That's partly an illusion. Try doing everything manually. After only using inline suggestions for six months a few years ago, I've noticed that my skills have gotten way worse. I became way slower. You have to constantly exercise your brain.
This reminds me of people who watch tens of video courses about programming, but can't code anything when it comes to a real job. They have an illusion of understanding how to code.
For AI companies, that's a good thing. People's skills can atrophy to the point that they can't code without LLMs.
I would suggest practicing it from time to time. It helps with code review and keeping the codebase at a decent level. We just can't afford to vibecode important software.
LLMs produce average code, and when you see it all day long, you get used to it. After getting used to it, you start to merge bad code because suddenly it looks good to you.
I disagree. I used to do a lot of math years ago. If you gave me some problems to do now I probably wouldn't be able to recall exactly how to solve them. But if you give me a written solution I will still be able to give you with 100% confidence a confirmation that it is correct.
This is what it means to understand something. It's like P Vs NP. I don't need to find the solution, I just need to be able to verify _a_ solution.
> That's partly an illusion. Try doing everything manually. After only using inline suggestions for six months a few years ago, I've noticed that my skills have gotten way worse. I became way slower. You have to constantly exercise your brain.
YMMV, but I'm not seeing this at all. You might get foggy around things like the particular syntax for some advanced features, but I'll never forget what a for loop is, how binary search works, or how to analyze time complexity. That's just not how human cognition works, assuming you had solid understanding before.
I still do puzzles like Advent of Code or problems from competitive programming from time to time because I don't want to "lose it," but even if you're doing something interesting, a lot of practical programming boils down to the digital equivalent of "file this file into this filing," mind-numbingly boring, forgettable code that still has to be written to a reasonable standard of quality because otherwise everything collapses.
Want to try to do anything more complicated? I have seen a lot of delusional people around, who think their skills are still on the same level, but in interviews they bomb at even simple technical topics, when practical implementations are concerned.
If you don't code ofc you won't be as good at coding, that's a practical fact. Sure, beyond a certain skill level your decline may not be noticeable early because of the years of built-in practice and knowledge.
But considering every year there is so much more interesting technology if you don't keep improving in both hands-on learning and slow down to take stock, you won't be capable of anything more than delusional thinking about how awesome your skill level is.
That's partly an illusion. Try doing everything manually. After only using inline suggestions for six months a few years ago, I've noticed that my skills have gotten way worse. I became way slower. You have to constantly exercise your brain.
This reminds me of people who watch tens of video courses about programming, but can't code anything when it comes to a real job. They have an illusion of understanding how to code.
For AI companies, that's a good thing. People's skills can atrophy to the point that they can't code without LLMs.
I would suggest practicing it from time to time. It helps with code review and keeping the codebase at a decent level. We just can't afford to vibecode important software.
LLMs produce average code, and when you see it all day long, you get used to it. After getting used to it, you start to merge bad code because suddenly it looks good to you.