alt Hacker NewsDo mathematicians and physicists put away the calculator and computer (this always reminds me of the last scene from Star Wars) and do the computation by hand? A physicist isn't going to manually invert a 10,000x10,000 matrix.
Exactly as we don't write machine code letting the compiler do that, now and in the near future we won't be writing high level programming language code. We are moving towards working on a higher level of abstraction.
When I ask a frontier model to write a loop 10 different ways in Python and TypeScript and test the performance of each using a 1,000,000 iterations, it isn't creating cognitive debt. For the time being, I'm still racking my brain asking the question, how does garbage collection affect the performance.
I feel like we're doomed to respond to these lazy analogies ad infinitum.
Knowledge abstractions have historically been built by people with a detailed understanding of a problem domain and with a period of vetting the abstraction by many people. That is simply not true with LLM-generated code. We do not really understand what techniques LLMs are using to understand directions, value aesthetic/legibility characteristics, assess tradeoffs, retrieve contextual information, generate output, etc. Embedded in everything LLMs do are small decisions.
If you reach for formulas that you don't understand the applicability of, you will similarly get bad outcomes! But a calculator has almost no resemblance to what happens when you give general instructions to an LLM and get a generated code back, because in between that prompt and the result are many layers of decisions you the developer did not make and likely will not understand without carefully assessing the output!
If you have no discomfort with being culpable for something and doing none of the work to understand it, by all means, don't do anything to understand the output! Don't read the code, don't re-type the result, etc. I have concerns that you'll have a job in a year, but that's your decision to make!