Post #1967173
2026-05-04 15:09 UTC
Replies (30)
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@crazyeddie@mastodon.social 2026-05-04 18:40
@elizayer@mastodon.social I concur.
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@hyc@mastodon.social 2026-05-04 15:52
@elizayer outsourcing all technical competence to external agencies really took its toll as well. Still does, I suppose.
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@beep@follow.ethanmarcotte.com 2026-05-04 16:08
@elizayer Oh gosh, yes, absolutely agreed. The industry’s long chased automated, repeatable solutions and frameworks — LLMs are just the latest salvo.
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@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us 2026-05-04 16:16
@elizayer
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@damianwalsh@mastodon.social 2026-05-04 16:29
@elizayer custom-designed by and for dudes who can’t be wrong but ain’t never been right.
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@pkw@snac.d34d.net 2026-05-04 16:31
I've seen this pattern enough to look for it. But yeah this one I lived thru so I have first hand experience of being a younger programmer where the programmer's perspective was taken into account. And more and more programmers are made to do what they are told in spite of strongly disagreeing with the tech or methodology or concept etc. By the time I'm a "senior" developer I effectively have less input into projects than i did as an entry level programmer. What happens in that situation in any field is it makes good people go away over time. So now you "need" LLMs because no one is left that knows how to build a project from scratch. (hypebole but still true i think)
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@twifkak@mas.to 2026-05-04 16:54
@elizayer I agree, but I'm not sure that changes what we should do about it. Sometimes the highest leverage regulation point is the tool, not the behavior - e.g. guns or narcotics. Yes, we should also work to eliminate the reasons people turn to those things, but that's not mutually exclusive with short term solutions.
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@r0k@mastodon.social 2026-05-04 16:55
@elizayer in a way, it's nice to be able to spot the corner-cutters more easily now
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@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social 2026-05-04 17:25
@elizayer yup. I’m tired of people acting too much like this is the cause of everything wrong rather than a symptom. Agents weren’t the first thing and, importantly, won’t be the last thing either to commoditize expertise.
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@_RyekDarkener_@mastodon.social 2026-05-04 17:29
@elizayer At the end of the day humans are responsible for keeping the fire. AI is just another quality of fuel to keep warm or to burn down.
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@tthbaltazar@chaos.social 2026-05-04 17:30
@elizayer and this makes getting a job hard too skills don't matter, privileged background and work history matters only
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@dogstar23@mastodon.social 2026-05-04 17:39
@elizayer Add a generous dollop of don't-give-a-shit-ism to complete the picture. AI amour is just super-charged isolation enjoyed by a culture of slackers who only care about making sure they get home in time to catch the next episode of Black Mirror in between ads telling them what to put in one end and what to do with what comes out the other. Deliberately overdriven meaninglessness for Meaningless Times.
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@thirstybear@agilodon.social 2026-05-04 17:51
@elizayer It’s the ongoing need to believe that writing software is “just typing”, so developers are merely fungible resources selling their labour. Marx had it about right IMO.
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@dckim@mastodon.social 2026-05-04 17:57
@elizayer this really is a trend across all trades, even the building trades. It is not incredibly dissimilar. The trend their is away from craftsmanship and towards installers. In software, though I am not myself an expert, I see a nearly identical thing. You have modularization across all levels. So, ultimately, the carpenter doesn't really use the spokeshave anymore, and he doesn't use the-hand planers, or even the hand-saws. Similarly, front-end developers never learn Javascript.Am I wrong
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@NicelyManifest@mastodon.social 2026-05-04 18:02
@elizayer All while good programming technique and documentation is foundational to quality deliverables. It kind of cannot be cut short or it will be buggy.
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@mirth@mastodon.sdf.org 2026-05-04 18:12
@elizayer That's consistent with my experience. I suspect adoption will facilitate a divergence, where there will be de-skilling in some cases, while in others users will get the technical leverage to do more / larger experiments that they can then learn from. Tools to amplify differences in culture, temperament, available resources, etc.
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@chrisjrn@social.coop 2026-05-04 18:37
@elizayer and that was 100% the point of my #NBPy talk: https://youtu.be/d7AeWFbOTHg
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@aptitude@mastodon.social 2026-05-04 18:58
@elizayer Which came first, the chicken robot, or the root egghead?
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@advicepig@hachyderm.io 2026-05-04 19:05
@elizayer Error budgets were a mistake when dealing with pedantic devs
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@Retreival9096@hachyderm.io 2026-05-04 19:15
@elizayer There is also sticking with the same job, but never seeing the reward for good decisions: I can remember being told of more than one project that I was wasting time during the year I worked on it -- but when future benefits showed up "that's old stuff, you can't count that".
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@grepe@ieji.de 2026-05-04 19:21
@elizayer job hopping is a problem but imho it doesn't significantly contribute to deskilling... you will still have to deal with consequences of bad choices, just not your own bad choices.
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@akromos@mastodon.social 2026-05-04 19:34
@elizayer totally agreed
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@firepoet@tech.lgbt 2026-05-04 19:43
@elizayer We aren’t blaming all people who are “hopping jobs” altogether, though, right? Some of them (like me) had no choice because they couldn’t survive a toxic work environment. Which seems to happen a LOT. Especially amongst those at the margins. Or am I misinterpreting this part of your point?
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@Gizmo@butts.team 2026-05-04 20:28
@elizayer @zenhob This is consistent with my experience. Last few years had my supervisors changing their priorities so rapidly all the time I never got to stick with one technology to get good at, and most of the time it was more configuring-things-with-yaml than any transferable skills like better bash scripts or upping my Golang knowledge.
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@jcolag@mastodon.social 2026-05-04 21:42
@elizayer Not to undercut the point that it's just a toxic industry burning through enthusiastic people, but studies have actually found the same effect on more general tasks. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872 https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-algorithmic-mind/202603/adults-lose-skills-to-ai-children-never-build-them And then there's the persistence issue. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.04721
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@BalooUriza@social.tulsa.ok.us 2026-05-04 22:51
@elizayer And this isn't recent, either. Ever notice that IT folks tend to run Linux at home and only recommend Windows where it gets billable hours?
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@madduci@mastodon.social 2026-05-05 05:15
@elizayer totally agree. Before LLMs there was already a pressure to meet unrealistic deadlines and skip refactoring/cleaning/maintenance of code since feature were more important for product. Now LLMs have pushed more on this situation, which leads to "throw away" code
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@uriel@x.keinpfusch.net 2026-05-05 06:01
@elizayer and now, you will realize how unpopular you get, when you say that there is nothing to steal from people with no more skills or creativity.
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@theeclecticdyslexic@mstdn.social 2026-05-05 09:22
@elizayer I think LLMs are basically the perfect technology to use an an analogy for the cultural zeitgeist 2020-present. (You can go back further though for sure.) - truth < power - theft? yes - messy reality < pathetically obvious simulacra - valuable work < grift and financial cannibalism - disinterest in learning and self betterment - reducing efficiency is the same as economic growth right? - 1 working thing < 1000 broken things - got a hard problem? have you tried accelerating?
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@SteveClough@metalhead.club 2026-05-05 20:08
@elizayer@mastodon.social I agree - I have seen so much development outsourced to somewhere cheaper, where the base functionality is the only thing people are concerned with, not maintainability, security, scalability. And when these things become an issue, they then try to retro-fit all of this stuff that needs to be fundamental to the software.