zlacker

>>tablet+(OP)
The argument seems to be that for an expert programmer, who is capable of reading and understanding AI agent code output and merging it into a codebase, AI agents are great.

Question: If everyone uses AI to code, how does someone become an expert capable of carefully reading and understanding code and acting as an editor to an AI?

The expert skills needed to be an editor -- reading code, understanding its implications, knowing what approaches are likely to cause problems, recognizing patterns that can be refactored, knowing where likely problems lie and how to test them, holding a complex codebase in memory and knowing where to find things -- currently come from long experience writing code.

But a novice who outsources their thinking to an LLM or an agent (or both) will never develop those skills on their own. So where will the experts come from?

I think of this because of my job as a professor; many of the homework assignments we use to develop thinking skills are now obsolete because LLMs can do them, permitting the students to pass without thinking. Perhaps there is another way to develop the skills, but I don't know what it is, and in the mean time I'm not sure how novices will learn to become experts.

>>capnre+15
I dont know if im convinced by this. Like if we were talking about novels, you don't have to be a writer to check grammar and analyze plot structure in a passable way. It is possible to learn by reading instead of doing.

>>bawolf+76
Sure, you could learn about grammar, plot structure, narrative style, etc. and become a reasonable novel critic. But imagine a novice who wants to learn to do this and has access to LLMs to answer any question about plots and style that they want. What should they do to become a good LLM-assisted author?

The answer to that question is very different from how to become an author before LLMs, and I'm not actually sure what the answer is. It's not "write lots of stories and get feedback", the conventional approach, but something new. And I doubt it's "have an LLM generate lots of stories for you", since you need more than that to develop the skill of understanding plot structures and making improvements.

So the point remains that there is a step of learning that we no longer know how to do.