* "search on steroids" - get me to the thing I need or ask whether the thing I need exists, give me few examples and I can get it running.

* getting the trivial and uninteresting parts out of the way, like writing some helper function for stuff I'm doing now, I'll just call AI, let it do its thing and continue writing the code in meantime, look back ,check if it makes sense and use it.

So I'm not really cheating myself out of the learning process, just outsource the parts I know well enough that I can check for correctness but save time writing

Same here. Except that as native french speaker there simply weren't that many quality books about programming/computers that I could easily find in french.

So at 11 years old I also learned english, by myself, by using computers (which were in english back then) and by reading computer books.

And we'd exchange tips with other kids in the neighborhood who also had computers and were also learning to code (like my neighbors who eventually, 20 years later, created a software startup in SoCal).

Of course, asking a question was another matter, likely to result in a rebuke for violating the group's arcane decorum. But given how pervasive "RTFM" culture was back then, most "n00bs" were content to do just that (RTFM) until they came up against something that genuinely wasn't covered in some FAQ or manpage.

Human posters need to start saying obscene things or making unsafe/violent statements to ensure the comment isn’t just AI generated.

For programming, I don't like it. It's like a master carpenter building furniture from IKEA. Sure it's faster and he doesn't have to think very hard and the end result is acceptable but he feels lazy and after a while he feels like he is losing his skills.

The best days of computing for me were what you remember. A computer was just a blank slate. You turned it on, and had a ">" blinking on the screen. If you wanted it to do anything you had to write a program. And learning how to do that meant practice and study and reading... there were no shortcuts. It was challenging and frustrating and fun.

I never had the feeling that being able to search for things on the internet made things too easy. For me it felt like a natural extension to books for self-learning, it was just faster.

LLMs feel entirely different to me, and that's where I do get the sense that they make things "too easy" in that (like the author of the OP blog post) I no longer feel like I am building any sort of skill when using them other than code review (which is not a new skill as it is something I have previously done with code produced by other humans for a long time).

As with the OP author I also think that "prompting" as a skill is hugely overblown. "Prompting" was maybe a bit more of a skill a year ago, but I find that you don't really have to get too detailed with current LLMs, you just have to be a bit careful not to bias them in negative ways. Whatever value I have now as a software developer has more to do with having veto power in the instances where the LLM agent goes off the rails than it does in constructing prompts.

So for now I'm stuck in a situation where I feel like for work I am being paid to do I basically have to use LLMs because not doing so is effectively malpractice at this point (because there are real efficiency gains), but for selfish reasons if I could push a button to erase the existence of LLMs, I'd probably do it.

I've seen the following prediction by a few people and am starting to agree with it: software development (and possibly most knowledge work) will become like farming. A relatively smaller number of people will do with large machines what previously took armies of people. There will always be some people exploring the cutting edge of thought, and feeding their insights into the machine, just how I image there are biochemists and soil biology experts who produce knowledge to inform decisions made by the people running large farming operations.

I imagine this will lead to profound shifts in the world that we can hardly predict. If we don't blow ourselves up, perhaps space exploration and colonization will become possible.

You could do that without that knowledge back in the day too, we had languages that were higher level than assembler for forever.

It's just that the range of knowledge needed to maximize machine usage is far smaller now. Before you had to know how to write a ton of optimizations, nowadays you have to know how to write your code so the compiler have easy job optimizing it.

Before you had to manage the memory accesses, nowadays making sure you're not jumping actross memory too much and being aware how cache works is enough

Fewer abstractions, deeper understanding, fewer dependencies on others. These concepts show up over and over and not just in software. It's about safety.

I think this depends on how you are using the internet. Looking up an API or official documentation is one thing, but asking for direct help on a specific problem via Stackoverflow seems different.

Kids today couldn't imagine how people used to live just 100 years ago, like it was the dark ages. People from that age would probably look at kids 10 years ago and think, these poor children! They don't know how to work hard! They don't know anything about life! They're glued to these bizarre light machines! Every age is different.

The internet never fell. I bet it’ll be the same with AI. You will never not have AI.

The big difference is the internet was a liberation movement: Everything became open. And free. AI is the opposite: By design, everything is closed.

Does this mean youd be incapable of learning anything? Or could you possibly learn way more because you had the innate desire to learn and understand along with the best tool possible to do it?

Its the same thing here. How you use LLMs is all up to your mindset. Throughly review and ask questions on what it did, or why, ask if we could have done it some other way instead. Hell ask it just the questions you need and do it yourself, or dont use it at all. I was working on C++ for example with a heavy use of mutexs, shared and weak pointers which I havent done before. LLM fixed a race condition, and I got to ask it precisely what the issue was, to draw a diagram showing what was happening in this exact scenario before and after.

I feel like Im learning more because I am doing way more high level things now, and spending way less time on the stuff I already know or dont care to know (non fundementals, like syntax and even libraries/frameworks). For example, I don't really give a fuck about being an expert in Spring Security. I care about how authentication works as a principal, what methods would be best for what, etc but do I want to spend 3 hours trying to debug the nuances of configuring the Spring security library for a small project I dont care about?

Man, it would rule so much if programmers were literate and knew how to actually communicate what they intend to say.

I learn the most from struggling through a problem, and reading someone’s code doesn’t teach me all the wrong ways they attempted before it looked like the way it now does.

Gemini 3 by itself is insufficient. I often find myself tracing through things or testing during runtime to understand how things behave. Claude Opus is not much better for this.

On the other hand, pairing with Gemini 3 feels like pairing with other people. No one is going to get everything right all the time. I might ask Gemini to construct gcloud commands or look things up for me, but we’re trying to figure things out together.

It's ironic that the more ignorant one is the one calling another ignorant.

Alright I've had my fun with the name-calling. I will now explain the stunningly obvious. Not a thing anyone should have to for someone so sharp as yourself but there we are...

For someone to produce that text after growing up in an English speaking environment, they would indeed be comically inept communicators. Which is why the more reasonable assumption is that English is not in fact their native language.

Not merely the more generous assumption. Being generous by default would be a better character trait than not, but still arguably a luxury. But also simply the more reasonable assumption by plain numbers and reasoning. So, not only were you a douche, you had to go out of your way to select a less likely possibility to make the douche you wanted to be fit the situation.

Literate programmers indeed.

I agree that if I don't already know how to implement something, seeing a solution before trying it myself is not great, that's like skipping the homework exercises and copying straight from the answer books.

These steps are what help you solve other issues in the future.

If that's not true, then what's the problem with not learning the material? Go do something more productive with your time if the personal curiosity isn't good enough. Were in a whole new world.

>Saying what you said about it being down to being how you use LLM comes from a privileged position. You likely already know how to code. You likely know how to troubleshoot. Would you develop those same skillsets today starting from zero?

This is true, and I can't answer that 100% confidently. I imagine I would just be doing more more/complicated things and learning higher level concepts. For example, if right off the bat I could produce a web app, Id want to deploy it somewhere. So Id come across things like ssh, nginx, port forwarding, jars, bundles, DNS, authentication, etc. Do this a 1000 times just the way I wrote 1000 different little functions or programs by hand and you'll no shit absorb little here and there as issues come up. Or maybe if whats hard a year ago is easy today, Id want to do something far more incredibly complex than anything anyone's been able to imagine before, and learn in that struggle.

Programmers in the 90s were far more apt at understanding CPU registers, memory and all sorts of low level stuff. Then the abstraction moved up the stack, and then again and again. I think same thing will happen.

Also, you can't say Im in a privileged position for already knowing how to code and at the same time asking what's the point of learning it yourself.