Post

"LLMs can help non-programmers with no technical background get a foothold in doing something that used to require a LOT of technical knowledge to get started in, putting them in a better position to learn the technical stuff over time by providing a less steep learning curve" feels uncontroversial?

As a former academic I take some issue with this, since just having the tool do work for you is not learning. It's going to a restaurant and pretending you're a chef. If you use the tool to help understand what's going wrong with what you made, i.e. as a tutor, that's a lot better

So the situation I was really talking about is one where you have to learn a lot of technical skills before you can get to the thing you want to actually learn.

In particular, if you want to make videogames, you generally have to learn a lot about programming before you can really get to the part where you're designing games. My hope is that LLMs will facilitate people being able to get to a place where they can design a game, test it, and iterate on it...

...more quickly, so that they don't have to learn a bunch of learning programming to even get to the place where they are developing the skills the care much more about and potentially end up becoming discouraged because of it.

I also suspect "well this game I designed that an LLM wrote most of the code for has a bug in it and the LLM keeps screwing up and I want this thing I care about to be better" might be a motivator for learning those technical parts?

Like, I don't actually know if this happens. The only real way we'll find out is if a game designer 20 years from now talks about how they got their start vibecoding their own kinda-crappy games and then learning to code. But I'd like to think there's a chance?

I'd take exception to a lot of those technical skills being useless, unless the goal is not to understand the code you're producing. But really, the biggest blocker here is wealth inequality. The cost to do the kind of work you're talking about is nontrivial now and will only get worse.

Like, my thesis here is not "technical skills don't matter because the robot can do them so why bother." It's "maybe this can help people get to a place where they are less frustrated and demoralized while learning"

(and while you make some salient points about wealth inequality—I am VERY pro wealth redistribution—$20 a month for some LLM assistance while learning these things is on the cheaper side as paid resources for this stuff goes?)