There's a reason we still (generally) teach people how to do arithmetic with pencil and paper instead of jumping straight to calculators. Learning basic algorithms for performing the computations helps solidify the concepts and the rules of the game.
We'll need to do the same thing eventually with respect to LLMs and software engineering. People who skip the foundations or let their comprehension atrophy will eventually end up in a spot in which they need those skills. I basically never do arithmetic using pen and paper now, but I could if I had to, and, more importantly, the process ingrained some basic comprehension of how the integers relate under the group operations.
I totally agree, re: SQL specifically, by the way. SQL is basically already natural language. It's probably the last thing that I'd need to offload to some natural language prompt. I think it's a bit of a vicious circle problem. There's a lot of people who only need to engage with SQL from time to time, so working with it is a bit awkward each time for lack of practice. This incentivizes them to offload it to the LLM just to get it out of the way, which in turn further atrophies their skills with SQL.
This was actually the whole point of SQL in the first place: to be a query language close enough to natural language that non-specialists could easily learn to use it.
I have seriously considered hanging out my shingle to do this freelance, I don't think the time is quite ripe yet but maybe in a few months.
People are programming out on a limb - and blame goes to the library maintainer if the user lacks the fundamental skills to do troubleshooting.
It seems like the future is converging on there will 5 Matrix savant architects who make $1B/y who keep things operating while everyone else lives in a shanty or a pod.
The OP is essentially a (white collar) labor version of this. What is evidently valued is an appearance of expertise, rather than expertise itself. Just like the capitalists who want to make money, and skipping production of actual goods in order to accomplish that, "professionals" are going to skip actual learning in order to appear knowledgeable.
For 200 years, people have hoped that the "free market" will sort out the problem that Marx saw. It didn't happen - we still get financial bubbles that cause trouble for many people. So, I suspect it's a mistake to assume the learning problem will fix itself either. I suspect people (society at large) will have to consciously value the hard work of learning for this to be fixed.
owenthejumper•1h ago