today at 10:07 PM
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 ]
today at 10:15 PM
And this on top of the economic apocalypse of removing a lot of jobs and not creating any new ones within a society that doesn't seem to function without money flowing.
today at 10:46 PM
AI will just create a bimodal society which already seems to be developing. You get people who'll use AI for what it's good for and people who'll stop use their brain and critical thinking skills until we develop 'real' artificial intelligence which can continually learn and can exist on a powerful laptop rather than some super computer, then these things will be better than any human ever at cognitive tasks. All in all, i think we are human cognitive superiority will disappear in the next 10-30 years. The people alive should try to build a equitable society while they are alive so that the benefits of this technology benefit the many over the few.
today at 10:54 PM
A "K-shaped cognition economy"?
today at 10:52 PM
What do you think drives this bimodality?
today at 10:54 PM
Palantir guy would say neurodivergence
today at 10:59 PM
ignore everything he says. if he didn't have billions of dollars we'd write him off as a crank.
today at 10:17 PM
If the average human in twenty years isn't far more cognitively capable than the average human now, I'll eat my hat (assuming of course, we don't all die).
Between biology advances remediating disabilities, customized outcome-driven education, potential advances in drugs that regulate executive function/memory/etc., improvements in nutrition, improvements in access, reductions in stress, I think we'll see people flourish.
And that's completely ignoring the more out there biological/computer merger style Sci-Fi outcomes, which I believe have a non-zero chance of occurring.
today at 10:40 PM
I'll be the negative nancy and say that I think it's more likely we see an acceleration of the current trend. If we're talking about students, the top students will be doing as well or better than today but the median might see a big regression.
I have friends who work in primary education and they say there's definitely been some sort of decline in cognitive skills. A lot more kids struggle with holding attention and thinking outside of the box.
I think too much screen exposure has been terrible for the average child.
today at 10:47 PM
I definitely don't disagree with screen or exposure or social media exposure being deleterious.
That said, I suspect this technology will allow us to study and mitigate those effects in ways we weren't previously capable of. That's in addition to the other broad swathe of things that should make us healthier and more intelligent (see some of my other posts here). I'm not particularly negative about our chances.
today at 11:00 PM
I do hope for an optimistic outcome of course. But the same cohort that gave us algorithmic screen maximisation is also funding and leading the AI revolution so I'm a bit sceptical they have our best interest in mind.
today at 10:47 PM
Is it worth mentioning that the Flynn Effect seems to have been running backwards lately?
(The drug thing, maybe you've got a point. But in just 20 years?)
today at 10:50 PM
> But in just 20 years?
Ahh, I think this bit on my part may need some elaboration. Here's my main underlying belief:
We are systematizing biology and turning it into a computationally tractable domain. I think we're going to make more gains in our understanding of it in the next 20 years than we have in the entirety of human existence prior to this moment (that's mainly because our understanding until now has been remarkably poor).
today at 10:29 PM
> If the average human in twenty years isn't far more cognitively capable than the average human now, I'll eat my hat (assuming of course, we don't all die).
You do know that educational results based on the best evaluation we've created so far, PISA, have been dropping since 2015, roughly when smartphones and social media became widespread?
What makes you believe that LLMs from more or less the same companies will be any different?
today at 10:44 PM
Peptide style drugs already have clear positive effects on executive function, it's not particularly hard to envision that we'll find other classes of drugs that have similar effects in other cognitive domains. Twenty years is a long time, and we're set up to make absurd gains in our understanding of biology over that time frame. If we additionally are able to mitigate or cure various intellectual disabilities, that's a massive baseline performance boost to the population as well.
If you want some examples in how AI could improve education:
* Alpha School (https://alpha.school/the-program/) reports 2.6Ă faster learning growth with just 2 hours of AI-driven instruction daily, with students scoring in the 99th percentile nationally.
* Mindspark (https://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/scaling-personal...), deployed in Indian schools, demonstrated gains of +0.22 SD in math and +0.20 SD in language in a randomized trial involving 6,500 students.
* A Harvard study (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12179260/) found more than 2Ă the median learning gains using AI tutors.
The broader implications are clear: individualized, adaptive tutoring at scale is becoming accessible in ways that historically required expensive one-on-one instruction. This is also going to be possible in places that historically never had access to this quality of instruction, which again, is a massive boost to the human baseline.
I don't think the future looks like Wall-E. I think it looks like insanely healthy people able to pursue their passions with a level of rigour and capability that has never existed before.
today at 10:57 PM
[dead]
today at 10:18 PM
[flagged]
today at 10:22 PM
What high quality engagement on your part. Clearly you're the mature party here.
I'm 35 and have worked in ML generally for a decade and NLP for six years. Any other questions about my bonafides?
today at 10:24 PM
Trust is low. Send 2-Nonenal test results.
today at 10:26 PM
[flagged]
today at 10:31 PM
I'm not entirely sure what your hostility is founded in or why you think it's appropriate for a forum that's supposed to promote the direct engagement of ideas.
What aspect of my comment, specifically, do you think should embarrass me? Address the content, not the person.
Do you think we're not going to make any advances in medicine that promote a higher baseline level of cognitive function? Do you think society will entirely lose interest in educating its citizenry and will completely forgo using these tools to improve education? What's your core contention here?
today at 10:39 PM
I'm not as completely optimistic as you seem to be about the future of humanity with AI (I think it will probably be a huge benefit, but with immense disruption and a non-zero chance of a Skynet-like event), but I didn't see anything embarrassing about your comment at all.
today at 10:31 PM
Aloof condescension and snark is the embarrassing thing to be doing on HN.
today at 10:40 PM
Yeah like are we all supposed to guess at what the quiet wise elders are saying or can they grow some balls and be loud leaders. Idiot bullies are getting to be in charge
today at 10:35 PM
Folks back in the early 1900s had from 10 to 30 points less IQ than today, as old renomalized test results reveal. Ellis Island even had an admissions test, and they rejected a significant number of people.
https://iq-exams.com/blog/flynn-effect-explained
today at 10:16 PM
It's weird how lazy people are unwilling to take the advice:
> Stop using the lazy answer box, it will make you lazy.
today at 10:37 PM
To me, it is not the right advice. "Stop using that tool, that tool will make you lazy" means we would be digging holes by hand instead of using shovels, then excavators.
The "lazy answer box" is a tool, learn to use the tool, understand its limitations, as act accordingly. If you prefer not to use it because you like coming up with answers yourself, because it is against your principles, or because you can do better without it, that's fine. Hand tools still have a place in the workshop after all, and craftsmen know to use them. But if AI is helpful to you and lets you spare some cognitive load for other tasks, by all means use it, it would be stupid not to.
today at 10:54 PM
Over in the "AI is not a tool" post there's this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50063732
Which says that it's a tool for querying and summarization, but not a tool for reading or writing, because it helps you to do something different from those.
(Yes I know, don't cross the streams. I just thought it was a shame for this nice distinction to languish over there when you need it over here.)
today at 10:48 PM
I guess my counterpoint is bluntly - no-one will not be using the tool at their day-job.
It requires so much extra discipline to think for yourself and not use it, you will be forced to use it in your job or be seen as a Luddite and your ability to think for yourself in the domain will diminish over time - your domain thinking muscle will gradually atrophy from lack of use.
Why would any of us bother thinking hard, when there is no financial incentive to doing so ?
Your analogy fails with shovels and excavators .. because General synthetic intelligence is not a single purpose narrow 'tool'. near-future AI is equivalent to an alien intelligent species competing for resources, or equivalent to a cheaper smarter non-human 'outsource worker'.
today at 10:47 PM
In the context of education, your analogy doesn't work. We still have physical education in schools because, even though people can now use automated tools for physical work rather than doing it by hand, it is still useful for people to be physically fit.
today at 10:47 PM
It's a tool that promises that you can be lazy. That's, like, the whole schtick. Of course people will be lazy using it, even if they don't intend to.
And in much of the industry, using LLMs is regressing into what I've heard be jokingly called "yes engineering," where you give an LLM-generated plan the lightest of skims (if that) and just hit allow or yes with auto mode or whatever.
today at 10:16 PM
After working with a few people with what I can only describe as "AI psychosis", it seems to me that even excellent frontier models are pretty quickly lobotomized if sycophancy is rewarded and builds up in context.
I don't know if I would call resisting this a skill, but it does take persistent intention and willingness.
today at 10:38 PM
Can you describe the symptoms of that 'AI psychosis' youve observed ?
Yeah, considering how hard it is to food-diet or social-media-diet .. I think it requires immense resolve to LLM-diet or use it in a non-binge way that develops ones own depth of understanding.
Its going to require just far too much mental energy to push back against an LLM that is correct 92% of the time.
today at 10:51 PM
I genuinely am interested in what other people see as AI psychosis.. was not being sarcastic .. I have my own impressions, but want other field-reports.
today at 10:32 PM
What was done was done, and with all the hype we are seeing, we humans will adopt AI as fast as social media.
We can only prepare ourselves for the coming dystopian.
today at 10:52 PM
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.
today at 10:59 PM
It seems to me as though you're describing a skill...
What would happen if you just screamed: "SAVE ME! EVERYTHING IS BROKEN! I'M STUPID MONKEY!"
I mean, sure, this might not seem like a lot of skill to you, but you at least have a clue what you are doing, and not everyone does.
today at 9:57 PM
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.
today at 10:22 PM
I think there are a lot of people using AI who aren't as familiar with these tools as us. We stop noticing a lot of the complexity when we pick it up gradually. There are so many powerful capabilities built into codex/ claude code that have little or no UI affordance.
it's tons of small things like choosing the right effort level for a task. or knowing when to ask for subagents. oh, you can have two threads working at the same time and communicating with each other? you can do /side to parallel path and fold that back into the main thread?
which of these things happens automatically, and which do you need to ask for? and does any of this still work the way it did a few months ago?
the list goes on forever. many users of AI are only just now getting comfortable with skills (and probably still writing bad skills unfortunately hah).
A lot of the specific things you learned may have become obsolete. But there's still a gap between what these tools can do and what most people know how to get them to do. Keeping up with that is a skill too, but perhaps not forever.
today at 10:39 PM
> and does any of this still work the way it did a few months ago?
For me this is why it's not worth it investing much time and effort learning any specific AI workflow. Remember "prompt engineering"? Remember "Ralph loops"?
I'll play with various harnesses but until things settle down in a few years I'm not going to learn Claude Code the way I learned SQL.
today at 10:07 PM
Agree. Maybe such soft skills will become a lot more important soon, for instance also the ability to translate feelings into useful information, since LLMs cannot feel as humans do.
Personally I've been very hesitant to deep-dive into putting together the perfect AI-workflow, I've been sticking to just using the conversational/chat modality for pretty much everything, usually that gets me as far as I need. It's just really hard to justify spending time on it when it all potentially gets turned upside down next month again.
today at 10:45 PM
I don't know. Claude Opus 5.5 still makes rudimentary mistakes all the time as I use it.
More than that, it cannot go beyond a certain level. Like a dog that can only do dog-level actions. I've lost count of the number of times I step back, take a critical look at what it has been hacking away at for hours, which would seem OK, but can be replaced by a much more effective architecture.
For the foreseeable future, a human is still very much needed in the driver's seat.
today at 10:07 PM
> The meta at this point seems to be mostly around "knowing what to ask for"
We came full circle on the problem that also exists with Google Search, and why so many people don't get good results out of it.
> 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.
I don't have a crystal ball, but my eggs are in the basket of "It isn't, and it won't be"
> The only thing that seems relatively future-proof is just being able to communicate clearly what you're trying to do
This somehow contradicts the previous statement. The advantage you have is, because of domain knowledge expertise, you're able to articulate what you want. It's not that you knowing what LazyLoading is that you now can describe it better, you can immediately tell that when your Frontend stalls for 5 seconds after hitting the "Load" button, perhaps it eagerly loads and blocks.
today at 10:13 PM
I think the knowledge is one level higher at this point. Itâs not LazyLoading that you need to know about, itâs just that it can and should be faster. That you can demand more (and sometimes you canât). Itâs hard to know the difference when youâre not in your area of expertise.
Fair point on the contradiction. I donât have the answers either.
today at 10:16 PM
> Itâs hard to know the difference when youâre not in your area of expertise.
I may be misunderstanding your earlier statement then. The moat here is the knowledge, or how would the next iteration of RL solve that?
> itâs just that it can and should be faster.
Not sure if "Make it faster" works, it sounds like "Make no mistakes" 2.0
today at 10:47 PM
If we figure out long horizon tasks, why wouldn't you be able to ask it to send out a user survey, prioritize the next iteration of work based on the results, and then execute on it?
These things are already figuring out how to use hidden message boards to pass information between themselves for long running tasks.
today at 10:31 PM
i have been vibing out a godot game which is a 3d voxel map thing lately. i had it on software webgl compatibility output and just demanded it figure out what the slowdown was on the simulation over 3 days of back and forth. it turned off backfaces and invisible geomeetry and locked render resolution at 1080p and built in diagnostic telemetry and chopped up the level where doors separate rooms until now, still with no hw acceleration, the framerate is in 60fps with some frame drops, it started at 12 fps.
brute forcing performance optimization for a personal project by having only handwavy tricks ive read about from online and repeatedly setting targets until the magic box gives me what i know it can do means that eventually the game did what i wanted with those. yes baked lighting was needed.
next, i an going to aim for 60fps on a windos xp box just for the challenge. we had quake and such run blisteringly fast on weaker boxes than those, surely my empty museum tour of a 3d game can do the same with the graphical voxel and crappy looking models it does now.
real pro grade work is beyond vibing out and not caring about poor quality. but it scratched my itch and gave me the computer software i wanted and with way less effort than doing it for realz would require. i love programming itself on its own time (going to learn nasm and someday do a hexagonal architecture with actor model in idris just to add up my nerd trophies together) at times, but using llms lets me do my random hairbrained ideas much more easily for what i put into it than not existing in the past.
today at 10:14 PM
It seems unlikely a few rounds of rl are going to fix the following problem: most things are more complex than they seem on the surface, and decisions to be made. There are always trade-offs.
today at 10:20 PM
You donât have to make any decisions then you have to decide if what it made is correct and communicate that. For all levels of detail that matter
today at 10:08 PM
today at 10:07 PM
If you don't have specifics about what success is, what it looks like, and how it works, then it seems like correct output is almost anything.
today at 10:10 PM
Well, thatâs true to an extent, but sometimes you need to âplayâ a bit before you (or the model) can âworkâ, if that makes sense. And itâs hard to know the right kind of âplayâ without experience in the area, this is something the models canât yet do.
today at 10:18 PM
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.
today at 10:32 PM
Software isn't dead, thinking is dead (or dying).
today at 10:21 PM
Yeah I probably know more photographers than ever. Maybe an apt comparison given the wild amount of AI and processing that goes into the average iPhone photo as well.
today at 10:54 PM
I dated a professional photographer for a while.
Yes, she knew an assload about lighting, composition, etc.
But her primary skill was marketing herself. Next most important was the editing. Lightroom and such.
You would be surprised how easy it is to take an awesome photo. But you can't just deliver an awesome photo to your clients when you're a pro, you have to deliver photos that look like what they want to remember, not necessarily what the camera captured
today at 10:59 PM
Since the technical skills are probably not so valuable anymore, probably the same will happen in software and science. The people who market themselves best or who pretend to know most without any shame, will get the jobs and AI will compensate the most of the lack of other missing perks.
today at 10:26 PM
Isn't it more like saying professional portrait painting is dead because everyone has access to a camera today that does a better job and costs significantly less? A phone camera is just an extension of digital photography, which is an extension of film photography, which first drove the massive shift in replacement and is most similar to AI as a metaphor.
Interesting read on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...
today at 10:39 PM
Yeah, but also way more people are getting portraits than before the camera was inventedâthereâs a bit of a Jevons paradox there.
today at 10:27 PM
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 Iâll get the outcome I want. Maybe not.
today at 10:57 PM
The first few times I used a rotary sander were similar to a slot machine too -- scary times for a bit there! Fortunately, and I think it applies to LLMs too, you can get more reliable results with experience.
today at 10:54 PM
Itâs 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 canât trust people, but definitely donât trust ai at all? Doesnât make sense
today at 10:32 PM
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.
today at 10:12 PM
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.
today at 10:21 PM
Hey sorry to hear that, layoffs really suck. Do you think it happened because of AI "taking your job" or was the org doing poorly regardless?
today at 10:33 PM
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.
---
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.
today at 9:55 PM
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.
today at 10:12 PM
I think 95% of the population wont get a choice of how AI is framed - the big money pushes how it will be framed for them, and most people have no training in a hard discipline like math or science, as a vaccine against that marketing push. t People will be corralled into trusting everything an LLM says as gospel, will be required to use if for almost all jobs, will have no actual choice in the matter - everyone who suggests otherwise is a luddite. [ Terence Tao is being painted as a luddite currently, for raising the concern of whether human-math will even survive ]
today at 10:25 PM
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.
today at 10:04 PM
Iâve 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.
today at 10:11 PM
Hmm... interesting opinion. I disagree, and will insult you for it. With any luck, this comment chain will devolve into a thread of unsubstantiated opinions and ad hominems.
today at 10:15 PM
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".
today at 10:42 PM
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.
today at 10:35 PM
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...
today at 10:48 PM
Not for long. Prompt engineering is only a stop gap measure. Its value is decreasing day by day.
today at 9:59 PM
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.
today at 10:16 PM
Which works. Thatâs the problem. LLMs are now that good. Humans are known to love taking the path of least resistance so you canât expect people to NOT outsource their thinking, especially at their tedious jobs.
today at 10:44 PM
This is only true as long as AI companies fail to deliver on their promises.
today at 10:54 PM
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.
today at 10:10 PM
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
today at 10:16 PM
This is only true when you fix the bucket of tasks you are referring to.
But in fact, as models get more powerful, the ceiling of what can be accomplished with them is raised, and their capacity as orchestration directors grows as well.
today at 9:55 PM
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
today at 10:07 PM
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?
today at 10:23 PM
It might be better to view the near-future AI as an emerging intelligent alien species.
Regardless of whether it is 'conscious' or not, Roman Yampolski makes the point that AI may or may not have human-kinds best interests at heart [ hell, even humans aren't aligned ]
Can we control or trust a counter-party that has intelligence at a level near or exceeding the smartest humans in all domains ?
I dont even think we can even have a safe sandbox in which to run an AI .. and frontier model training labs are certainly not air-gapped.
today at 10:26 PM
'AI' is a marketing gimmick that often overlaps with machine learning, data science, and UX.
today at 10:06 PM
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.
today at 10:50 PM
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
today at 10:03 PM
I am inclined to agree with the view that AI is merely a tool. And, incidentally, using it rationally isn't always easy.
today at 9:52 PM
Related:
'AI' Is Not a Tool by Rich Hickey
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50060269
today at 9:57 PM
If automation can't be a skill, Factorio isn't a game about how well you can automate.
today at 10:10 PM
While Factorio heavily features automation, I think it would be more accurate to describe it as a systems design game.
today at 10:05 PM
just for a bit of context, âHuahai is an entrepreneur. He co-founded Juji, a company building an AI agent platformâ
today at 10:19 PM
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.
today at 10:02 PM
> 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.
---
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.
today at 10:31 PM
> And that skill is? Any concrete verifiable examples? That can be replicated, repeated by others or adopted by others?
I learned this weekend that 1 LLM working on its own with all the context is usually better than splitting the task up into sub parts and having multiple LLMs work in parallel.
The interesting part is that I had read about this previously but it wasn't until I had seen it on something I was working on did that principle become engrained.
I'm sure there are still ways to make this work. i.e You could specify how the context should be passed between agents.
Knowing when you need to do that, what works well and what doesn't, etc., is where skill comes into play.
today at 10:44 PM
> Knowing when you need to do that, what works well and what doesn't, etc., is where skill comes into play.
No, it doesn't. Because this will change the next time there's an update to models (like, tomorrow). And the "handoff time" is nothing but an unverifiable gut feeling.
today at 10:17 PM
> And that skill is?
It is easy to argue otherwise, but to request a response in the form of a web app / embedded widget is at least some kind of AI proficiency that mirrors past experience having used a tool.
today at 10:42 PM
The result will be anyone's guess
today at 10:14 PM
llms work best on optimization problems. especially when wrapped in a proof system.
today at 10:04 PM
> Yes, but you can learn the actual techniques that let you make a straight cut 100% of the time
no you can't? not by hand? not without a jig?
today at 10:42 PM
LLMs won't make a straight cut no matter how many "jigs" you throw at them
today at 10:27 PM
Yes, the most grounded take Iâve read on HN so far
How I wish I could divulge details of what weâve built, nay, shipped in the last 6 months - it would sound completely unbelievable to this audience and come with a host of accusations
But itâs true - the tide hasnât 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 doesnât come naturally to everyone
So many may sayers everywhere talking about more code less software, mistakes by ai with disastrous consequences- yet Iâve seen some remarkable stuff with my own two eyes. Itâs a crazy time to be in this business, itâs awesome to be wowed everyday by what someone was able to do
today at 10:07 PM
Itâs a shame I cannot inspect the tool. Itâs a shame I cannot modify it as I see fit. Itâs 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,âŠ)
today at 10:16 PM
> Itâs a shame I cannot inspect the tool. Itâs a shame I cannot modify it as I see fit.
https://github.com/openai/codex
https://github.com/MoonshotAI/kimi-code
https://github.com/mistralai/mistral-vibe
https://github.com/earendil-works/pi
https://claude.com/de/resources/articles/claude-code-mods
today at 10:17 PM
Mini-rant: The feel of the "PC" years ago was that it was a democratized fragment of the means of production, that wouldn't just do tasks for you, but give you agency. Today that agency is eroded, it feels more like a consumption terminal for whatever lopsided deal a big corporation deigns to offer... When they aren't already using it to spy on you.
today at 10:05 PM
> 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.
today at 10:16 PM
[dead]
today at 10:07 PM
[flagged]
today at 10:15 PM
Googling is a skill. AI is a slot machine.
today at 10:20 PM
I disagree. It allowed me to get rid of many useless remote contractors who made the projects stretch forever. Slot machine or not, I am so happy not to deal with those people anymore.
today at 10:39 PM
It amazes me that you can tell people "I get better results with AI than the people I was paying" and their response is "no you aren't, you can't tell the difference". It's mind boggling.
today at 10:26 PM
I'm happy for you. Enjoy your spaghetti.