used to have a habit of thinking in code. it'd be like walking down the street and immediately seeing what kind of code would make the next paragraph.
now it's thinking in prompts. half a recipe for making pasta is in the middle of my brain. i just need to make the prompt to add that.
i learned to code when i was a geophysicist with no computer science education. i was forced to read documentation. i built a lot. it took me years to realize that everyone who had a similar skill set was doing things that made it difficult to be effective. the world was full of idiots. now there are fewer idiots because of an LLM which knows everything. i'm pretty sure i wouldn't have thought it necessary to write code in the first place if someone could do it for me.
no one talks about how to preserve the skills that will make future generations smarter. we're getting worse at thinking deep and dealing with humans because our AI tools don't encourage it.
it's really shameful to think about the fact that now it's more efficient to think about things in terms of "prompt" rather than code.
but this isn't an anti-LLM post. i use it all the time to save time on writing. i'm optimistic that it'll help me be a better programmer. and i've been doing three hackathons at the same time, and i couldn't have done it using only one brain at 100% usage capacity. it makes life so much easier.
being behind is always an unpleasant feeling. i'm on the edge of a bug in the system:
it tells me what the bug is, and suggests a fix.
"what does it look like?" i ask.
the answer has too many technical details. most of them are correct, but i'm too far behind on context.
so i'll let it take care of it. it fixes the bug, commits the changes, and starts a pull request.
"wait a minute… is there a reason for this commit?"
"you're asking me a question before i even got started!"
"this isn't good. i'll check the git log…"
this sounds like an opportunity to build a mental model of what's happening. this is a perfect situation to be an agentless developer. but i can be busy with the next 10 threads. i'd lose a lot of time. maybe that's okay? let's see what the changes look like…
the changes aren't great. it's okay so far. wait a minute… i should double check this change…
oh. okay.
next thread.
this is how we get to where we are today…
i don't expect to switch back from thinking in prompts… i'm optimistic about LLMs! they are helping a lot of people do incredible things! i'm embarrassed that i'm still not doing some things that i can easily delegate with prompts.
Top comments (14)
Exactly, Daniel! I'm currently reading a book written about 20 years ago, and the author predicted surprisingly well what modern AI would look like.
Sometimes the AI suggests to the main character, who is a programmer, that it could just write something for him. And he replies that he'll do it himself because he doesn't want to get out of practice.
Maybe we should do that from time to time too. Because I have to admit, I'm already starting to think in prompts.
sylwia, that's the piece i left out. choosing to do it yourself on purpose instead of letting the skill drift away by default...
This:
"choosing to do it yourself on purpose instead of letting the skill drift away by default"
... resonates big time - I've been banging that drum almost too often when commenting here on dev.to ...
If all we do is prompt without knowing any of the underlying 'craft', aren't we then becoming extremely dependent, and vulnerable? Like 'prompt monkeys' with big primate brains, but using very little of it ...
P.S. on the other hand, there are people who say this is just about replacing one kind of skill with another kind of skill - we also don't program in assembly language anymore, something like that ... this sounds plausible, but somehow I'm not fully convinced :-)
The assembly comparison breaks for me on one point. nobody writing c had to double-check the compiler's output line by line to trust it. i still read every diff an agent hands me. that's the real test for whether this is a clean abstraction or just dependency… does the layer above still need to verify the layer below? right now, for me, yes, every time.
"prompt monkeys with big primate brains, using very little of it" — that's uncomfortably close to how it feels some days.
@leob @dannwaneri but the truth is, it's always been the case that the better you understand what's happening at a lower level in a language, the better programmer you become. And somehow I don't think that's going to change anytime soon.
As long as that does not change, we'll still have a job, lol ...
But when(ever) AI moves "up the foodchain", and enables 'business users' to vibe-code increasingly more complex and more mission critical systems (with sufficient mitigation of performance and security risks), well, then we MIGHT just get squeezed into progressively smaller "niches" as devs ...
I'm not a doomsayer, but fact is that the mid/long term future is surrounded with a lot of insecurity ...
P.S. and oh the irony - according to a newspaper article, as a result of the AI data center boom, there seems to be a huge demand for ... electricians and carpenters!
If I'd be out of (or at the end of) secondary education and had to choose a career/education path, well, I don't know - I'd think twice about development, I might be tempted to cast a wider net - development is cool, I've always loved it, but "there is more", without a doubt ...
But still - if you have a choice, do something you love, not just something that pays the bills ;-)
@sylwia-lask, the layer i understand less each year is the layer i'm trusting more each year...
@leob the electricians and carpenters bit is the tell. the squeeze you're describing isn't ai replacing devs, it's ai replacing the writing part and leaving the checking part wide open. that's not a niche shrinking, that's the whole job turning into review.
whether that still counts as "a job" you'd choose probably depends on whether you loved the writing or the solving.
I get your point, but my fear is that the 'checking' part might also shrink, when AI gets better at that - and I somehow think it's a matter of "when" more than "if" ...
So, we might get pushed into a 'niche', and that niche might shrink ... then again, maybe not - I might be wrong about this, and I hope I am :-)
I do know about that famous economic theory where lowering costs increases demand to such a degree that the end result is we need more people to do the work, but yeah it's anyone's guess :-)
if checking gets automated too, something still has to verify the automated checker . That job doesn't disappear, it just moves up a level...
True, but then you got to wonder how much work actually gets left - it might keep shrinking as AI gets better ... I don't want to be a negative Nelly or a doomsayer, but if stuff keeps moving this fast then nothing is certain ...
The skill that softens first is reading your own diffs, not typing syntax. Prompts skip the loop that trained that
andrew, reading the diff is the rep. skip enough reps and the muscle doesn't know it's supposed to fire.
Yeah interesting take! Of course it doesn't have to be either/or, it can be both, but this might be a "slippery slope" ...