LLMs Are Making Me Lose My Savviness

Have mathematicians become "less savvy" since the invention of the abacus or calculator? The invention of logarithms or analysis? In some ways, the answer is trivially positive. In fact, number crunching was, for most of human history, a key element of being a maths researcher.

However, when we look at the claim with a more critical eye, it becomes obvious that this view is myopic. In fact, current progress is in fact indebted to the invention various tools, which has led us to grand theories and hypotheses: things the Ancient Greeks could only dream about.

Is coding about writing assembly? Is it about writing boilerplate? About writing endless if-then statements? I would argue that it is not: it's about coming up with ideas, building products, finding customers, iterating, producing code that's easy to read, easy to understand, easy to extend.

Coding (at least the kind LLMs do) was never really the hard part, and I'd like to know specific examples of savvyness the author is losing. They've made me more critical of code and able to create better patterns, simply because I can iterate so quickly.

This is exactly my predicament of recent. I haven't necessarily feel like I've lost the savviness yet, but I feel I've lost the fun of the job. I guess it's the reality of life that all fun work eventually has its end of fun. Even the foot messengers of the past now probably load trucks/trains and sit the whole day, no longer feeling the fun of meeting people on the journey through whatever street or town they pass.

Prior to AI, I’d spend hours debugging and figuring how to make something work. It felt exciting in the end; the journey not so much. It was frustrating sometimes, and the overall output was not great. Sometimes I couldn’t try out all of my ideas simply because I had no capacity to do it. Anything requiring multiple months of work, I’d get burned out and never finish anything.

Now I delegate all the grinding to AI. I still feel accomplishment when I get the final result. But more importantly, I can now build something in couple of weeks that would otherwise take me half a year. I can focus now less on the for-loop vs while-loop and more on the big picture, like keeping things tidy and separation of concerns. The front-end and how end-users will interact with what I build is now more important to me, as well as the design. Previously, I had brain capacity only for writing my clever backend algorithm. Now I can make an equally clever front-end for it.

Maybe we never enjoyed the grind? We just came to accept it and convinced ourselves to enjoy it, because there was no other way. If you wanted something cool, it meant you had to put in hours. Now you just need to word it correctly and get the prerequisites.

While I also griefed the years spent mastering craft being automated.

I also had a lot of ideas that I wanted to execute and I'm finally able to do so. Some of them are wild and big, unthinkable last year. I also really enjoy building product/software that people are delighted to use. So from my perspective, the net positive outweighs the losses.

My work position is less certain, I grief the years spent mastering things just to see AI doing it, but I went to software engineering because I enjoyed building products, from ideas to something people can play with, and this has never been easier.