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rewgstoday at 5:11 PM1 replyview on HN

But here's the thing: learning Android dev is nothing like "learning" to use an LLM.

Obviously there are tons of tools and systems building up around LLMs, and I don't intend to minimize that, but at the end of the day, an LLM is more analogous to a tool such as an IDE than a programming language. And I've never seen a job posting that dictated one must have X number of years in Y IDE; if they exist, they're rare, and it's hardly a massive hill to climb.

Sure, there's a continuum with regards to the difficulty of picking up a tool, e.g. learning a new editor is probably easier than learning, say, git. But learning git still has nothing on learning a whole tech stack.

I was very against LLM-assisted programming, but over time my position has softened, and Claude Code has become a regular part of my workflow. I've begun expanding out into the ancilary tools that interact with LLMs, and it's...not at all difficult to pick up. It's nothing like, say, learning iOS development. It's more like learning how to configure Neovim.

In fact, isn't this precisely one of the primary value propositions of LLMs -- that non-technical people can pick up these tools with ease and start doing technical work that they don't understand? If non-technical folks can pick up Claude Code, why would it be even _kind_ of difficult for a developer to?

So, I'm with the post author here: what is there to get left behind _from_?


Replies

aworkstoday at 7:48 PM

"must have X number of years in Y IDE"

Not quite on topic but as an engineering manager responsible for IDE development, explaining to recruiters and candidates I wanted engineers who developed IDEs, not just used them. Unfortunately, that message couldn't get through so I saw many resumes claiming, say 5 years of Eclpse experience, but I would later determine they knew nothing of the internals of an IDE.

Presumably, people now claim 3 years of machine learning experience but via ChatGPT prompting.