alt Hacker NewsWait a second, its layers all the way down
Exactly, I'm over 50 and I remember all the complaints about script kiddies who looked at windows bat files as opposed to all the 'real programmers' who knew C and Assembly and used VIM and linux (which is still going strong)
(ie https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/378:_Real_Program...)
but now also as an AI engineer we have to learn how harnesses, sys prompts, various models, tokens LLMs etc all work so a new abstraction is born..
layers changes, nerds and ultra-specialist nerds will remain
nostaliga is always for the last layer- the one you remembered from your teens and 20s.
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I expect 20 years from now there will be people reminiscing "remember claude.md? Back then we knew how it all worked. We had deep control. We counted tokens, chose the model..."
Script kiddies didn't look at the .bat files. They ran them without a clue how they worked. There was some respect for the people who wrote those scripts but none for users who couldn't write them
A (sad/funny) anecdote. Someone told me earlier this week "Not using a coding agent today is like using Vim for development instead of an IDE, you're just lagging behind".
As someone who's been exclusively using Vim for my development (and can definitely integrate it with AI workflows), that's just an insanely silly opinion. But I guess it shows how the next generation thinks about these tools that they've heard of but never actually bothered to learn.