Just to make this clear up front: I was always very skeptical of LLMs (I'll never call them AI) and still see them as fundamentally limited and unreliable. See my post history if you don't believe me.
Having said that: I work in business software and the models have progressed to the point where typing code and writing classes and functions by hand has become uneconomical. We review the output closely to avoid the idiocy of "vibe-coding", but the quality has improved to the point where we rarely have to outright reject solutions. The discussions have moved to high-level architectural points, where we just request better implementations than the first-shot. We get them, review again and move on. Maybe there are deeper, latent problems beeing embedded in the code-base through this process, but we can't spot any although we are looking intently.
And just like that, my profession has died. Nobody in my team writes code anymore. Things that would have taken days are now done in minutes. We are all just considering design and architecture. We are changing our processes since they are not fit for the new way of doing things. Scrum? What's even the point anymore? We can work through a sprint-backlog that would've taken two weeks in two days now. We do reviews 90% of the time. When we request changes they come back in minutes.
I have a feeling like the ground has been taken from below me. My son wanted to become a developer, that isn't a real job anymore. Everyone around me feels the same way, including our management. We are a small team and a small company, everyone is effective and our jobs are not in danger as long as our product is succesful. But my profession is essentially dead. It's a craft I honed for many, many years and the craft itself is now automated. I wanted to improve my typing skills to code faster, this is now a ridiculous endeavour. We don't know what comes next, but I now only have my analytical skills and knowledge of good architecture to fall back on.
And it all changed so fast. I don't think this will transfer to other professions so easily, but for programming LLMs ended it all in the span of the last four months. I thought I knew what my future holds as a senior dev, now I can barely see past christmas.This is a nightmare.
A lot fewer people can make money being artisanal bakers these days, though. Used to be every village with more than a few families had a baker, all those bakers lost their bakeries and had to get different jobs working for someone else.
The same will happen with programming. There will be some people who still perform unique skilled work that can't be slopped out, and then everyone else will need to get a different job. Every time this happens it causes economic crisis until the economy adjusts.
Did you just read my example? I literally just used this same example somewhere in the comments.
No one lost the skill. People interested to learn the skill can learn it. It's just not a widely known skill because units you rant to know the skill, there's no reason to know that into..
I just read the comment I replied to?
It was a widely known skill, and now it isn't. That means, quite obviously, skill has been lost.
Use it or lose it. If you don't bake for 20 years and then get back into baking, you'll find you have to relearn some stuff.
Skills get lost all the time when they become less critical. If you don't need to know how to bake to have bread, why learn to bake?
Ah, OK - I think you're conflating a few terms here, which is causing the confusion.
First, a skill that must be practiced and kept up is called a perishable skill. CPR is a perishable skill, you have to get re-certified to prove you've practiced. Speaking a language is also one. I used to speak Spanish pretty well and French OK, and over the last 15 years of not using either of those and learning other languages instead, my Spanish sucks and my French is limited to like 50 words. "Skill Decay" is the term for when someone used to know how to do a perishable skill well, and then stopped practicing and would need to practice more before doing it again.
Right - that's a perishable skill. If you experience skill decay and forget how to bake well, it doesn't meant that the whole world has also lost the ability to bake bread.
Second, "Lost Skill" can mean a few things - I'm talking about it in terms of a societal lost skill. I don't think you are, so it's sort of a nebulous conversation pinned to a single term.
I'm talking about lost skills like hunting mammoths with an atlatl, or telephone switchboard operator. Skills attached to tasks where the task ceased to be part of our world. Mine horse trainer. High priest to the Temple of Zeus. Things like that.
What's actually not a lost skill to our species? A lot of things where someone (or many someones) have kept the alive and recorded so we can still learn how to do it if we want. Papyrus scroll maker? You can learn that. How to make garum, the fish sauce that Ancient Rome used instead of salt on their food? You can learn that, too. How to hunt deer with an atlatl? We still have deer, and people still play around with atlatls, so it's just hunting deer with a different weapon. Amazingly, there are people that hunt with spears for the hell of it. Weird, but they're keeping a paleolithic skill alive in our species while others that are more modern have come and gone.
Back to bread. Why bake bread if you don't need to know how? Personally, I learned how to brew beer, bake fancy bread, make pasta, make kimchi, make pickles, cure meat, and a few other things because I like those things and lived in places where the versions of those things I like weren't available. The knowledge on how to do those skills was easily available, and so I learned in order to improve my quality of life. Many people do it for fun. Some people are lucky enough to do it for pay as skilled artisans that can charge $8 for a loaf of sourdough (getting up at 4:00am, notwithstanding the lucky part).
As for CS majors and people that write code, there are people out there that still know how to write COBOL and Fortran and early computer languages that used to be taught commonly. This is, so far, not a lost skill to our species, but it will be in 50 years as those people pass away, and no new programs are written in those languages. That's like hunting with a spear. It might fade out and be lost, but it's something people in the future can learn if they want. Modern coding is used everywhere all the time, so that skill in general is not at risk of being lost, even with LLMs.
When I was in high school, I wrote HTML by hand because my friends and I were dorks and thought using Word to get basic WYSIWYG formatting was "cheating." We made fun of each other as sissies and bitches for using Word to format our Geocities pages - can you believe it? Then after maybe 6 months, we all stopped being idiots and realized that while knowing the basics were important to make little changes, letting the machine help you on the bulk of the work was just a huge savings of time and frustration. Once all our geocities pages were up and running, no one inspected the code anyway, so it ultimately didn't matter other than our teenage egos.
Personally, I think a lot of the friction here is similar to the fading of the US auto industry. Americans hold a lot of self-identity with their jobs. And, these are very good-paying, highly-skilled jobs that are narrow enough they don't allow for much transfer of the skillset to things like HVAC repair or plumber. So to go from $180K a year to being made redundant and learning that you're now unskilled for most other work available is a double shock, and demand learning skills for another unrelated job entirely from scratch.
It sucks, but it happens a lot on this planet.
By your definition in this comment chain, no one ever loses skills. You can relearn any skill whenever you want!
That's an odd way of framing the idea. Relearning a skill that has decayed from a lack of practice is still a lot of effort, it's not some trivial thing that should be thought of like riding a bike. If you went back and tried to learn Spanish, you'll find it's going to take many dozens or possibly hundreds of hours to regain the skill you lost.
This applies on a societal level too. The skill can be learned whenever anyone wants, but fewer people have it.
Let's apply that to the entire software development industry. People becoming overly reliant on chatbots are seeing their skills degrade fairly rapidly, in not much time at all they'll be incapable of what they used to be able to do. That might be fine! Or, that might mean that we are building up a debt that we are going to have to pay for later, like when the chatbot breaks something it can't fix and no one knows how to fix it anymore either. That skill will have to be relearned, and in the meantime it'll be broken because the computer can't do it for them.
By the way, did you hear ArchiveOfOurOwn.org is going to be down for almost a month because something went wrong?
Maybe it's unrelated! Or, maybe we can expect to start seeing that happen to more and more websites.
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree here, but I still think you're really mixing up a lot of things and just painting a blanket "skills are lost" label to anything that's not at its peak.
Case in point, I used to wear bow ties once in a while, back when that was a cool thing people did. I haven't worn one in maybe 5 or 6 years. So I tried to tie one and it took a couple tries to remember how to do it.
Now, you're saying I "lost" the skill by not remembering perfectly. I'm saying my skill at it degraded.
Was I ever the best bow tie tier in the world? Of course not. My skill was good enough - maybe 50% of what it would have been had I worn one every day. So at my peak, my skill level was 50%. This morning, it was 10%. Now it's probably at 35%.
Was the skill ever down to 0% and lost? No. Did it degrade? Sure.
I learned a bit of Arabic once, and knew the alphabet decently well. That was 20+ years ago, and at this point I can't even write my own name anymore. That is a skill I've lost. 0% capacity right now to read even a single letter.
Which is to say that not every person that writes code is operating at 100% code knowledge and capabilities. I know some HTML, CSS, and JS among other things, but I'm like 5% at that level. I've worked with people that knew their stuff, but were sloppy and lazy and made mistakes. Maybe they're around 60% good at it. Will they ever lose that skill entirely? Maybe. But it might just degrade over time if they rely on LLMs to do the work.
Just like how the people that work in a Wonder Bread factory don't know how to bake bread, they know how to operate a bread-making machine.
As for security and reliance on LLMs code - no one should do that! But, as LLMs doing cybersecurity auditcs and attacks have readily shown, human code wasn't perfect. Far from it.
Someone that's lazy and sloppy and 2 years ago was writing bad code now can rely on the LLM to write bad code, and not know enough to QC it. That's someone that would rather run the bread making machine than bake the bread the right way because they don't value the product in the first place. If they're using their own bad code, or an LLM's bad code, what's the ultimate difference? Their poor skill erodes and degrades? Hard to be sympathetic to that when it's people that got paid well to shuffle along and barely do enough to get by sometimes and chose CS as a major in college for the money.