alt Hacker News>First, I like programming and don't want to stop doing it just because a machine can do it too. Second, I'm pretty sure atrophied coding skills will make me worse at directing the machines, thus worse at what seems to be "the job" these days.
In theory wouldn’t atrophied coding skills not matter if models are sufficiently good at coding? I mean isn’t whats left just design and architecture and testing?
Sure, if LLMs are producing shit code you need to have an understanding of what it should do instead. But I think that day is already gone.
Its hard to think of a skill that you’d need to build with an LLM that requires writing meaningful amounts of code by oneself. From my end all the complexity is business logic and system design.
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If it helps, imagine they were talking about something like drawing or painting or stitching or sculpting instead of coding.
You don't expect everyone to stop wanting to do those just because they can be automated more or less effectively, right?
> In theory wouldn’t atrophied coding skills not matter if models are sufficiently good at coding?
I am begging HN users to understand that some people enjoy writing software themselves
Only in the same sense that painting skills not matter
I still catch Claude writing some shit code sometimes
> In theory wouldn’t atrophied coding skills not matter if models are sufficiently good at coding? I mean isn’t whats left just design and architecture and testing?
No, because good understanding of design comes from programming experience. Atrophied skills mean you lose touch with the actual nuts and bolts of what you are building.
This is also the worst kind of lock-in you can imagine, by outsourcing all of your understanding of a codebase and your skills you are now completely at the mercy of LLM providers. Even if you switch to open weight models you're at the mercy of graphics cards producers and scalpers.
> Sure, if LLMs are producing shit code you need to have an understanding of what it should do instead. But I think that day is already gone.
Maybe your standards are too low. By my standard, they still produce shit code and require lots of iterations to get reasonable designs (I often end up just rewriting the bits that are obviously wrong rather than trying to figure out how to "prompt engineer" the right output).
They do often produce passable code but my experience is the longer you spend reading the code the more things you find wrong with it, almost like an uncanny valley.
At least that's my experience with Opus and Fable. Maybe it's too old-fashioned at this point to complain about code quality, but I find it very strange how many people have started proclaiming that their code quality is good.