@whitequark @david_chisnall i don't have a strong argument for this, but i still think there is a big and maybe fundamental difference between the audience that wants to do things, and the audience that wants to avoid doing things.

i guess i need to think about it more as well...

@whitequark @david_chisnall i think i get what you mean. put to the extreme, the situation is: by making $thing and publishing it out for the public, you allow those without the skill to make $thing to still have a $thing.

i ... honestly i don't know. i don't have an answer. if anything, the past month i have been devastated by vibe code that satisfies "functioning" and nothing else like "understandable" (by *anyone*) or collaboration (instead it has thousands of loc to paper over problems)

@david_chisnall @whitequark one analogy i think is that it would be preposterous to think that learning and using modern algebra and category theory is deskilling to a mathematician.

maybe it's not a perfect match, but i don't think writing in a higher level language is a "deskilled" way to draw gates or write instruction bits. it produces a different *kind* of product, that is itself amenable to various different processes, some manual and some automatic. it's not just "bits with extra steps".

@david_chisnall @whitequark i think to me this is the key part. a (digital) hdl provides a model that you can think about bits and gates in. a better hdl provides you with the better model.

llms on the other hand promise to let you avoid all the thinking. if i may philosophizd a bit - llms promise to let you avoid expressing yourself in terms of mental labor. maybe some like this, but i know i don't. [cont'd]