The thing is, agents aren’t going away. So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things.

I mourn the loss of working on intellectually stimulating programming problems, but that’s a part of my job that’s fading. I need to decide if the remaining work - understanding requirements, managing teams, what have you - is still enjoyable enough to continue.

To be honest, I’m looking at leaving software because the job has turned into a different sort of thing than what I signed up for.

So I think this article is partly right, Bob is not learning those skills which we used to require. But I think the market is going to stop valuing those skills, so it’s not really a _problem_, except for Bob’s own intellectual loss.

I don’t like it, but I’m trying to face up to it.

> So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things.

The problem arrises when Bob encounters a problem too complex or unique for agents to solve.

To me, it seems a bit like the difference between learning how to cook versus buying microwave dinners. Sure, a good microwave dinner can taste really good, and it will be a lot better than what a beginning cook will make. But imagine aspiring cooks just buying premade meals because "those aren't going anywhere". Over the span of years, eventually a real cook will be able to make way better meals than anything you can buy at a grocery store.

The market will always value the exact things LLMs can not do, because if an LLM can do something, there is no reason to hire a person for that.

People would have said the same about graphing calculators or calculators before that. Socrates said the same thing about the written word.

The determining factor is always "did I come up with this tool". Somehow, subsequent generations always manage to find their own competencies (which, to be fair, may be different).

This isn't guaranteed to play out, but it should be the default expectation until we actually see greatly diminishing outputs at the frontier of science, engineering, etc.

I think that's too easy an analogy, though.

Calculators are deterministically correct given the right input. It does not require expert judgement on whether an answer they gave is reasonable or not.

As someone who uses LLMs all day for coding, and who regularly bumps against the boundaries of what they're capable of, that's very much not the case. The only reason I can use them effectively is because I know what good software looks like and when to drop down to more explicit instructions.