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.
I am begging HN users to understand that some people enjoy writing software themselves
No, I didn't. I claimed that if my coding ability atrophies, I expect that my ability to code through LLMs will decrease. And this is an outcome I want to avoid for the stated reasons and others.
That said, I get your point: maybe "the thing writing the code" will be as abstract as "the thing moving the electricity through transistors" at some point. And maybe I will be wrong about coding skill translating to good agent-herding skill. But I don't think I'm wrong now.
Please reread my comment. That’s not what I’m addressing.
“Programming” is a bit loaded. Do you mean thinking through and typing everything out yourself?
What design skills specifically can you only develop from continually programming in this way?
Personally I’ve found the opposite to be true. As writing out code myself has shrank to nearly 0, I now have a much shorter feedback loop on design. You get a lot more repetition and feedback when that’s basically all you are doing.
Weeks and month for to wait for a feedback in developing software? Are you the sloth in zootopia?
The longest cycle for feedback for me has only been hours. And that was about redesigning the core architecture of an app. Otherwise, it’s like 10 minutes cycle if it’s edit-compile-run, 5 minutes if it’s REPL (lisp, bash, python,…).
As I write code myself I continously take into consideration stuff like following the consistency of the entire design, whether what I'm doing is efficient, etc. LLMs are terrible at this and I don't see how you could develop such skills by prompting only.
For example, I would never produce designs that require degenerate db access patterns (linear scans, etc.). Everything I write myself always takes into account using db & network efficiently from the ground-up. Every query is an index lookup, every api request is rate limited, everything is batched and cached, so on and so forth.
LLMs meanwhile don't care about any of this. I just had Claude happily try to fetch youtube page html because the api didn't expose something. Great idea, I'd love to be banned by google for scraping.
Designing with performance in mind is black magic too, I need to notice myself that stuff that I think has no reason to be slow (pretty much nothing does) is slow and hammering the llm to finally come up with a non-stupid design that's not ridiculously slow and wasteful. Yeah, why don't we pull 2.3mb of html to update a list, sounds good.
Agents make it too easy to gloss over too much. They're great at work where i care about productivity but I've zero interest at home where the point is learning and having fun
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.