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AI assistance is only making coders dumb, lazy and prone to replacement

19•pyeri•3h ago
LLMs like ChatGPT and copilot are like those super saturated junk food like a pizza or burger which feels good in that moment (ready code snippets or answers) but over a period only accumulates weight gain, sugar and diseases (technical debt, brain drain).

We have stopped reading or even looking up official documentation, that has become an extinct skill today. And why would we if an LLM does it for us and tells us only what we need to be told to create that release or fulfill that urgent deadline.

What happened with AWS outage recently is only a brief foreshadow of what might eventually come to pass if this trend continues. Imagine a world where most programmers are primarily LLM prompters with a very shallow understanding of core programming skills or even operational skills pertaining to an app, framework or library. What will we do if a major outage or technical issue occurs then and no person around knows what’s really going on?

And that’s not even mentioning the replacement of human workers problem which is the most discussed topic these days. Eventually, the senior/mid management will think why do we even need these “prompt engineers”, let an agent do that work. After that, senior management will think why do we need these “prompt managers”, let another agentic AI that controls other agents do it! Eventually, the company will be run entirely by robots and shareholders will enjoy their wealth in peace!

As dystopian as the above scenario sounds, that’s the world we are eventually heading towards with all the progress in AI and the commerce oriented environment it’s evolving in. But it’ll still take decades at least considering the state of prevailing systems in public and private sectors. But until that happens, let us programmers equip ourselves with real old school skills which have stood the test of time - like scavenging documentation, referring to stack overflow and wikipedia for knowledge, etc. and coding with humility and passion, not this LLM crap.

Comments

o0ower0o•3h ago
> We have stopped reading or even looking up official documentation

I mean... I still do it, but it's not like before LLMs I used those as the primary source. I just googled issues and checked stackoverflow first, then moved to the documentation (which is often a mess in smaller libraries).

> What happened with AWS outage recently is only a brief foreshadow of what might eventually come to pass if this trend continues

Is there a source that the issue was caused by AI tools? I've found out it was a DNS issue but there's no mention of the root cause, at least that I've found, nor AI or LLM mentions. And it's not like we didn't have outages before chatgpt

hu3•2h ago
LLMs are like vehicles.

They allow us to travel further and faster (my experience, but many disagree).

At the cost of walking/exercising less.

And just like cars, it's up to us to keep a healthy dose of thinkering about code to keep our neurons well connected.

So just don't blindly vibe code and you'll do fine. For now.

rkuodys•2h ago
I think it highly depends on your perception on what is your job.

If programmer is only the code-writer - then it is reasonable to agree with the post.

If on the other hand the developer is problem solver - well it just changes what problems you're solving. Somehow I don't see the future where CEO of any respectable company would sit with AI and ask Agent to develop features. You hire people who solves problems for you.

amunozo•2h ago
Industrial machinery is only making workers weak, lazy and prone to replacement.

Jokes aside, as any tool, it depends on how you use it. I think the problem is not AI assistance but the ever existing urgency and lack of patience of nowadays, which leads to everything to be done as fast as possible with no toleration to any waiting time. This plus language models is a really band combination that would lead to a disaster way before AGI or anything like that is remotely close.

codyswann•2h ago
Agreed. If your identity is your ability to bang away on a keyboard writing instructions to a computer in Python (or any other "language"), you're in for a bad time.

If your identity is solving difficult, domain-specific software-based problems, efficiently and securely, it doesn't matter if your instructions are written in English, French or... Python.

noufalibrahim•30m ago
One point where, I think, the analogy fails is context.

If one wants to modify a code base, it's necessary to be able to, sort of, load the program into ones head and then work off a mental model. The "slowness" of traditional development and the tooling around it gave people enough time to do this and over time, get really good at a navigating and changing a code base.

With LLMs being able to generate huge amounts of code in a short time, this is missing. The LLM doesn't fully know what it generated and the nuances. The developer doesn't have the time to absorb all that so at the end of the day, you have something running which nobody (including the original AI author) really understands. That's risky.

Of course, there are ways to mitigate and handle this I don't know if the original analogy is missing this.

sonicvroooom•2h ago
Just another step in cultural and cognitive speciation.

Brains & bodies, the minds that run on them, as well as the levels of consciousnesses with their context-switched/hopping awareness are not build the same, neither passively, nor actively.

If you propose to make the bulk of the people smarter and more competent vs just more productive you end up with smarter voters and more competent participants on the markets and in civil society.

Nothing big would change but smarter voters and news audiences have been a no-go, despite being a no-brainer, forever.

People are supposed to reason themselves into whatever enlightenment shines brightest during the time they grow up.

None of that is your problem. "It" is not everywhere. You can always build your own or join some net that doesn't even bother laughing about this shit. There's too much more.

viraptor•2h ago
This is just a rehash of lots of articles we've seen lately, but with no supporting data and wild speculation (how is AWS outage related at all?). This seems like just trolling. There's no real content here.
Nextgrid•2h ago
> What happened with AWS outage recently

I'm not hearing about any large lawsuits or customers migrating off the apps affected by the AWS outage... hell I'm not even hearing about migrations from AWS itself... meaning every party in the chain seems to be satisfied with what they're getting from each other despite the outage.

> What will we do if a major outage or technical issue occurs then and no person around knows what’s really going on?

If the outage is major enough we'll suddenly magically find enough money to actually pay an expert to figure it out. But turns out the world doesn't end when some bullshit apps go down and prevent people from working their bullshit jobs for a day.

EZ-E•2h ago
> Imagine a world where most programmers are primarily LLM prompters with a very shallow understanding of core programming skills or even operational skills pertaining to an app, framework or library. What will we do if a major outage or technical issue occurs then and no person around knows what’s really going on?

You could make the same claim to make a case for the usage of any technology that simplifies the coding work, ie: using Java instead of assembly, usage of AWS instead of implementing your own infra, etc. With higher level languages, by freeing up developers from having to worry about specifics of memory management or syscalls, they could become more productive and focus more on the actual problems to solve. Some still understand the underlying because they work on that low level layer, but this is not needed anymore for most.

I think LLMs are another step in that direction, although with caveats.

jeisc•2h ago
Any kind of powerful tool carries a load of risk with it. For example in woodworking one would never give a belt sander to a novice to smooth a surface.
wickedsight•2h ago
Isn't this true for literally everything else too?

Recruiters seem to be automating everything and it doesn't seem to make their work any more useful. Marketing people seem to generate a ton of slop. Even executives are starting to use AI assistance for writing memos and taking business decisions.

At some point, will nobody do anything anymore, like in Dall-E? Will we just lay down while we get AI slop force fed into our eyes?

I doubt it, but sometimes it does seem that way.

alganet•2h ago
It reads as poorly drawn caricature made by someone who secretly loves LLMs aimed at what he perceives an LLM skeptic to be.
bestouff•1h ago
Syntax highlighting and autocomplete have made me (even more) lazy, that's for sure. But I don't think they made me dumber.

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