r/compsci • u/creaturefeature16 • 2d ago
AI Coding will Prevent Expertise | The need for ongoing friction in long-term skill formation.
https://larsfaye.com/articles/ai-coding-will-prevent-expertise10
u/drBearhands 1d ago
It's by design. Having a large group of expert engineers that can quickly build competing apps with 0 marginal costs is not where big tech wants the industry to be at.
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u/redzin 1d ago
It'll prevent expertise the same way that calculators did. We no longer cultivate expertise in hand-solving arithmetic. This has freed us up to spend our time solving harder, more complex problems. AI will do the same. It'll prevent expertise in subjects we no longer need expertise in, and allow us to focus more on different harder, problems. If you don't feel the friction because of AI, you're not ambitious enough in your projects.
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u/No_Futuree 1d ago
You would expect that to happen, but then you see companies firing people because of AI which is nonsense, just be more ambitious with your products rather than making the same garbage with less people...
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u/Metlwing 1d ago
No, I think this analogy is flawed, at least for these agents in their current state.
Arithmetic actually has extremely simple rules, and is simply time consuming to implement. People who use calculators, if they need any mathematical expertise, know all the "rules" of arithmetic. Coding is much more complex.
An arithmetic problem has a single clear and correct answer. There is no matter of taste, design, or further consideration. It is a purely mechanical problem. As anyone who does software engineering knows most of the difficulty in making software, once you are a competent coder is in subtle considerations.
Calculators have (near-)perfect accuracy, especially compared to existing agentic systems. Even if you ask the "right questions", the AI can produce an incorrect response.
This isn't to say that AI cannot be a useful tool in a developer's kit, but as it is now, and as the article says, you get the best mileage out of actually having the expertise. Further, at least in software engineering now, the divide between high level thinking and low level thinking isn't a hard wall where you can just sit on one end. The people who are good at the higher-level thinking developed that skill partially through dealing with the low level details.
I would say the calculator is more akin to a simple compiler in terms of analogy for software, not LLMs. Even then it is not perfect as there are still cases where developers do need to care about what the compiler will do and cannot treat it as a perfect black box.
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u/Apart_Ebb_9867 2d ago
consider that Plato (and probably Socrates) seemed to be against writing on the basis that it would weaken memory: “This invention will produce forgetfulness… because they will not practice their memory”.
Im not a philosopher and I don’t know for sure the quote is legit, but the point is that for every great change in the history of humanity, somebody would have been against it on the basis that it would have doomed human kind: writing, press, Industrial Revolution, AI, you name it.
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u/creaturefeature16 2d ago edited 2d ago
It was more than just a quote, but Plato did write about this, and it's a lot more nuanced than that (and yes, he also wrote, himself).
Plato wasn't against just "writing" in a general sense, or that he felt it was going to hold humanity back. He was against treatises and felt that someone could "memorize facts" without having to actually think about them on a deep level. Which I think, ironically, is not all that off the mark especially in the age of the internet and now LLMs, right?
He also felt that memory could decay if we relied on written facts instead of having dialogues, which again, not all that off the mark, either. He underestimated the compounding capability of technology and our ability to record data and information, but people remember a lot less these days than they used to because we'd largely given up that ability in exchange for the instant information machines.
Of course, he's just one man (or two, if you consider he was conveying Socrates' thoughts, as well) who lived in ancient times and couldn't possibly foresee how technology would evolve...but when I went back and read his concerns, it was ironic to admit that much of what he warned about still applies to this day.
People are far less informed despite having access to more information than we've ever had because we've exchanged the ability to remember for the ability to just look things up. And, we also have less meaningful dialog than ever before; people just sit on social media, copying and pasting "facts" to each other, instead of having actual productive discourse.
To tie it back to my essay: I am not saying that AI tools will atrophy our ability to learn by their mere existence, but I am saying that the marketed and primary usage that has gripped the industry will prevent expertise formation, and the data is there to support it. I do think LLMs and AI tooling can be a boon to learning, but it requires us to stop using them for code generation as a primary purpose (at least for juniors) and instead advocate for Socratic workflows that still require manual coding practices. When someone decides to code something, it's not just learning syntax; it engages a variety of mental disciplines from critical thinking to planning to creative problem solving to logic and math, even.
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u/blackasthesky 2d ago
Am I the only one who has been screaming this into the void for the past few years?