Makes me think of Japan, where young people learn to recognize kanji. They type the sound of a word into a computer, then choose the appropriate one.

When they have to write by hand, they often draw a blank (not only children, I had a university professor I knew temporarily forget the character for "police").

An article from 2012 said that 66% of Japanese surveyed believed that they were losing the ability to write kanji.

Now it seems like the need to think is rapidly going away. More and more I realise I'm not actually needing to think about anything. I'm not worried so much about losing my ability to program as I am about losing my ability to think. Programming without thinking is the worst kind of grunt work. I wanted more time to think and less time typing, but it's just far too tempting to not bother thinking either.

I've made a wealth of cute things for me and my kids to do (shameless self promotion) https://drawesome.art - multiple people drawing/painting/coloring on the same canvas my kids love this. The architecture took forever for me to get write. Basically server side authoritative state of pixels and blending between two points. How to realistically manage and store it. https://www.catchmemeow.com - random where's waldo-esque game where you find a cat or dog wearing a silly hat I made this for my daughter and me to help the shelter she wants to volunteer at. https://www.cluestep.com - this one is weird I've actually tried to productize it but i made this because I had the HARDEST time helping my oldest with her calculus/algebra II homework. Basically I constantly made her cry. I just wish I could make it not look so "Made with AI"

I think LLM's analogy are prefab with nailguns did for carpentry. It's very complicated to prompt it (at least for me) to try and make it do something novel and net new. It always falls back on node/typescript/fastAPI/python. It's not terrible at using more obscure languages but I have the hardest time describing what I want or thinking without starting something more by hand and then letting it take the wheel and seeing where it drives me.

I should mention too at work I'm practically forced, measured even on the amount of AI I use. The expectation feels like use AI for any and everything. So i'm more worried one day I'll be laid off once I'm found to hit the 'enter' key much anymore. Anyways for me I'd say embrace it, use it and you'll find your output is much higher with the caveat that when a bug occurs it's incredibly hard sometimes to fix if it's with LLM generated code.

  > You have a previous generation of cars where people just enjoy working on with hand tools, and there’s modern cars where people like to tune with software patches.

I think the analogy with cars is apt, but we should also like at what happened with cars. People are being locked out of fixing them, even for simple jobs that would usually be task that introduces someone to the hobby or career. Fixes like changing your oil or brakes. Remember that the Ford CEO said that cars are "too dangerous" to fix. Probably connected with the other thing they talk about... a $100 bn repair industry that they want a bigger piece of. There's an easy way to do that, John Deer and Apple have clearly shown that it's not hard, even when we get the right to repair. Is it any wonder far fewer people work on their cars these days? Ask the people with electric vehicles... there are people out there, just as there always will be, not the numbers do matter

Weirdly, I think LLMs would be much more useful if everything was open source. No need to hack your microwave to give it a firmware update to the door doesn't lock, just patch. More training for the LLMs and turns what would be a specialized task into one anyone can do if they point the LLM at the code. Plus, people submit patches to the source code, getting companies free work. There is a way everyone can win in this. Sometimes (often) being greedy prevents you from getting a bigger fill

The second thing is that using LLMs in a useful way is a skill in itself.

For linting style errors I’m using entr in a separate terminal which is also awesome.

The only thing to be proud of will be that we are genetically close to Sam Altman, the Creator of AI and über-shrimp.

Frenetic multitasking is for suckers.

My workflow is the most common one - use something like Opus to help create a spec document (I decide the specs and then get the LLM to ask me questions to harden it), then generate a plan, and then implement. I use Opus the whole time. Sonnet sometimes if it is a simple task.

So be it. It's fine. It will be fine. At some point I knew assembly well enough; I read hex fluently and confidently changed things directly in some random-looking files. This skill sometimes comes in handy (even today) when reading network packets. How many people today need to really understand offsets, field sizes and padding, so shit like: "bytes 12-13 are the EtherType" feels natural? What percentage of programmers actively creating software need to know how to read, say, exploit and malware traffic?

Some may say: "well, this is enormously important", but the reality is, "no, it's fucking not". For like 95% of programmers, it isn't.

And the number of programming languages I had to learn and then forget later... The point is - you don't need to be "thinking in a programming language". You just need to be thinking, period. Whatever language it will be tomorrow, it really doesn't matter. Cuneiform tablets with math still hold the math even though nobody in the world does any math in cuneiform anymore.

Technology has always been moving from lower abstractions to higher ones, and that's a normal cycle. Why is it so inconceivable to think that most of the software developers of tomorrow would have no idea how to "think" in Python, C++, Java, or Clojure? Does every car mechanic need to be able to explain the principles of a combustion engine?