@whitequark

This is very close to where I parted ways with the FSF. There's always a tension between enabling people to create the desirable thing and enabling people to make the undesirable. Their view is that it should be very hard to make the undesirable thing, and slightly easier to make the desirable thing. My view is that you should make it so easy to make the desirable thing that people always have a choice and then, once the desirable thing exists, you can apply other pressures to get rid of the undesirable thing.

I don't think deskilling is the right framing for a lot of these things, it's about where you focus cognitive load. There's a line from the Stantec ZEBRA's manual (1956) that says that the 150-instruction limit is not a real problem because no one could possibly write a working program that complex. Small children write programs more complex than that now. That's not a loss to the world, the fact that you don't have to think about certain things means you can think about other things, such as good algorithm and data structure design.

There was research 20ish years ago comparing C and Java programs and found that the Java programs tended to be more efficient for the same amount of developer effort, because Java programmers would spend more time refining data structure and algorithmic choices and improve entire complexity classes, whereas C programmers spend the time tracking down annoying bug classes that are impossible in Java and doing microoptimisations. Of course, under time pressure, Java developers will simply ship the first thing that works and move onto new features rather than doing that optimisation. C programmers would take longer to get to the MVP level and their poorly optimised code was often faster than poorly optimised Java.

I see LLMs as very different because they don't provide consistent abstractions. A programmer in a high-level language has a set of well-defined constraints on how their language is lowered to the target hardware and can reason about things, while allowing their run-time environment to make choices within those constraints. Vibe coding does not do this, it delegates thinking to a machine, which then generates code that is not working within a well-defined specification. This really is deskilling because it's not giving you a more abstract reasoning framework, it's removing your ability to reason.

Letting people accomplish more with less effort, in an environment where their requirements are finite, ends up shifting power to individuals, because it reduces the value of economies of scale.