alt Hacker NewsWait: a calculator doesn't make you a mathematician because you have to know math to get the calculator to do anything. A pencil does even less for you. You can't say any of that about AI.
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b112 • yesterday at 11:55 PM
Entering 2x2 in the calculator, gives you 4, just as looking up the answer on a chart. Yet no one would give you the title of "mathematician" for doing so.
AI doesn't make you an expert. Or even a professional in any field. First, AI is terrible at cogent work, without someone driving it. And even if you do get it to do all the work, then that's not you doing it.
"Hi, I asked a coder friend to write an app, I'm a developer", nope!
> You can't say any of that about AI.
It’s weird though, LLMs still don’t seem very good at magically enabling most non developers able to make software. I’ve tried with a couple people - mostly for curiosity’s sake. Even when they have pressing needs that software could solve, they’re really resistant to talking to the machine about them. Then they don’t know what to actually ask the ai to do. Regular people don’t seem to know what use cases are. Or what a design mockup is. They don’t know what a website is, or what the limitations are. The llm could help guide them through all of this, but the people I’ve sat down in front of the machine didn’t ask the machine to guide them through the process at all.
Of course, if you only know how to vibe code, that doesn’t make you an engineer. But I’m no longer convinced that LLMs make developers pointless. If anything, so far they seem to make our skills much more valuable. With LLMs, I can get a lot of low quality work done quickly if that’s what the project calls for.