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 don’t know about you, but I use LLMs as gateways to knowledge. I can set a deep research agent free on the internet with context about my current experience level, preferred learning format (books), what I’m trying to ramp up on, etc. A little while later, I have a collection of the definitive books for ramping up in a space. I then sit down and work through the book doing active recall and practice as I go. And I have the LLM there for Q&A while I work through concepts and “test the boundaries” of my mental models.

I’ve become faster at the novice -> experienced arc with LLMs, even in domains that I have absolutely no prior experience with.

But yeah, the people who just use LLMs for “magic oracle please tell me what do” are absolutely cooked. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.