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This describes my own usage. I was a code capable designer before LLMs. Most of my skills were in UX and building layouts / flows. Although it's not perfect, LLMs help me deliver on the vision and concentrate on functionality and user experience.

Definitely - at the very least we need to make sure new learners have good awareness of how to use LLMs in a way that accelerates and supports their learning, which is a big topic on its own!

I saw a news headline that said "learn to code" is now worse advice than "get a face tattoo." Even if knowing the minutia of code is being commoditized, you still need the intuition behind algorithmic complexity, bottlenecks, easy vs hard problems, etc. That's all still worth learning.

I think the idea that "learning to code" is a bad career decision right now is terrible advice! There never been a better time to learn to code, because the leverage and amplification you get from these new tools is so much higher

I'd like to see significantly more focus on architecture in software pedagogy, as that's where we still obviously shine. And maybe some more precise low level stuff, as that's "hidden knowledge" we don't want to die with the rise of vibe coding. Middle tier stuff is less relevant imo

A big part of modern software architecture patterns exists to facilitate code maintainability for humans. Will machines develop their own patterns? I suspect machine friendly arch will look nothing like what we find “elegant”

I think this is more about how the minutiae of syntax is less important than it used to be - I'm seeing that in my own work, I'm writing Go code now despite not being able to tell you what a Go for loop looks like off the top of my head - but I have 25y of programming experience to help me guide it

It’s the same for me (writing Typescript even though I don’t know the language, etc.) but Beck’s take strikes me as really facile. We went through this with high-level languages and compilers, right? Nobody knows how to write assembler anymore but there’s still such a thing as a junior coder.

Yea- what does AI have to do with setting direction and good PM vs "knowing where to put brackets and ampersands in Rust"? If you're spending that much time on the latter, either something's wrong or the person is VERY junior.

Any company’s career ladder will say it explicitly: junior hires are judged on how quickly they can finish assigned tasks and promotions are based on demonstrated ability to plan and predict over progressively longer spans of time, space, team, and uncertainty. Beck is a senior dude, he knows this.

I've found the "10% of my skills just went up x1000" to be true, but the "90% of my skills just went down to zero" part hasn't born out at all. Generated output via an expert vs a novice are night / day, owing to some expert intuition we're maybe downplaying. I think both skill sets just went up.

Sorry but knowing syntax hasn't been that valuable for decades, except in job interviews. Which hasn't changed. Understanding how the runtime relates to the syntax is valuable, but an LLM offers zero help with that. Knowing how to put software together has always been valuable.