alt Hacker News> I can’t help but wonder whether constant use of “agent” harnesses will lead to an atrophy of the software engineering (or really any field) muscles.
It will, but I'm not sure the impact of this will be all too great. We suffer from not knowing how to use an abacus because we have a calculator, and people who feel a pull to keep their low-level chops up will do so anyway.
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I don't think this is equivalent. The calculator won't occasionally hallucinate a wrong answer. LLMs are a far leakier abstraction which means skill atrophy impacts evaluation and verification ability.
We will suffer from not knowing how to add. You could still argue "so what?"
Systems aren't a single addition. They are compounded operations with sprawling complexity. What happens when you can't reason through the system? What happens when you start asking for the wrong things? What happens when saying "fix it" on loop stops working?
Now imagine if your calculator billed per button press.
And imagine you can't own a calculator because owning one outright requires too much hardware (or whatever).