If that's true, it would be very sad indeed. Techical excellence is a very low bar to clear. It's so easy even AI can do that part.

When I was young, and learning my technical skills, then naturally I was focused on improving those skills. At that age I defined myself by what I did, and so my self worth was related to my skills. And while the skills are not hard to acquire, not many did, and they were well paid. All of which made me value them even more.

As I've grown older though I discovered my best parts had nothing to do with tech skills. My best parts (work wise) was in translating those skills into a viable business, hiring the right people, focusing my attention where it's needed (and getting out the way where it's not.) My best parts at work are my human relationships with colleagues, customers, prospects and so on.

Outside of work my technical skills mean nothing. My family and friends couldn't care less. They barely know I have drills at all, and no idea if I'm any good or not. In that space compassion, loyalty, reliability, kindness, generosity, helpfulness, positivity, contentment and so on are far (far) more important.

I hope at my funeral people remember those things. Whether I could set up email or drive an AI will (hopefully) not even be in the top 10.

This is quite an interesting question, because I believe there's two facets to the surface of the question.

Given you're interacting with a competent hacker (i.e. a person who is into tech not for money and for tinkering), you can't impress them. You can pique their interest, they may praise you, but if they are informed enough, anything looking like magic can be dissected easily. So technical excellence is meaningless.

Given you're interacting with a competent hacker again, everything technical will be subjective. Creating is deciding trade-offs all the way down and beyond. Their preferences will probably lay at a difference balance of trade-offs. Even though you catch "objective" perfection, even this perfection has nuances (see USB audio interfaces. They all have flat response curves, but they all sound different, for example), hence, technical excellence is not only meaningless, it's subjective.

On a deeper level, a genuine person who knows its cookies well, even though with gaps is a much more interesting and nicer person to interact with. They'll be genuinely interested in talking with you, and learn something from you, or show what they know gently, so both parties can grow together. They might not be knowledgeable in most intricate details, but they are genuinely human and open to improvement and into the conversation itself, not to prove themselves and win a meaningless battle to stroke their own ego.

An LLM generated response is similar. It's lazy, it's impersonated, it's like low quality canned food. A new user recently has written an LLM generated rebuttal to one of my comments. It's white-labeled gibberish, insincere word-skirmish. It's so off-putting that I don't see the point to reply them. They'll just paste it to a non-descript box and will add "write a rebuttal reply, press this point". This is not a discussion, this is a meaningless fight for internet points.

I prefer genuine opinions, imperfect replies, vulnerable humans at the other end of the wire. Not a box of numbers spitting out grammatically correct yet empty sentences.

Have you tried that line in a bar?

More to the point, Hacker News is much more interesting for encouraging idiosyncratic (i.e. original, diverse, nuanced views of specific) human viewpoints, not just being raw technical information.

Model rewrites remove much of specific human dimension.

There is value in technical excellence, but it’s not substituable for having and using a voice that isn’t the crowd-averaged AI normal. Better an unpracticed voice than a dull one, etc. (Also, AI is nullifying a great deal of excellence in favor of barely sufficient, just like Java did! so betting on the continued value of technical prowess requires some particular specializations that are not so easily replaced as the high quantity of devopseng cogs turn out to be.)

No, that would be my roguish good looks.

Only if you’re a very boring person.