Comment by everdrive 2 days ago
I can feel the skill atrophy creeping in. My very first instinct is go use the LLM. I think much like forcing yourself to exercise, eat right, and avoid social media / distractions, this will be a new modern skillset; do you have the discipline to avoid becoming useless without an LLM? A small few will be great at this, the middle of the bell curve will do "well enough," and you know the story for the rest.
I largely agree. But sometimes the program is not destructive and you only need to test for inputs that may/will actually occur. The LLM wrote a script to do some processing? Just test it, if the processing is fine, done.
I have many LLM-written scripts and tools to do some semi simple jobs where I have barely even looked at the code because I could see immediately that the job I wanted to do got done.
I have wasted too much time wishing I could find the motivation to work on coding projects. And there are times that I was able to force myself to just get started. Spin up the flywheel and let momentum carry me.
But I'm talking about a consistent problem for more than 25 years. AI agents didn't do this to me. At least in my anecdotal case, this isn't atrophy. It's just the way it has always been. Now I actually have much less friction in getting a project going. I can just type a few of my thoughts at an agent and away it goes. The momentum is almost free, now.
I haven't written any code in 6 months. But I can still remember how to code in 6502 machine code from the 1980s.
How can you be sure you remember if you aren’t actually doing it?
I’ve been using LLMs to code for some time and I look at it differently.
I ask myself if I need to understand the code, and if the answer is yes I don’t use an LLM. It’s not a matter of discipline, it’s a sober view of what the minimal amount of work for me is.