AI Coding Will Prevent Expertise: The 'Expert Novice' Paradox

// The need for ongoing friction in long-term skill formation.

The subtitle of the story tells it all.

There are some people who seek out friction. Think about an athlete or a hardcore nerd.

The best engineers are ones who were fascinated with computers and learning as kids and persued it at every opportunity. Found their own friction in other words.

For those kinds of people, friction-seeking is the constant and what LLMs did is moved the point of where the friction occurs.

For example - the best engineers I've worked with didn't necessarily have lots of experience coding in assembly because that kind of friction was no longer necessary. But they could solve hard problems (and if a problem really required assembly they could go learn it)

What I think will be hit much harder by AI is the low tier engineer. Someone who was never truly curious and committed to it, for whom it was just a job. For example a typical offshore ticket pusher kind of person. That kind of person never went out to find friction and that's the kind of thing that's never going to fly again - if I want mediocre or average, the LLMs are sufficient

The snake eating it's own tail for llm software development has really been met with a shoulder shrug whenever it gets brought up. At best you might have a small cohort of developers that don't cook their brains with AI and their reward for that appears to be having to review terrible AI code written by people who have cooked their brains.

Completely unsustainable.

As a tech educator I 100% agree. LLMs are not going to become a "new compiler" where we don't have to worry about the code any more. There's a reason we trust deterministic systems.

I've been worried about this a lot, I even created an agent skill called do-i-understand that's designed for novice devs (and experienced too, because atrophy) where the LLM asks you questions about the PR you're about to submit. I've found it helps a lot: https://github.com/AnthonyPAlicea/skills/blob/main/skills/do...

One way or another, there will be a skill reckoning.

I strongly agree with the concept that cognitive friction is the engine of learning.

First and foremost, it's an issue of "dependency": if you stop training the "muscle" of logic and reasoning, it gradually atrophies, just like unused physical muscles. You become dependent on external tools that replace a capability you once had yourself.

A historical example that brought about a similar shift is this: when the production process moved from the craftsman's mind and hands to the Fordist factory (and the assembly line), the skill of building things shifted from human craftsmanship to anonymous, structured processes.

Bit by bit, traditional artisans lost their knowledge and "know-how." Today, having a piece of furniture in our home depends on a massive production and supply chain; the "average" person no longer has the ability to build it themselves.

The exact same thing is happening to software.

We are the (now "former") software craftsmen.

It believe the most likely consequence of AI is to promote generalists: people who have a domain expertise, can work cross discipline, and has enough programming knowledge to keep the LLMs on track. I don't think 'pure' software engineers will end up being as highly valued as the last decade though I also think that will be true for other disciplines as well. Just as an example, in signal processing, it's not uncommon to have a person designing the general algorithm and another person dedicated to implementing the algorithm in the embedded system. With the quality of coding agents, it's not really necessary to have both of those people anymore. A person who is moderately experienced in both can do the job now.

This seems sadly very true.

Just yesterday I was implementing some slightly tricky javascript (not my main language) on hover show n neighbours to each side, and if a deficit on either side, expand to the other side. After about 20 minutes of struggling to get the offsets just right, I succumbed to just asking an agent to do it.

I'm sure I'd still be able to do it, but was saddened that I didn't get it as quickly as I think I used to be able to. Atrophy might already be in play.

Software engineering >> Coding. How many times do we have to keep repeating this. Author wrote a fucking marketing piece.

Stop the FUD for profit

TBH it was already pretty bad. There is a stark difference between the best and the average in my experience. The top, say, ten percent of coders are vastly better than anyone else when it comes to anything but boilerplate glue code(which is still needed and is better done by average coders anyway).

This is speaking from my experience as a systems/c/c++ guy. If you are a js web frontend guy, python, or whatever I have no idea if this applies to you.

Yes, and it doesn't matter.

Writing code in programming languages is a skill/necessity created by us to instruct computers what we want them to do

Initially in the 60s, this was done by connecting circuits one way or another (think ENIAC). Then we devised "programmable" computers and devised a bunch of codes (computer code instructions) that abstracted away those cables.

The we created Programming Languages to further abstract away the hardware complexity, and to be able to write down our wishes in a way that is more transferable between us humans, but that is still computable by machines.

But with LLMs and neural networks, at some point these abstractions wont be necessary.

The computers will still be making computations, but the way we tell them what we want is going to evolve.

It's fascinating.