to master AI SWE.
Yeah I probably know more photographers than ever. Maybe an apt comparison given the wild amount of AI and processing that goes into the average iPhone photo as well.
Isn't it more like saying professional portrait painting is dead because everyone has access to a camera today that does a better job and costs significantly less? A phone camera is just an extension of digital photography, which is an extension of film photography, which first drove the massive shift in replacement and is most similar to AI as a metaphor.
The title is either a letdown or clickbait - I'm unsure which. You could say "Blah. Using It Well Takes Skill." for any value of Blah.
"The transmission in your car: Using It Well Takes Skill."
Further, Claiming AI is a tool is overly reductive. It's as much a tool as a full self driving car is a car.
You can treat the full self driving car, as a car, driving it with full attention and effort like you would have a Camry but then you paid for features you're not using. Also, some full self driving cars might not even have the steering and braking controls as a Camry. That's not the point of a full self driving car and this warped perspective will make you lose out to people who use a full self driving car well, to its utmost, safe capability.
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So what is the "AI" we are so excited about currently?
That "AI" is most likely an intelligent (semi-autonomous?) agent.
Depending on the intelligence, it can be as useful as a dog, scanning your camera feed for threats and identifying real threats for you, separating activity from tree leaves moving due to the wind or a moving shadow cast by a flying bird.
Or it can be your co-founder, interviewing potential customers, finding and exploring their pain-points, helping you figure out if there's a gap in the market you can build a business around.
I would go even far as to say, AI is having such a moment because AI are cheap intelligent agents - anything else that's remotely close are likely humans that cost atleast a few dollars an hour.
All of these require skill on your part - there's nothing special or unique about AI that makes skill special just like operating the transmission in your car requires skill.
A saw or a compiler cannot replace the essence of your job. You cannot use a saw or a compiler to carelessly create faulty work and claim that it was fully authored by you to the best of your capabilities.
'Just a tool' is a lie ranging from unconscious self-deception to outright scams.
As someone laid off just now, I wish companies saw this. I genuinely don't know where to go with my 'skills' as a software engineer, both pre and post AI.
The market is shrinking, the pressure to review code is so high, I'm kinda relieved to not be at the $last_place anymore, but looking on LinkedIn or calling around my network... there isn't a lot out there.
It feels more like a slot machine than a tool to me. A tool has a clear, repeatable cause & effect, and I can use that to figure out how precisely to get from one condition to another iteratively. With a slot machine, sometimes I get lucky. If I pull the crank a lot, maybe I’ll get the outcome I want. Maybe not.
Markets try to put things in perspective to sell more. Remember razors used to be for men only? But hte brilliant marketer (forgot the name) made it so that trimming makes women more feminine? Now razor sales doubled?
Anyways, same thing here. Those who want to sell AIs want to make it as non-tool but know-it-all do-it-all for you. Those who wants to use it view it as a tool.
Just frame it the way you like to see how you should use/view AIs.
I think 95% of the population wont get a choice of how AI is framed - the big money pushes how it will be framed for them, and most people have no training in a hard discipline like math or science, as a vaccine against that marketing push.
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People will be corralled into trusting everything an LLM says as gospel, will be required to use if for almost all jobs, will have no actual choice in the matter - everyone who suggests otherwise is a luddite. [ Terence Tao is being painted as a luddite currently, for raising the concern of whether human-math will even survive ]
Today's example: A colleague very kindly used Claude to inspect a helpdesk call I ended up with owning, despite being off site and working on something quite complicated for a customer.
It was mostly correct but clearly failed to read the docs properly and assumed a configuration parameter was 1 instead of -1 which is the default, presumably based on the scenario. Exim is extremely well documented and the assumption was unwarranted (it didn't have access to exim4.conf and made it up). Nonetheless, the analysis was pretty good and largely corresponded to mine. What it failed to do was fix the other issues I was working on at the same time 8)
Last Friday: I finally found out a decent way to fix a Windows machine's domain account going walkies which I'd never come across - a Powershell jobbie that can be passed a cred. and it will fix up a broken domain join - ie sort out the machine password at both ends. Back in the day, I would have used the GUI to remove and re-add the machine to the domain. I've been using Windows since v1 on a 80186 RM Nimbus so its nice to have a better search tool than Search - ie it did a better job of searching than I did. The LLM searched based on my intention rather than my actual query.
The reality is that it's both. LLMs (along with every tool from a hammer to GPS) shape the world instrumentally (that is, by being wielded by the user), but also turn around and shape us formally. Every tool goes into the ecology of media, reshaping reality around us, including our abilities, senses, and values.
Rich's definition of "tool" is something like Ivan Illich's "Tools for Conviviality." Convivial tools can be used with minimal loss of agency, within a healthy politically-defined society. Huahai's definition is more akin to McLuhan's idea of "media." This category covers pretty much every technical or technological system, and its use is necessarily systematic and risks the instrumentalization of the user himself.
No. Quite the contrary. We are the 'tools' and we have been used skillfully.
The few AI companies have slurped up so much of human textual and artistic creation without attribution. They have taken enormous amounts of money from the public directly or indirectly and funneled it upwards to a few dangerous individuals.
For now. It is definitely true right now, there's a notable difference between my coworkers depending on their skill driving these models: it mostly seems to be correlated with those who are willing to build their own tools, now that the cost to do so is basically zero.
But the models are getting so good and so fast, that I'm starting to wonder if that will stay true forever... probably not, if I had to guess. I'm just trying to pay off my house as quickly as I can...
I‘ve been on both camps and been critized for it (see my comments), and now I think these are some of the most useless disussions on HN, as they are heavily skewed by all of our life situations.
Hmm... interesting opinion. I disagree, and will insult you for it. With any luck, this comment chain will devolve into a thread of unsubstantiated opinions and ad hominems.
AI is incredible tool when you want to use it to enhance your skill (learn complex codebase, experiment different solution and understand the limit of complex system). However, most of people use it as a wishing machine and outsource their thinking.
Which works. That’s the problem. LLMs are now that good. Humans are known to love taking the path of least resistance so you can’t expect people to NOT outsource their thinking, especially at their tedious jobs.
This is only true when you fix the bucket of tasks you are referring to.
But in fact, as models get more powerful, the ceiling of what can be accomplished with them is raised, and their capacity as orchestration directors grows as well.
Agreed, in my experience as an engineer if you want to build a personal project on a weekend yes AI is good for that but the moment you start scaling your application, that's where real engineers who understand the engineering well are needed. The skill and expertise of a true engineer coupled with the speed of AI is my sweet spot
I don't understand the point of this debate. Rich's point is good. Having a mini-army of highly intelligent beings at your fingertips is not an ordinary "tool."
And it minimizes the fact that these things are only getting smarter. Having an entity much smarter than you--could that entity seriously be considered your "tool"? Just your tool? Or are the people on the "just a tool" side of this debate not taking that possibility seriously?
It might be better to view the near-future AI as an emerging intelligent alien species.
Regardless of whether it is 'conscious' or not, Roman Yampolski makes the point that AI may or may not have human-kinds best interests at heart [ hell, even humans aren't aligned ]
Can we control or trust a counter-party that has intelligence at a level near or exceeding the smartest humans in all domains ?
I dont even think we can even have a safe sandbox in which to run an AI .. and frontier model training labs are certainly not air-gapped.
Software engineering experience might be visualized as a panel with a few dozen buttons and levers. The engineers that are most successful with LLMs are the ones that understand more of that panel.
Yeah I don't think so. It takes some knowledge today if you want to have control over architectural decisions. But honestly even if you don't the latest models still make fairly reasonable decisions.
I am pretty sure my wife could vibe code website or whatever at this point, or if not she will be able to in 6 months.
> And that skill is? Any concrete verifiable examples? That can be replicated, repeated by others or adopted by others?
I learned this weekend that 1 LLM working on its own with all the context is usually better than splitting the task up into sub parts and having multiple LLMs work in parallel.
The interesting part is that I had read about this previously but it wasn't until I had seen it on something I was working on did that principle become engrained.
I'm sure there are still ways to make this work. i.e You could specify how the context should be passed between agents.
Knowing when you need to do that, what works well and what doesn't, etc., is where skill comes into play.
> Knowing when you need to do that, what works well and what doesn't, etc., is where skill comes into play.
No, it doesn't. Because this will change the next time there's an update to models (like, tomorrow). And the "handoff time" is nothing but an unverifiable gut feeling.
It is easy to argue otherwise, but to request a response in the form of a web app / embedded widget is at least some kind of AI proficiency that mirrors past experience having used a tool.
Yes, the most grounded take I’ve read on HN so far
How I wish I could divulge details of what we’ve built, nay, shipped in the last 6 months - it would sound completely unbelievable to this audience and come with a host of accusations
But it’s true - the tide hasn’t risen all ships the same though. Some engineers have become absolute monsters - things that used to take a month get done in days. Features that used to be prioritized on the order of weeks are done way faster.
Some engineers though? Even high performance ones have gone productive to bottom 25% by some measures
Why? Because it is a skill and it doesn’t come naturally to everyone
So many may sayers everywhere talking about more code less software, mistakes by ai with disastrous consequences- yet I’ve seen some remarkable stuff with my own two eyes. It’s a crazy time to be in this business, it’s awesome to be wowed everyday by what someone was able to do
It’s a shame I cannot inspect the tool. It’s a shame I cannot modify it as I see fit. It’s a shame that I need to pay $200/month to use it. But hey, I am a 3X engineer and my boss likes it, so I guess it should be fine? Not really, but I still get to pay the bills (for now)
I miss the tools I used in the past (gcc, linux, sqlite,…)
Mini-rant: The feel of the "PC" years ago was that it was a democratized fragment of the means of production, that wouldn't just do tasks for you, but give you agency. Today that agency is eroded, it feels more like a consumption terminal for whatever lopsided deal a big corporation deigns to offer... When they aren't already using it to spy on you.
I disagree. It allowed me to get rid of many useless remote contractors who made the projects stretch forever. Slot machine or not, I am so happy not to deal with those people anymore.
It amazes me that you can tell people "I get better results with AI than the people I was paying" and their response is "no you aren't, you can't tell the difference". It's mind boggling.
Its probable that AI will roll out much faster than humans can develop that skill of using it in a way that increases not decreases human knowledge over time.
The current slew of excellent LLMs will probably cause a decades long dip in human cognitive ability.
If social media on smartphones had an impact of ability of students to concentrate, LLM AI will likely have a much greater negative impact on education.
There are trillions of dollars of investment pushing for humans to trust whatever an LLM says, and very little money behind encouraging people to tackle hard problems themselves and train themselves to think.
I have to say honestly, that AI looks like an apocalypse for human thinking [ Im glad Tao is warning people, I just dont think many people will listen ]
And this on top of the economic apocalypse of removing a lot of jobs and not creating any new ones within a society that doesn't seem to function without money flowing.
If the average human in twenty years isn't far more cognitively capable than the average human now, I'll eat my hat (assuming of course, we don't all die).
Between biology advances remediating disabilities, customized outcome-driven education, potential advances in drugs that regulate executive function/memory/etc., improvements in nutrition, improvements in access, reductions in stress, I think we'll see people flourish.
And that's completely ignoring the more out there biological/computer merger style Sci-Fi outcomes, which I believe have a non-zero chance of occurring.
I'll be the negative nancy and say that I think it's more likely we see an acceleration of the current trend. If we're talking about students, the top students will be doing as well or better than today but the median might see a big regression.
I have friends who work in primary education and they say there's definitely been some sort of decline in cognitive skills. A lot more kids struggle with holding attention and thinking outside of the box.
I think too much screen exposure has been terrible for the average child.
> If the average human in twenty years isn't far more cognitively capable than the average human now, I'll eat my hat (assuming of course, we don't all die).
You do know that educational results based on the best evaluation we've created so far, PISA, have been dropping since 2015, roughly when smartphones and social media became widespread?
What makes you believe that LLMs from more or less the same companies will be any different?
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What high quality engagement on your part. Clearly you're the mature party here.
I'm 35 and have worked in ML generally for a decade and NLP for six years. Any other questions about my bonafides?
Trust is low. Send 2-Nonenal test results.
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I'm not entirely sure what your hostility is founded in or why you think it's appropriate for a forum that's supposed to promote the direct engagement of ideas.
What aspect of my comment, specifically, do you think should embarrass me? Address the content, not the person.
Do you think we're not going to make any advances in medicine that promote a higher baseline level of cognitive function? Do you think society will entirely lose interest in educating its citizenry and will completely forgo using these tools to improve education? What's your core contention here?
I'm not as completely optimistic as you seem to be about the future of humanity with AI (I think it will probably be a huge benefit, but with immense disruption and a non-zero chance of a Skynet-like event), but I didn't see anything embarrassing about your comment at all.
Aloof condescension and snark is the embarrassing thing to be doing on HN.
Yeah like are we all supposed to guess at what the quiet wise elders are saying or can they grow some balls and be loud leaders. Idiot bullies are getting to be in charge
Folks back in the early 1900s had from 10 to 30 points less IQ than today, as old renomalized test results reveal. Ellis Island even had an admissions test, and they rejected a significant number of people.
It's weird how lazy people are unwilling to take the advice:
> Stop using the lazy answer box, it will make you lazy.
To me, it is not the right advice. "Stop using that tool, that tool will make you lazy" means we would be digging holes by hand instead of using shovels, then excavators.
The "lazy answer box" is a tool, learn to use the tool, understand its limitations, as act accordingly. If you prefer not to use it because you like coming up with answers yourself, because it is against your principles, or because you can do better without it, that's fine. Hand tools still have a place in the workshop after all, and craftsmen know to use them. But if AI is helpful to you and lets you spare some cognitive load for other tasks, by all means use it, it would be stupid not to.
After working with a few people with what I can only describe as "AI psychosis", it seems to me that even excellent frontier models are pretty quickly lobotomized if sycophancy is rewarded and builds up in context.
I don't know if I would call resisting this a skill, but it does take persistent intention and willingness.
Can you describe the symptoms of that 'AI psychosis' youve observed ?
Yeah, considering how hard it is to food-diet or social-media-diet .. I think it requires immense resolve to LLM-diet or use it in a non-binge way that develops ones own depth of understanding.
Its going to require just far too much mental energy to push back against an LLM that is correct 92% of the time.
What was done was done, and with all the hype we are seeing, we humans will adopt AI as fast as social media.
We can only prepare ourselves for the coming dystopian.
I go back and forth on this. For awhile yes it took a lot of workflow tweaks and finesse to get directionally correct outputs (thinking back like mid 2025). I invested time in figuring that out, mostly because I was interested, but those skills are all obsolete now, you don't need to worry so much about context management and special instruction recipes or anything these days.
The meta at this point seems to be mostly around "knowing what to ask for". Eg: I suck at prompting for specific design tweaks, because I don't have the design vocabulary to be specific and articulate what I want. It's a lot of trial and error. I hear people who are developing full scale applications without a tech background run into the issue writ large. For now, I have an advantage over these people when building applications. But perhaps that's just one round of RL away from being obsolete too. Supposedly the model will eventually have such good taste in design/architecture/whatever there will be little point in asking for tweaks.
The only thing that seems relatively future-proof is just being able to communicate clearly what you're trying to do. Not how to do it, or even what success looks like. Perhaps an element of it is even as basic as being honest with yourself.
I think there are a lot of people using AI who aren't as familiar with these tools as us. We stop noticing a lot of the complexity when we pick it up gradually. There are so many powerful capabilities built into codex/ claude code that have little or no UI affordance.
it's tons of small things like choosing the right effort level for a task. or knowing when to ask for subagents. oh, you can have two threads working at the same time and communicating with each other? you can do /side to parallel path and fold that back into the main thread?
which of these things happens automatically, and which do you need to ask for? and does any of this still work the way it did a few months ago?
the list goes on forever. many users of AI are only just now getting comfortable with skills (and probably still writing bad skills unfortunately hah).
A lot of the specific things you learned may have become obsolete. But there's still a gap between what these tools can do and what most people know how to get them to do. Keeping up with that is a skill too, but perhaps not forever.
> and does any of this still work the way it did a few months ago?
For me this is why it's not worth it investing much time and effort learning any specific AI workflow. Remember "prompt engineering"? Remember "Ralph loops"?
I'll play with various harnesses but until things settle down in a few years I'm not going to learn Claude Code the way I learned SQL.
Agree. Maybe such soft skills will become a lot more important soon, for instance also the ability to translate feelings into useful information, since LLMs cannot feel as humans do.
Personally I've been very hesitant to deep-dive into putting together the perfect AI-workflow, I've been sticking to just using the conversational/chat modality for pretty much everything, usually that gets me as far as I need. It's just really hard to justify spending time on it when it all potentially gets turned upside down next month again.
It seems unlikely a few rounds of rl are going to fix the following problem: most things are more complex than they seem on the surface, and decisions to be made. There are always trade-offs.
You don’t have to make any decisions then you have to decide if what it made is correct and communicate that. For all levels of detail that matter
> The meta at this point seems to be mostly around "knowing what to ask for"
We came full circle on the problem that also exists with Google Search, and why so many people don't get good results out of it.
> For now, I have an advantage over these people when building applications. But perhaps that's just one round of RL away from being obsolete too.
I don't have a crystal ball, but my eggs are in the basket of "It isn't, and it won't be"
> The only thing that seems relatively future-proof is just being able to communicate clearly what you're trying to do
This somehow contradicts the previous statement. The advantage you have is, because of domain knowledge expertise, you're able to articulate what you want. It's not that you knowing what LazyLoading is that you now can describe it better, you can immediately tell that when your Frontend stalls for 5 seconds after hitting the "Load" button, perhaps it eagerly loads and blocks.
I think the knowledge is one level higher at this point. It’s not LazyLoading that you need to know about, it’s just that it can and should be faster. That you can demand more (and sometimes you can’t). It’s hard to know the difference when you’re not in your area of expertise.
Fair point on the contradiction. I don’t have the answers either.
> It’s hard to know the difference when you’re not in your area of expertise.
I may be misunderstanding your earlier statement then. The moat here is the knowledge, or how would the next iteration of RL solve that?
> it’s just that it can and should be faster.
Not sure if "Make it faster" works, it sounds like "Make no mistakes" 2.0
i have been vibing out a godot game which is a 3d voxel map thing lately. i had it on software webgl compatibility output and just demanded it figure out what the slowdown was on the simulation over 3 days of back and forth. it turned off backfaces and invisible geomeetry and locked render resolution at 1080p and built in diagnostic telemetry and chopped up the level where doors separate rooms until now, still with no hw acceleration, the framerate is in 60fps with some frame drops, it started at 12 fps.
brute forcing performance optimization for a personal project by having only handwavy tricks ive read about from online and repeatedly setting targets until the magic box gives me what i know it can do means that eventually the game did what i wanted with those. yes baked lighting was needed.
next, i an going to aim for 60fps on a windos xp box just for the challenge. we had quake and such run blisteringly fast on weaker boxes than those, surely my empty museum tour of a 3d game can do the same with the graphical voxel and crappy looking models it does now.
real pro grade work is beyond vibing out and not caring about poor quality. but it scratched my itch and gave me the computer software i wanted and with way less effort than doing it for realz would require. i love programming itself on its own time (going to learn nasm and someday do a hexagonal architecture with actor model in idris just to add up my nerd trophies together) at times, but using llms lets me do my random hairbrained ideas much more easily for what i put into it than not existing in the past.
If you don't have specifics about what success is, what it looks like, and how it works, then it seems like correct output is almost anything.
Well, that’s true to an extent, but sometimes you need to ”play” a bit before you (or the model) can “work”, if that makes sense. And it’s hard to know the right kind of “play” without experience in the area, this is something the models can’t yet do.
As Nader has said: Saying software is dead because anyone can build it is literally saying professional photography is dead because everyone has a camera in their pocket.
Professional photographers are different to everyday phone-photo takers because they have the experience built up over so many years in that sector, same as AI SWE, where the humans in the loop need experience to master AI SWE.
Yeah I probably know more photographers than ever. Maybe an apt comparison given the wild amount of AI and processing that goes into the average iPhone photo as well.
Software isn't dead, thinking is dead (or dying).
Isn't it more like saying professional portrait painting is dead because everyone has access to a camera today that does a better job and costs significantly less? A phone camera is just an extension of digital photography, which is an extension of film photography, which first drove the massive shift in replacement and is most similar to AI as a metaphor.
Interesting read on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...
Yeah, but also way more people are getting portraits than before the camera was invented—there’s a bit of a Jevons paradox there.
The title is either a letdown or clickbait - I'm unsure which. You could say "Blah. Using It Well Takes Skill." for any value of Blah.
"The transmission in your car: Using It Well Takes Skill."
Further, Claiming AI is a tool is overly reductive. It's as much a tool as a full self driving car is a car.
You can treat the full self driving car, as a car, driving it with full attention and effort like you would have a Camry but then you paid for features you're not using. Also, some full self driving cars might not even have the steering and braking controls as a Camry. That's not the point of a full self driving car and this warped perspective will make you lose out to people who use a full self driving car well, to its utmost, safe capability.
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So what is the "AI" we are so excited about currently?
That "AI" is most likely an intelligent (semi-autonomous?) agent.
Depending on the intelligence, it can be as useful as a dog, scanning your camera feed for threats and identifying real threats for you, separating activity from tree leaves moving due to the wind or a moving shadow cast by a flying bird.
Or it can be your co-founder, interviewing potential customers, finding and exploring their pain-points, helping you figure out if there's a gap in the market you can build a business around.
I would go even far as to say, AI is having such a moment because AI are cheap intelligent agents - anything else that's remotely close are likely humans that cost atleast a few dollars an hour.
All of these require skill on your part - there's nothing special or unique about AI that makes skill special just like operating the transmission in your car requires skill.
A saw or a compiler cannot replace the essence of your job. You cannot use a saw or a compiler to carelessly create faulty work and claim that it was fully authored by you to the best of your capabilities.
'Just a tool' is a lie ranging from unconscious self-deception to outright scams.
As someone laid off just now, I wish companies saw this. I genuinely don't know where to go with my 'skills' as a software engineer, both pre and post AI.
The market is shrinking, the pressure to review code is so high, I'm kinda relieved to not be at the $last_place anymore, but looking on LinkedIn or calling around my network... there isn't a lot out there.
Hey sorry to hear that, layoffs really suck. Do you think it happened because of AI "taking your job" or was the org doing poorly regardless?
It feels more like a slot machine than a tool to me. A tool has a clear, repeatable cause & effect, and I can use that to figure out how precisely to get from one condition to another iteratively. With a slot machine, sometimes I get lucky. If I pull the crank a lot, maybe I’ll get the outcome I want. Maybe not.
This is an argument about a framing issue.
Markets try to put things in perspective to sell more. Remember razors used to be for men only? But hte brilliant marketer (forgot the name) made it so that trimming makes women more feminine? Now razor sales doubled?
Anyways, same thing here. Those who want to sell AIs want to make it as non-tool but know-it-all do-it-all for you. Those who wants to use it view it as a tool.
Just frame it the way you like to see how you should use/view AIs.
I think 95% of the population wont get a choice of how AI is framed - the big money pushes how it will be framed for them, and most people have no training in a hard discipline like math or science, as a vaccine against that marketing push. t People will be corralled into trusting everything an LLM says as gospel, will be required to use if for almost all jobs, will have no actual choice in the matter - everyone who suggests otherwise is a luddite. [ Terence Tao is being painted as a luddite currently, for raising the concern of whether human-math will even survive ]
AI is a tool (to me).
Today's example: A colleague very kindly used Claude to inspect a helpdesk call I ended up with owning, despite being off site and working on something quite complicated for a customer.
It was mostly correct but clearly failed to read the docs properly and assumed a configuration parameter was 1 instead of -1 which is the default, presumably based on the scenario. Exim is extremely well documented and the assumption was unwarranted (it didn't have access to exim4.conf and made it up). Nonetheless, the analysis was pretty good and largely corresponded to mine. What it failed to do was fix the other issues I was working on at the same time 8)
Last Friday: I finally found out a decent way to fix a Windows machine's domain account going walkies which I'd never come across - a Powershell jobbie that can be passed a cred. and it will fix up a broken domain join - ie sort out the machine password at both ends. Back in the day, I would have used the GUI to remove and re-add the machine to the domain. I've been using Windows since v1 on a 80186 RM Nimbus so its nice to have a better search tool than Search - ie it did a better job of searching than I did. The LLM searched based on my intention rather than my actual query.
The reality is that it's both. LLMs (along with every tool from a hammer to GPS) shape the world instrumentally (that is, by being wielded by the user), but also turn around and shape us formally. Every tool goes into the ecology of media, reshaping reality around us, including our abilities, senses, and values.
Rich's definition of "tool" is something like Ivan Illich's "Tools for Conviviality." Convivial tools can be used with minimal loss of agency, within a healthy politically-defined society. Huahai's definition is more akin to McLuhan's idea of "media." This category covers pretty much every technical or technological system, and its use is necessarily systematic and risks the instrumentalization of the user himself.
No. Quite the contrary. We are the 'tools' and we have been used skillfully.
The few AI companies have slurped up so much of human textual and artistic creation without attribution. They have taken enormous amounts of money from the public directly or indirectly and funneled it upwards to a few dangerous individuals.
When you say AI, learn to say "AI companies".
For now. It is definitely true right now, there's a notable difference between my coworkers depending on their skill driving these models: it mostly seems to be correlated with those who are willing to build their own tools, now that the cost to do so is basically zero.
But the models are getting so good and so fast, that I'm starting to wonder if that will stay true forever... probably not, if I had to guess. I'm just trying to pay off my house as quickly as I can...
I‘ve been on both camps and been critized for it (see my comments), and now I think these are some of the most useless disussions on HN, as they are heavily skewed by all of our life situations.
Hmm... interesting opinion. I disagree, and will insult you for it. With any luck, this comment chain will devolve into a thread of unsubstantiated opinions and ad hominems.
AI is incredible tool when you want to use it to enhance your skill (learn complex codebase, experiment different solution and understand the limit of complex system). However, most of people use it as a wishing machine and outsource their thinking.
Which works. That’s the problem. LLMs are now that good. Humans are known to love taking the path of least resistance so you can’t expect people to NOT outsource their thinking, especially at their tedious jobs.
The amount of skill it requires is decreasing every month. I would have agreed with GPT 5.3 Codex but Opus 5.5 is more or less foolproof
This is only true when you fix the bucket of tasks you are referring to.
But in fact, as models get more powerful, the ceiling of what can be accomplished with them is raised, and their capacity as orchestration directors grows as well.
'AI' is a marketing gimmick that often overlaps with machine learning, data science, and UX.
Agreed, in my experience as an engineer if you want to build a personal project on a weekend yes AI is good for that but the moment you start scaling your application, that's where real engineers who understand the engineering well are needed. The skill and expertise of a true engineer coupled with the speed of AI is my sweet spot
I don't understand the point of this debate. Rich's point is good. Having a mini-army of highly intelligent beings at your fingertips is not an ordinary "tool."
And it minimizes the fact that these things are only getting smarter. Having an entity much smarter than you--could that entity seriously be considered your "tool"? Just your tool? Or are the people on the "just a tool" side of this debate not taking that possibility seriously?
It might be better to view the near-future AI as an emerging intelligent alien species.
Regardless of whether it is 'conscious' or not, Roman Yampolski makes the point that AI may or may not have human-kinds best interests at heart [ hell, even humans aren't aligned ]
Can we control or trust a counter-party that has intelligence at a level near or exceeding the smartest humans in all domains ?
I dont even think we can even have a safe sandbox in which to run an AI .. and frontier model training labs are certainly not air-gapped.
Software engineering experience might be visualized as a panel with a few dozen buttons and levers. The engineers that are most successful with LLMs are the ones that understand more of that panel.
I am inclined to agree with the view that AI is merely a tool. And, incidentally, using it rationally isn't always easy.
If automation can't be a skill, Factorio isn't a game about how well you can automate.
While Factorio heavily features automation, I think it would be more accurate to describe it as a systems design game.
Related:
'AI' Is Not a Tool by Rich Hickey
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50060269
just for a bit of context, “Huahai is an entrepreneur. He co-founded Juji, a company building an AI agent platform”
Yeah I don't think so. It takes some knowledge today if you want to have control over architectural decisions. But honestly even if you don't the latest models still make fairly reasonable decisions.
I am pretty sure my wife could vibe code website or whatever at this point, or if not she will be able to in 6 months.
> AI Is a Tool. Using It Well Takes Skill.
And that skill is? Any concrete verifiable examples? That can be replicated, repeated by others or adopted by others?
> A compiler performs substantial work without the programmer continuously directing each operation.
Yes, and the compiler produces the same output for the same input all the time. And when it doesn't, it's a bug or a specified behaviour [1]
> Picking up a saw does not guarantee a straight cut. Holding a chisel does not make you a sculptor.
Yes, but you can learn the actual techniques that let you make a straight cut 100% of the time. And make you a sculptor.
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The rest of the small article doesn't even begin to approach the premise of the title.
[1] Yes, I know it's not strictly true. But compilers are 100% predictable compared to LLMs.
> And that skill is? Any concrete verifiable examples? That can be replicated, repeated by others or adopted by others?
I learned this weekend that 1 LLM working on its own with all the context is usually better than splitting the task up into sub parts and having multiple LLMs work in parallel.
The interesting part is that I had read about this previously but it wasn't until I had seen it on something I was working on did that principle become engrained.
I'm sure there are still ways to make this work. i.e You could specify how the context should be passed between agents.
Knowing when you need to do that, what works well and what doesn't, etc., is where skill comes into play.
> Knowing when you need to do that, what works well and what doesn't, etc., is where skill comes into play.
No, it doesn't. Because this will change the next time there's an update to models (like, tomorrow). And the "handoff time" is nothing but an unverifiable gut feeling.
> And that skill is?
It is easy to argue otherwise, but to request a response in the form of a web app / embedded widget is at least some kind of AI proficiency that mirrors past experience having used a tool.
The result will be anyone's guess
llms work best on optimization problems. especially when wrapped in a proof system.
> Yes, but you can learn the actual techniques that let you make a straight cut 100% of the time
no you can't? not by hand? not without a jig?
LLMs won't make a straight cut no matter how many "jigs" you throw at them
Yes, the most grounded take I’ve read on HN so far
How I wish I could divulge details of what we’ve built, nay, shipped in the last 6 months - it would sound completely unbelievable to this audience and come with a host of accusations
But it’s true - the tide hasn’t risen all ships the same though. Some engineers have become absolute monsters - things that used to take a month get done in days. Features that used to be prioritized on the order of weeks are done way faster.
Some engineers though? Even high performance ones have gone productive to bottom 25% by some measures
Why? Because it is a skill and it doesn’t come naturally to everyone
So many may sayers everywhere talking about more code less software, mistakes by ai with disastrous consequences- yet I’ve seen some remarkable stuff with my own two eyes. It’s a crazy time to be in this business, it’s awesome to be wowed everyday by what someone was able to do
It’s a shame I cannot inspect the tool. It’s a shame I cannot modify it as I see fit. It’s a shame that I need to pay $200/month to use it. But hey, I am a 3X engineer and my boss likes it, so I guess it should be fine? Not really, but I still get to pay the bills (for now)
I miss the tools I used in the past (gcc, linux, sqlite,…)
> It’s a shame I cannot inspect the tool. It’s a shame I cannot modify it as I see fit.
https://github.com/openai/codex
https://github.com/MoonshotAI/kimi-code
https://github.com/mistralai/mistral-vibe
https://github.com/earendil-works/pi
https://claude.com/de/resources/articles/claude-code-mods
Mini-rant: The feel of the "PC" years ago was that it was a democratized fragment of the means of production, that wouldn't just do tasks for you, but give you agency. Today that agency is eroded, it feels more like a consumption terminal for whatever lopsided deal a big corporation deigns to offer... When they aren't already using it to spy on you.
> code me an app, AI.
...AI codes an app...
> I don't like it. Make it like this.
...AI codes an app...
> I don't like it. See this app? Make it like it.
...AI codes an app...
> I don't like it. Hmm. Draw me an elephant.
...AI draws an elephant...
> I don't like it. This AI is stupid.
[dead]
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Googling is a skill. AI is a slot machine.
I disagree. It allowed me to get rid of many useless remote contractors who made the projects stretch forever. Slot machine or not, I am so happy not to deal with those people anymore.
It amazes me that you can tell people "I get better results with AI than the people I was paying" and their response is "no you aren't, you can't tell the difference". It's mind boggling.
I'm happy for you. Enjoy your spaghetti.