alt Hacker NewsIs AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good
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I wonder if this same effect happens for very wealthy and/or very senior executives? Those sorts of people have always had numerous people they could 'outsource' their thinking to; delegating work, asking for research/summaries, assigning tasks.
Does handing off that sort of work to people also ruin your skills in the same way? Or are AIs fundamentally different, and if so, why? Because we have no moral or social pressure to not delegate everything?
This is new, the scope of it, its not just about individual "skills" because its all of them; we are being challenged at the very fundamentals of our ability to think deeply and widely and persistently. That has never happened before like this.
It is quite extraordinary and breath-taking at times to see the agents in action; the flipside is that very power renders us both vulnerable to its seduction and enfeeblement on an equal scope - its almost hard-drug like in its potential long-term psychological effects.
I haven't written a full function of code in over a year. That being said, I've been spending a lot more time thinking about architecture and system properties.
So, yes, I do feel like I've lost some of that very low-level skill. But maybe I've also been able to spend more time on a higher level skill? Maybe the doctors got worse with the images but had more cognitive resources to think about the patient's context?
Not sure.
But yes, I can't physically get myself to write code without an AI anymore. It feels so much slower, almost painful.
Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old. New sports, new businesses, new academic pursuits. Technology is a lever and AI is the biggest lever we've ever had. It enables laziness or incredible productivity. Choose your own path forward.
Tool use typically follows this curve. If you want to preserve a skill you have to actually preserve it. This isn't inherently bad by itself, tools enable us to do much more than we can without them and its a point of contention whether or not any skill is inherently important when a tool comes along that does it for us.
The biggest negative I'm seeing is that people are moving _too fast_ to evaluate the stuff they're slinging. When you move too fast, you do not take the time to build up your taste or appreciate the nuances of different approaches to the same problem.
I am using LLMs quite a lot, but the amount of time I spend sitting on some slopped out code is I think on average much longer than a lot of my peers. What I've found is that while the original thing "works", it usually winds up being another 2-3 cycles of iterating on the original idea after I've let it settle in my head before I actually feel confident about merging.
As a result, when I add it all up, for actual "this is important" design-level concerns, I do not feel significantly more productive.
Oh ho ho....looks like I'll need to update my essay! The evidence is mounting higher and higher.
Of course. If you don’t use something it atrophies not only in non use but in losing interest in keeping up with the state of the art in said tech.
What we gain though is for people don’t possess that knowledge in the first place, now have this superpower. I know several individuals who have vast experience in specific disciplines and they are now able to solve real problems where there were previously struggling and having to make existing solutions work.
In the context of software engineering it allows people that have great institutional knowledge bypass the software market and construct stuff on their own - or at least prototype something and turn it over to an SE if the situation dictates.
I’ve been using CC for several months now and have noticed an increasing quality of output - Fable 5 I think was 85% there. At 95% SE’s are going to be increasingly looking for work to do.
To the title though, I’ve noticed while my desire to actually write code is decreasing CC is forcing me to improve my high level thought processes in the context of overarching goals in a project through discussion with CC. The software often introduces things that had escaped me or just think more outside the box.
My concerns are that this technology will be restricted at some point and the people making the restrictions will have a lot of control - and we know how that works out. But I believe they are inevitable, first obvious example being Fable 5. Are guardrails needed - yeah sure. Common sense says that I don’t want someone able to concoct an easily transmittable Ebola virus that has a 90 day incubation period in their kitchen but I do want an entrepreneur to be able to build a competitor to MS Office, or a cure for Ebola, for example.
For me personally, holding a dialogue with several agentic dev streams in parallel keeps me very much on my toes mentally. It's quite exhausting, and certainly not letting my brain atrophy.
I'm probably losing some coding skills, but replacing them with different ones, and honing some others.
I used to manage dev teams of 20+ people inside high pressure, high stakes projects.
I've been coding all my adult life, on big things and small.
To me, agentic engineering is a deja vue of managing teams, except in real time.
There are a lot of mundane coding skills I consciously put off learning in case they'd ever become obsolete, and now I'm glad I did. Like sure learning React was good, but Angular? That boilerplate is Claude's job now. Ruby? Forget that.
Is this a situation where AI will go away and we will regret the loss of skills? At worse, we will be forced to use open weight models instead of the cutting edge, so I don't think it's a big deal. I'm sure people got worse at arithmetic after the invention of the calculator.
I don't feel like AI coding has ruined my skills, and I could go back to manual coding any time.
However, I cannot build a good mental model of a software component that I didn't write myself, and that can affect future maintenance if that component is not properly decoupled from the rest of the system.
MDs NPs and PAs currently are offered free access to a medical AI app called Open Evedidence. Was just discussing this with our chief medical officer and while he is quite enthusiastic about it, he could already see this same dumbing down effect emerging among his providers. The solution I think, is 5 or 10 ten year re-certification exams for MDs, currently reqd for "Physician Extenders" but not the Physicians who supervise them. Continuing compulsory education and re-certification works, I suspect, in all highly skilled fields that are both augmented by AI but also degraded by it.
Humans will become individually and independently less skilled while having access to tools that allow them to do far more than even the most skilled human could, before having access to these tools.
I'm not sure if we'll become less intelligent. I think our sacks of neurons are gonna keep on making associations, just across a different set of topics.
Colonoscopy detection has gotten modestly better with AI assistance.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39216648/
https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2023...
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1309086
https://info.asge.org/083024-colon-asge/acg-quality-task-for...
New tool that does task better than worker leads to workers being less good at task. Net outcome for patient is positive. Next?
Programming: "for a given task, if you take a shortcut then you will not have the familiarity and expertise that someone who took the veritable and righteous path would have".
The question is then, what did you do with the extra time. If it's fuck all, then yes, that's a liability.
Like any technology, it comes down to the disposition of any given person in how they plan on applying it.
Not trying to say it's all going to be awesome. Definitely maybe the opposite. These arguments are weak tho.
My compiler writing skills atrophied with the advent of high-level languages, but in exchange I got more done. There is still a very well paid market for compiler writers, but the fact that not everyone needs to be one has made the world richer overall.
Personally? Yes (and I hate it).
Autocomplete of entire functions and methods. Nice, but also really boring. Takes the fun out it. It's all about fixing sup-par code now, a line here or there.
It's just boring. I tried writing some code by hand today after a few months hardly thinking about things and it was really hard to do even the simplest stuff.
Wow so technology doing tasks for people has an effect of diminishing their skill at those tasks. Truly unprecedented.
I suppose tractors and cars ruined our skills at feeding and caring for horses.
Losing a specific skill to automation isn't necessarily a bad thing. Losing the ability to learn things would be however, and that would be my fear with AI, but I'm not sure it's well-founded. Humans learn naturally by interacting with the world.
Some effect is real, but it's likely overstated by poor metrics.
"Currency" in all fields relates to the recency and frequency with which you dealt with a particular issue. Whether flying on auto-pilot or coding with AI, automated reduces some currency. But is that a reduction in capability?
Measuring concrete tasks makes currency the operative skill; that's why it works to cram for standardized and mid-level tests.
(Indeed, the 2010's interviewing "wisdom" about people being quick to answer simple questions veered into measuring currency, not skill.)
I think this effect is strongest in time-impacted professionals. Doctors doing dozens of endoscopies a week and developers churning out code will use what tool leverage they can, and forget as much as possible to focus on what they need to. I suspect the effect is weaker in personal or research projects.
People riding bikes won't be able to run long distances - because they won't have to, and will be able to outdo any runners. That's only a problem if the supply of bikes is someone constrained. So the risk is not skill loss, but losing control of the means of production.
For the people peddling LLMs this is actually good news:
1. Force AI down everyone's throats claiming it's going to boost productivity
2. See people lose valuable skills because they rely too much on AI
3. Peddle more AI to make up for the lack of skills in professionals
AI should demand tokens of attention from proffesionals little challenges to continue, turn the toolise into an adventure. The gold standard would be the primer from diamond age
No, AI isn't doing anything. When someone gets stabbed, do you say "are knives stabbing people?" No, just like you don't give credit to the knife for cutting up your vegetables.
"Just being aware that this phenomenon exists hopefully provokes some self-reflection about which skills people want to maintain and which they’re willing to outsource” to AI tools. Right. Obviously.
So we need to be teaching that core lesson to children -- they don't retain skills that they don't practice. And we need to be careful to decide what skills and verify they are learning them. We also should absolutely be using AI to provide personalized instruction to every single student.
Blaming the tools for things that humans do is incredibly stupid and dangerously misguided. Because it shirks responsibility onto the technology, when technology is the best lever humans and society have to improve things! It just happens to also be the best lever available to make things worse.
This negative view of improving technology starts from a warped and very unrealistic concept of the state of the world, where it has been, and the role technology has played.
1. Technologies, starting with fire, the printing press, etc. have been critical in raising life expectancy, standard of living, etc.
2. The world is still a profoundly unequal and exploitive place.
3. AI and robotics have the potential to provide everyone on earth who wants it with extremely inexpensive labor to help them with anything they need or can imagine. This will be a dramatic shift in quality of living.
Human society is the source of our problems, not technology. Part of this is that I think deep down people believe that any tools or developments that arise will just be used to exploit and suppress them more, and there is no alternative. In this case, I guess people think the best outcome is to go back to feudalism or some nonsense because technology just makes things worse.
But why stop there? Why not go back to, I don't know.. fire? Or maybe no one should ever eat any red fruit?
The bit about computer science (behind the paywall) starts:
> To investigate whether skills are being lost in the field of computer science, researchers at the AI firm Anthropic in San Francisco, California, designed a randomized controlled trial in which 52 software engineers were asked to perform a basic coding task
That's this study here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20245 - also written about on the Anthropic research site here: https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skil...
Back in the mid-90s I was doing desktop support. It was a lot of work because PCs were relatively new (and they were garbage!), and people broke shit all the time. Sometime around '96 a disk-cloning utility called Ghost was released. It was great - one could provision a fully working PC with all required apps and config settings in minutes! Sounds lame now, but back then it was revolutionary. It had a dark side, though. After about a year most people I worked with had lost the ability to troubleshoot even the most basic problems. The solution to every problem was to just re-apply the standard Ghost disk image (we called it 'Ghosting' back then) ... Can't print? Ghost it! Not receiving emails? Ghost it! Word is too slow? Ghost it!
> To investigate whether skills are being lost in the field of computer science, researchers at the AI firm Anthropic in San Francisco, California, designed a randomized controlled trial in which 52 software engineers were asked to perform a basic coding task3. During the exercise, all 52 participants could search the web and access instructions on how to do the task. Half of the participants were prompted to use an AI assistant as well.
> Afterwards, all of the software engineers were asked to complete a quiz about what they had learnt from the task. The participants who had used an AI assistant did significantly worse on the quiz than those who hadn’t: the average score was 50% in the AI group versus 67% in the non-AI group.
This doesn't strike me as a great test? Most engineers aren't going to learn anything from a basic coding task anyway, so I do wonder exactly what they were testing there. If it was just recall about what the issue was, then it doesn't really strike me as a problem - using AI to handle simple problems that it's clearly capable of dealing with is the right way to use it, and of course you're not going to spend time poring over the details because then you haven't saved any time by using AI.
There are other examples that don't strike me as particularly problematic, like GPS eroding people's sense of direction. It's totally reasonable to let a skill atrophy that you no longer really need because you have an ever-present tool to handle it. I'm a lot worse at doing long division than I was when I was <whatever grade one learns long division in>.
The whole skill atrophy thing seems like much less of a problem than it's made out to be. We've been letting skills atrophy for good reason long before the advent of AI. If you start at McDonald's as a fry cook and work your way up to regional manager, if you suddenly have to work a shift on the fry station you're going to be worse than you were when you were doing it all the time. MDs at investment banks almost certainly can't put together a pitch deck as well as the junior bankers who are doing that task regularly. These things are fine - part of moving up in the world and having a broader impact is being able to successfully delegate tasks, and when you delegate tasks your skill at those tasks will atrophy. No real difference whether you're delegating them to AI or not.
To be clear, there are of course cases where skill atrophy is bad. iLoveOncall posted about senior engineers in their org who have lost all of those skills and their judgment along with them. That's definitely bad! If you delegate so much that you lose the ability to even judge good work, now you can't even delegate effectively any more.
I think the real lesson with AI is that you need to be self-aware about what skills you should practice and retain vs. what skills you can let atrophy, since it's easier than ever to hand things off. I've lost most of my ability to write a SQL query, but that's fine because it was only a skill I used intermittently and AI can always do the job fine at the level of complexity I need. I have not let my skill of writing product specs atrophy (I am a PM, in case you haven't read my username), because that's critical to using AI correctly in the first place.
How many of you feel this, anecdotally? I had to come up with a class hierarchy for a roguelike game the other day. This should be something that's dead simple, off the top of my head, no problem.
And suddenly I was stuck! It was like thoughts weren't forming properly. My instinct was to use Claude to help brainstorm, but I resisted. 5 minutes later, I finally broke free and instantly came up with the plan.
What the hell?
I realized I'd offloaded my planning onto AI. I would ask it for plans and then choose the best one, but that's a different skill than coming up with the plans in the first place. My skills were rotting.
Luckily for me, I was never truly that intelligent nor skilled to begin with.
At least for writing, I think AI is mostly useful for the types of writing that aren’t particularly interesting or worthwhile in having to begin with.
In concrete terms, AI isn’t all that useful for writing a personal blog, because no one wants to read obvious AI slop. But it is useful for creating boilerplate product pages, FAQs, and other types of writing that weren’t very interesting pre-AI.
So it’s not really a huge deal to me that my skill for writing descriptive product page text or FAQs is atrophying, assuming that it is.
Is C ruining our memory allocation skills? Early results are in - and they're not good
Technology like many things is about _how_ you use it.
If social media is consuming first, or primarily consuming, anyone can scroll their way to a negative rabbit hole that never ends.
If creation is the use it's something else entirely.
AI in the form of interactive chats, can be a novel kind of consumption.
You can have passive conversations in terms of asking a magic genie, or more active ones.
It is not said here much given the AI psychosis, but firms like Anthropic do not allow you to use AI in their interviews for a reason.
They know that this is one of the biggest de-skilling programmes they have seen.
So expect the return of in person Leetcodes and whiteboard challenges.
What is most troubling for me is seeing kids just switch off when LLMs are available. Doing homework they will have zero interpretation or contemplation, just enter the question as a prompt and record the result. LLMs appear to have the ability to interfere with the most basic aspects of attention and executive function.
AI has allowed me to keep shipping features and system even when holding a normally managerial position, so if anything it preserved some of my coding skills. I'd not have seen any code otherwise (writing code is a huge time sink compared to managing things around an org).
I pity those who need to contend with that as ICs, though.
AI/AR Glasses that show you every piece of knowledge about whatever your looking at might not help, especially if the AI is wrong. Otherwise everyones a know it all?
Are employees ruining managers' skills? Late results are in - and they're not good.
The two senior engineers in my org (in a FAANG) who vibe-code the most have lost literally all of their skills. Their code has become terrible and their judgment even worse.
A very similar topic was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48392004 and I make the exact same conclusion:
All of this makes me selfishly excited for my own future. It's glaringly obvious that anyone who's a heavy user of LLMs is atrophying their skills in real-time. I have yet to meet a single person for whom it's not the case. But I essentially completely stopped using them for software engineering (why isn't really relevant, but it's not because od this skill atrophy). So as the skills of everyone else is diminishing, mine is proportionally raising.
It has never been easier to get better than others. You don't need to put in more effort, just the same effort as you always have, and others will do the job of losing their skills for your own benefit.
I call it Alien Slop Intelligence (ASI) that gradually turns your mind into slop. AI is sloppy on details, so at first you polish its slop by hand, then you start ignoring small imperfections, and eventually you lose taste and skills to evaluate AI output. At that point your mind has become slop.
It’s absolutely atrocious in the Fortune 500 tech sector. Multiple times a day I see people debating each other on teams about things they know nothing about and it’s obvious that it is just copilot v copilot. Crazy.
A skill which is now done better by a machine is no longer a skill, it is technology. It is just a matter of time before most of our logical and language reasoning skills are replaced by frontier model-agents, which will at some point be far superior (if not already) to human capability.
So I totally disagree with this premise that human skills are being ruined by the use of AI technology. No, many human skills are being made obsolete. That's a good thing for economic productivity as a whole, but for those who only have skills that are being automated, their labor value decreases (which is usually bad for them as individuals).
We were so spoiled. We got fat salaries to sit in air conditioned Herman Millers all day learning about computers. Now we discover a way to synthesis intelligence and the only thing we can think to do with it is ruin the most fun career most of us could have ever hoped for.
Sure, we're all more productive now, but how much of that is because we leverage AI on top of the intelligence we gained from all of that manual work? Who is to say that in 36 months you're not a worse developer over all because that systems knowledge starts to atrophy too?
This isn't me saying you shouldn't use AI. I use it all of the time to do useful side tasks like to setup GitHub Workflows while I write a feature, or with my agent on a VPS to do internet tasks for me. It's nice to have a little synthesized intelligence.
What isn't nice is to supplement your own intelligence. I think the gains are in the work there--similar to how you can be absolutely ripped from taking steroids while destroying your body. Often it's the shortcuts that are the most treacherous path.