alt Hacker NewsI've been having this same gnawing feeling. I just started reading the book "The Collision" by Eric C So which promises to cover this subject. I haven't finished it but seems decent so far.
It's so depressing a thought that if I continue on this path, in a few years, let alone a decade, I'll be utterly unable to produce or even understand code. I realize the skill may not be very economically useful, but losing it is still a depressing outcome that's preventable in theory. At the same time I'm feeling a deep apathy towards building anything. Playing a Zachtronics game is the farthest my internal motivation can push me towards...
I'd love to hear what others are thinking/doing.
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I don't know if it's true. I didn't program at all between 2000 and 2015 and I've been able to restart without too much effort. I forgot many things, but I found it relatively easy to recover...
I'm more worried about people that did never program and started directly with LLM support...
I've actually been thinking that designing a Zachtronics-like would be both great practice and great fun!
I've been doing more networking recently. But any skill building is probably worthwhile.
I’m personally using it to augment my coding more than replace it. I find joy in it.
I use my agent to prototype a rough version that mostly works, and then I iterate through (with or without my LLM) to clean it up. Then back to the top with a new feature until I’m satisfied with the project and code.
I do tend to like it. My real selling point is that I’m not “locked in” to any choices until I’m happy with how it looks. I used to have to build the thing to see how it looks and acts, and going back on those choices was painful.
I do think there will be value in it, but I’ve been wrong before. My agent occasionally makes stupid choices that make every prompt after that 4x as hard to fix. Like I screwed up a pydantic model in an unreleased library and it supported a “legacy” path no one would ever use for like the next 5k LoC. By the time I noticed, legacy handlers were like 25% of the codebase.
That’s gonna burn a looot of tokens if you scale it up to a million line of code app.