alt Hacker NewsTool 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.
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The huge problem in this specific case is that to use this tool well you also need the underlying skill to be developed and preserved. It's very different from a power drill.
The difference if this is okay is how reliable the tool is. If it is a calculator or compiler it is okay. The example in the article also sounds okay (machine learning image classification), though I am not sure.
LLM output is unreliable, so we still need to judge it. If I want to be able to judge code, I must have worked with it to a certain extent. So the unreliable tool does not help me much if I don't want to accept the unreliability.
Sure. But if you don't own the tool and it is held by a cabal of centralist (even political state-adjacent) parties, you're having a bad day when computer says no.
One of the challenges here is that the skillset we are in danger of letting atrophy is essentially unbounded. It’s not a specialized tool like a calculator, where you have a well scoped domain of problems you are offloading. granted, in practice many people are using ai for specialized domains (like coding or producing visual designs). But whatever level of abstraction they are currently working at is not, in principle, something that they couldn’t also offload to ai.