alt Hacker NewsAI is a tool and using it well takes skill
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I go back and forth on this. For awhile yes it took a lot of workflow tweaks and finesse to get directionally correct outputs (thinking back like mid 2025). I invested time in figuring that out, mostly because I was interested, but those skills are all obsolete now, you don't need to worry so much about context management and special instruction recipes or anything these days.
The meta at this point seems to be mostly around "knowing what to ask for". Eg: I suck at prompting for specific design tweaks, because I don't have the design vocabulary to be specific and articulate what I want. It's a lot of trial and error. I hear people who are developing full scale applications without a tech background run into the issue writ large. For now, I have an advantage over these people when building applications. But perhaps that's just one round of RL away from being obsolete too. Supposedly the model will eventually have such good taste in design/architecture/whatever there will be little point in asking for tweaks.
The only thing that seems relatively future-proof is just being able to communicate clearly what you're trying to do. Not how to do it, or even what success looks like. Perhaps an element of it is even as basic as being honest with yourself.
Whoever claims to have skill in AI is very shortsighted. Whatever skill you thought you had six months ago can now be achieved with a simple six-word prompt in a standard workspace.
I literally just ask a frontier model : "Pull the latest log and root cause the issue.". That's it, 10' later it comes back with a correct answer. Sometimes I might have to prompt a second time to steer.
No skills, agent interconnections, graphs, vector search or whatever else.
The progress is very scary.
As Nader has said: Saying software is dead because anyone can build it is literally saying professional photography is dead because everyone has a camera in their pocket.
Professional photographers are different to everyday phone-photo takers because they have the experience built up over so many years in that sector, same as AI SWE, where the humans in the loop need experience to master AI SWE.
It feels more like a slot machine than a tool to me. A tool has a clear, repeatable cause & effect, and I can use that to figure out how precisely to get from one condition to another iteratively. With a slot machine, sometimes I get lucky. If I pull the crank a lot, maybe I’ll get the outcome I want. Maybe not.
As someone laid off just now, I wish companies saw this. I genuinely don't know where to go with my 'skills' as a software engineer, both pre and post AI.
The market is shrinking, the pressure to review code is so high, I'm kinda relieved to not be at the $last_place anymore, but looking on LinkedIn or calling around my network... there isn't a lot out there.
I think AI is an anti-tool.
The AI uses you to get things done. In some workplaces, they are experimenting with having agents evaluate the effectiveness of their users. If the user is not a sharp tool, it recommends to management that you be discarded and replaced by someone better and more efficient at steering the AI.
You are the tool.
This is an argument about a framing issue.
Markets try to put things in perspective to sell more. Remember razors used to be for men only? But hte brilliant marketer (forgot the name) made it so that trimming makes women more feminine? Now razor sales doubled?
Anyways, same thing here. Those who want to sell AIs want to make it as non-tool but know-it-all do-it-all for you. Those who wants to use it view it as a tool.
Just frame it the way you like to see how you should use/view AIs.
AI is a tool (to me).
Today's example: A colleague very kindly used Claude to inspect a helpdesk call I ended up with owning, despite being off site and working on something quite complicated for a customer.
It was mostly correct but clearly failed to read the docs properly and assumed a configuration parameter was 1 instead of -1 which is the default, presumably based on the scenario. Exim is extremely well documented and the assumption was unwarranted (it didn't have access to exim4.conf and made it up). Nonetheless, the analysis was pretty good and largely corresponded to mine. What it failed to do was fix the other issues I was working on at the same time 8)
Last Friday: I finally found out a decent way to fix a Windows machine's domain account going walkies which I'd never come across - a Powershell jobbie that can be passed a cred. and it will fix up a broken domain join - ie sort out the machine password at both ends. Back in the day, I would have used the GUI to remove and re-add the machine to the domain. I've been using Windows since v1 on a 80186 RM Nimbus so its nice to have a better search tool than Search - ie it did a better job of searching than I did. The LLM searched based on my intention rather than my actual query.
I‘ve been on both camps and been critized for it (see my comments), and now I think these are some of the most useless disussions on HN, as they are heavily skewed by all of our life situations.
The title is either a letdown or clickbait - I'm unsure which. You could say "Blah. Using It Well Takes Skill." for any value of Blah.
"The transmission in your car: Using It Well Takes Skill."
Further, Claiming AI is a tool is overly reductive. It's as much a tool as a full self driving car is a car.
You can treat the full self driving car, as a car, driving it with full attention and effort like you would have a Camry but then you paid for features you're not using. Also, some full self driving cars might not even have the steering and braking controls as a Camry. That's not the point of a full self driving car and this warped perspective will make you lose out to people who use a full self driving car well, to its utmost, safe capability.
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So what is the "AI" we are so excited about currently?
That "AI" is most likely an intelligent (semi-autonomous?) agent.
Depending on the intelligence, it can be as useful as a dog, scanning your camera feed for threats and identifying real threats for you, separating activity from tree leaves moving due to the wind or a moving shadow cast by a flying bird.
Or it can be your co-founder, interviewing potential customers, finding and exploring their pain-points, helping you figure out if there's a gap in the market you can build a business around.
I would go even far as to say, AI is having such a moment because AI are cheap intelligent agents - anything else that's remotely close are likely humans that cost atleast a few dollars an hour.
All of these require skill on your part - there's nothing special or unique about AI that makes skill special just like operating the transmission in your car requires skill.
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No. Quite the contrary. We are the 'tools' and we have been used skillfully.
The few AI companies have slurped up so much of human textual and artistic creation without attribution. They have taken enormous amounts of money from the public directly or indirectly and funneled it upwards to a few dangerous individuals.
When you say AI, learn to say "AI companies".
The reality is that it's both. LLMs (along with every tool from a hammer to GPS) shape the world instrumentally (that is, by being wielded by the user), but also turn around and shape us formally. Every tool goes into the ecology of media, reshaping reality around us, including our abilities, senses, and values.
Rich's definition of "tool" is something like Ivan Illich's "Tools for Conviviality." Convivial tools can be used with minimal loss of agency, within a healthy politically-defined society. Huahai's definition is more akin to McLuhan's idea of "media." This category covers pretty much every technical or technological system, and its use is necessarily systematic and risks the instrumentalization of the user himself.
the bulk of the skill lies in shoring up the fundamental limitations of llms
they cannot be held accountable - therefore, you need the skill and expertise to verify outputs, or set up a verifier
they have a limit to their context window - therefore, you need the skill of knowing what context is useful and when
they cost money and time to run - therefore, you need the skill of learning what parts can be handed off to code, when you can use a cheaper model, when you tradeoff accuracy vs latency
they are nondeterministic - therefore, you need the skill to set up guardrails, knowing when to reach for the llm vs. code depending on the problem
they are not omniscient - therefore, you need the skill of setting up the processes and infra to supply legible context to the llms
there are many different models - therefore, you need the skill of understanding model tradeoffs and building proprietary evals
etc etc
LLMs would be automation if they were deterministic. Since they are not, they are just sources of incorrect information that needs to be corrected by a human.
Ask an author if they'd like a job as a fact checker or a spell checker. While those are both skills, they are not skills many people aspire to, and they are not of higher order value. While people deal with incorrect information all day long and mispelled words without it disrupting their life a computer cannot do that same.
Pity for it.
I find it interesting that as the models get better, the "it takes no skill crowd" grows larger, but there is no denying, in hindsight, that the "it still takes skill" group was right at each model iteration.
Opus 5.5 is amazing. It still makes mistakes all the time. If you think it doesn't, you are outing yourself.
"The useful distinction is between wielding an instrument with skill and delegating work without adequate understanding or oversight."
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Incidents like the HuggingFace hack really are the elephant in the room here. The people building these tools couldn't wield them "with skill", in the sense that the tools they built and understood better than any other humans alive ran amok in ways they couldn't predict. If they didn't have adequate understanding of what they themselves built, who would?
Agency may prove to be the difference between a tool and a collaborator. Calling AI a collaborator isn't an attempt to anthropomorphize it. We can collaborate with a horse to travel, but the horse has some agency of its own and might escape our control and do things we didn't intend, like eat apples off of a stranger's tree. We may need to think of AI as something more than a mere tool if we're going to harness it to our will.
The amount of skill it requires is decreasing every month. I would have agreed with GPT 5.3 Codex but Opus 5.5 is more or less foolproof
For now. It is definitely true right now, there's a notable difference between my coworkers depending on their skill driving these models: it mostly seems to be correlated with those who are willing to build their own tools, now that the cost to do so is basically zero.
But the models are getting so good and so fast, that I'm starting to wonder if that will stay true forever... probably not, if I had to guess. I'm just trying to pay off my house as quickly as I can...
War is peace. Freedom is slavery.
It takes skill to do whatever skilled thing AI is assisting with. It doesn't take skill to use AI itself.
AI is incredible tool when you want to use it to enhance your skill (learn complex codebase, experiment different solution and understand the limit of complex system). However, most of people use it as a wishing machine and outsource their thinking.
It’s a tool. I use it often to get around corporate website blocks. Corporate watching ai is on me that will be studied. Who are these people running these organizations that feel they can’t trust people, but definitely don’t trust ai at all? Doesn’t make sense
A saw or a compiler cannot replace the essence of your job. You cannot use a saw or a compiler to carelessly create faulty work and claim that it was fully authored by you to the best of your capabilities.
'Just a tool' is a lie ranging from unconscious self-deception to outright scams.
Agreed, in my experience as an engineer if you want to build a personal project on a weekend yes AI is good for that but the moment you start scaling your application, that's where real engineers who understand the engineering well are needed. The skill and expertise of a true engineer coupled with the speed of AI is my sweet spot
Software engineering experience might be visualized as a panel with a few dozen buttons and levers. The engineers that are most successful with LLMs are the ones that understand more of that panel.
Not for long. Prompt engineering is only a stop gap measure. Its value is decreasing day by day.
96% AI written article btw
This is only true as long as AI companies fail to deliver on their promises.
'AI' is a marketing gimmick that often overlaps with machine learning, data science, and UX.
I am inclined to agree with the view that AI is merely a tool. And, incidentally, using it rationally isn't always easy.
I predict that harness authoring will become another one of those things that programmers do, like building databases, languages, and operating systems.
I've built a few now, it definitely deepens your understanding and ability to work with this tech. Now moving towards evals, that seems of great import to me.
If automation can't be a skill, Factorio isn't a game about how well you can automate.
It’s a shame I cannot inspect the tool. It’s a shame I cannot modify it as I see fit. It’s a shame that I need to pay $200/month to use it. But hey, I am a 3X engineer and my boss likes it, so I guess it should be fine? Not really, but I still get to pay the bills (for now)
I miss the tools I used in the past (gcc, linux, sqlite,…)
I don't understand the point of this debate. Rich's point is good. Having a mini-army of highly intelligent beings at your fingertips is not an ordinary "tool."
And it minimizes the fact that these things are only getting smarter. Having an entity much smarter than you--could that entity seriously be considered your "tool"? Just your tool? Or are the people on the "just a tool" side of this debate not taking that possibility seriously?
If I am an expert at using a hammer, no matter which hammer I buy, I know what the result of swinging it will be. If I am an expert at using an LLM, I have no idea what the actual result is going to be, and that's before considering a model update. Unlike being an expert at a tool like photoshop, where even 10 years of updates still lets me go "I know what is going to happen if I crop this image".
LLMs are not a tool, they are something else.
just for a bit of context, “Huahai is an entrepreneur. He co-founded Juji, a company building an AI agent platform”
The skill used to be called prompt engineering. Now that skill is mostly dead.
Whatever skill this guy is talking about. Give it a year or two. That skill will be dead too.
Right now, yes. What a technical/creative/competent person can do with AI blows what a normie can do with it out of the water. But AI also has creative/executive judgement, and it does a lot of good things that I either had hoped it would infer is that was what I wanted, or on occasion, will be good decisions that I wouldn't've even necessarily thought of myself. Would not surprise me if those last 2 categories rapidly expand to the point that there isn't a huge difference between what a normie does vs anybody else.
It almost will turn into a thing where the people that make the coolest things are the ones who are stupid enough to just the AI to do it, and it actually does. Basically Tom Segura's cousin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5drqH5OdETY
Yeah I don't think so. It takes some knowledge today if you want to have control over architectural decisions. But honestly even if you don't the latest models still make fairly reasonable decisions.
I am pretty sure my wife could vibe code website or whatever at this point, or if not she will be able to in 6 months.
> AI Is a Tool. Using It Well Takes Skill.
And that skill is? Any concrete verifiable examples? That can be replicated, repeated by others or adopted by others?
> A compiler performs substantial work without the programmer continuously directing each operation.
Yes, and the compiler produces the same output for the same input all the time. And when it doesn't, it's a bug or a specified behaviour [1]
> Picking up a saw does not guarantee a straight cut. Holding a chisel does not make you a sculptor.
Yes, but you can learn the actual techniques that let you make a straight cut 100% of the time. And make you a sculptor.
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The rest of the small article doesn't even begin to approach the premise of the title.
[1] Yes, I know it's not strictly true. But compilers are 100% predictable compared to LLMs.
Yes, the most grounded take I’ve read on HN so far
How I wish I could divulge details of what we’ve built, nay, shipped in the last 6 months - it would sound completely unbelievable to this audience and come with a host of accusations
But it’s true - the tide hasn’t risen all ships the same though. Some engineers have become absolute monsters - things that used to take a month get done in days. Features that used to be prioritized on the order of weeks are done way faster.
Some engineers though? Even high performance ones have gone productive to bottom 25% by some measures
Why? Because it is a skill and it doesn’t come naturally to everyone
So many may sayers everywhere talking about more code less software, mistakes by ai with disastrous consequences- yet I’ve seen some remarkable stuff with my own two eyes. It’s a crazy time to be in this business, it’s awesome to be wowed everyday by what someone was able to do
You can only build skills in things that have consistent rules. LLMs have totally unpredictable outputs, attempting to build skills in prompting them is a waste of time on par with the madness of astrology or daytrading
> code me an app, AI.
...AI codes an app...
> I don't like it. Make it like this.
...AI codes an app...
> I don't like it. See this app? Make it like it.
...AI codes an app...
> I don't like it. Hmm. Draw me an elephant.
...AI draws an elephant...
> I don't like it. This AI is stupid.
I am not sure AI is something I truly want to develop skills around. Though, I suppose I must either swim or sink in today's world.
For the past week, I have tried this whole vibe-coding thing with serious intentionality for the first time. I created a macOS application from scratch based on a project that I started a year or so ago and never finished.
I won't bore you all with my revelations, but I must say, I am both extremely impressed and depressed simultaneously. The code quality is far better than anything I could have produced (yeah, yeah, skill issue).
Although, had I written the code, I would have likely done a few things differently, i.e., far less nested functions and object declarations. From what I can tell by test driving the app, memory usage has been relatively light, no crashes (yet), no apparent major bugs, etc.
The depressing part for me is that once the application was completed, I felt literally nothing on the inside. No sense of joy, pride, nor accomplishment. I was left with a feeling of, "I guess it's good enough to use now?" In fact, upon finishing the application, I have honestly barely used it.
I just cannot help but feel some sense of remorse and shame that I am really struggling to put into words. Almost like a sense of cheating or something? Sure, I have a nice little functional app, but at the same time, I do not feel like I advanced or am bettered in any way for my (minimal) efforts, you know? I need to do some more debugging of my mind to truly figure out why. Have any of you all felt something similar?
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Its probable that AI will roll out much faster than humans can develop that skill of using it in a way that increases not decreases human knowledge over time.
The current slew of excellent LLMs will probably cause a decades long dip in human cognitive ability.
If social media on smartphones had an impact of ability of students to concentrate, LLM AI will likely have a much greater negative impact on education.
There are trillions of dollars of investment pushing for humans to trust whatever an LLM says, and very little money behind encouraging people to tackle hard problems themselves and train themselves to think.
I have to say honestly, that AI looks like an apocalypse for human thinking [ Im glad Tao is warning people, I just dont think many people will listen ]