alt Hacker NewsIt took me a few months of working with the agents to get really productive with it. The gains are significant. I write highly detailed specs (equiv multiple A4 pages) in markdown and dicate the agent hierarchy (which agent does what, who reports to who).
I've learned a lot of new things this year thanks to AI. It's true that the low levels skills with atrophy. The high level skills will grow though; my learning rate is the same, just at a much higher abstraction level; thus covering more subjects.
The main concern is the centralisation. The value I can get out of this thing currently well exceeds my income. AI companies are buying up all the chips. I worry we'll get something like the housing market where AI will be about 50% of our income.
We have to fight this centralisation at all costs!
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I have found that using more REPLs and doing leetcodes/katas prevents the atrophy to be honest.
In fact, I'd say I code even better since I started doing one hour per day of a mixture of fun coding and algo quizzes while at work I mostly focus on writing a requirements plan and implementation plan later and then letting the AI cook while I review all the output multiple times from multiple angles.
The hardware needs to catch up I think. I asked ChatGPT (lol) how much it would cost to build a Deepseek server that runs at a reasonable speed and it quoted ~400k-800k(8-16 H100 + the rest of the server).
Guess we are still in the 1970s era of AI computing. We need to hope for a few more step changes or some breakthrough on model size.
This is something I think a lot of people don't seem to notice, or worry about, the moving of programming as a local task, to one that is controlled by big corporations, essentially turning programming into a subscription model, just like everything else, if you don't pay the subscription you will no longer be able to code i.e. PaaS (Programming as a Service). Obviously at the moment most programmers can still code without LLMs, but when autocomplete IDEs became main stream, it didn't take long before a large proportion of programmers couldn't program without an autocomplete IDE, I expect most new programmers coming in won't be able to "program" without a remote LLM.