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i keep thinking about this post

There are some interesting thoughts in this and I'll have to read it over to take it all in. The thing about deskilling confuses me though; we work in an industry that has automated away manual work, including our own, from the get go. It's surprising we've not come to terms with this.

Some risks around deskilling are not purely about obsoleting skills that will never be needed again, but about eroding skills that may be highly necessary but less frequently called upon—often inadvertently so due to changing how they are practiced. This is partly why pilots must use simulators.

A long known irony of automation is that as you automate the most frequent (and easy) cases first, people are left to handle both increasingly rare *and* challenging situations, with less practice.

Absolutely! The deskilling is real. I mean, how many developers these days can program and debug assembler? But so is the tradeoff. And we keep choosing automation. Just seems that an old argument has been churned up that I thought we'd made peace with.

Yeah it's not all needed in the same way. I've written a much more opaque post last year to try to figure out what sort of systemic effects can come from removing friction that hone subtle skills and tradeoffs. A questions I like is "do you still like your code if you can't use AI to work on it?"

We’ve built such unwieldy development stacks (and so many of them) that LLMs become a way to survive, rather than address the dysfunction (friction). Is that a fair reading? If so I agree. I can't help thinking LLMs would still be super useful even with less dysfunction.

So assume LLMs are letting us not only survive, but they let us paper over the dysfunction, such that we feel it less and less. Coherence can be replaced by additional data. More than surviving, we inadvertently let unwieldy stacks thrive and at ecosystem levels make things overall worse, maybe.