alt Hacker News> In the 2010s, if you had technical gaps (say, you couldn’t write CSS), you had to either rely on a skilled colleague or just hope that the answer to your exact problem was out there on the internet.
You could read some general reference/guide/tutorial documentation on CSS, and then probably solve your problem (without searching for "how to center a div", or whatever your exact problem was, and copy&pasting the answer and moving on), also becoming more knowledgeable in the process.
The rest of the short blog post has some good points, but the first sentence sounds like it's targeted at the percentage of developers who did StackOverflow copy&paste to close Jira tickets, never becoming experts.
Delegating to LLM-ish AI is just a natural evolution of that. The question is whether they can still add value if kept in the loop.
The article author suggests that the answer is to be expert, and is addressing people who... "either rely on a skilled colleague or just hope that the answer to your exact problem was out there on the internet."
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I think you're talking about a different type of expertise from TFA. Consider this: What if I never enjoyed frontend programming and so I never wanted to be an expert on that?
In fact, I never enjoyed frontend programming because it was such a pain to deal with matters I considered trivial yet so frustratingly hard to do right... like centering a div. And yet the slightest misalignment is visually jarring and forces me to get a bit OCD about fixing it, which made it even more frustrating.
I questioned the whole premise of the situation: is working around a bad developer experience something worth spending my time on? Unless I actively wanted to get in there and fix the situation, not really. So yes, in those cases I would outsource my problem to a colleague or StackOverflow and move on. And as a career choice, I preferred to do more backend dev.
I would posit that that was the type of expertise that did not matter. The type of expertise that really matters here is good UI design. That is entirely orthogonal to the drudgery that is implementing and debugging webpage rendering, and I am eternally grateful to LLMs for freeing us from it.
You can extend that line of thought to the entire article. What really matters (and what LLMs reward) is domain expertise rather than technical expertise.
I don't think AI use is supposed to replace foundational learning such as reading a C++ book or Python book or CSS tutorial when you're a beginner. You still have to do those things if you want to be a professional or a strong amateur. But many people just want to get the thing done. They don't want to become a mechanic, they just want to drive from A to B.
I've seen junior engineers be productive on their first day in the industry because of AI, so I don't think the article is the whole truth.
The example math is boundary-pushing and definitely not a solved problem. But most of us work on CRUD backends with a React frontend. Those are more or less solved problems that have well-documented solutions. For those kinds of tasks, LLMs just reward usage.
I can count on one hand the number of times in my career I've needed to solve a problem that's not described on Stack Overflow.
As they said in the 80s or maybe earlier RTFM. I think if you got a good enough duster TFM was still readable in 2010.
the author forgot you could also do a secret third thing: learn!
dont really see the point when LLM compiles english
Except LLMs will only tend to share the most common or average of what it knows as the standard and deviating from it (including new ways) it can be resistant to.
An expert can lay a different kind of frame to prevent the llm to fell out of its way of being generally too verbose, and that can transfer as well to code generation and complication.
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> You could read some general reference/guide/tutorial documentation on CSS, and then probably solve your problem
Hours + Hours of reading and a lot of trial-and-error. The loop was so long and sooo slow. Now it's instant. As if your very first Google search just solved the problem for you immediately.