AskHN:How do you handle skill atrophy from using coding agents?

Architecture decisions, requirements analysis, trade-offs in technology selection, and cross-system debugging—these high-level cognitive activities cannot yet be replaced by AI. Focusing on these areas is actually a smarter skill investment.

Cognitive skills? You must be using cognition to guide the AI.

Either you are doing something guiding the AI or you are in your hammock doing nothing. If you’re in a hammock find a crossword puzzle.

I suppose work organisation, leadership, soft skills, working in areas with inherent uncertainty will be key for defending employment in near future

For every skill that may atrophy, I feel like I am developing experience in 10 new ones. I am not focused on using AI to perform my existing job function though, I am developing new capabilities.

In addition to what other people have said, I've taken some time to do leetcode questions lately - both architecture ones and coding ones. I'm not looking for a job by any stretch, but the practice and forcing a detailed zoom in has been really cathartic, and leetcode gives a nice structure/feeling of progress to it.

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I honestly don't feel there is much atrophy or this is an issue at all

As if for example someone's skill lessened if they switched from assembly to a higher level programming language over time (like, does it matter?)

If you for some reason had to go back and program more manually, then you could do so as the need arises

Otherwise, LLMs appear to be here to stay and you don't actually need those skills that are even possibly admittedly "atrophying"

I guess we'd need a detailed pinpointing of what skills exist or existed and to identify if they actually ateophy (I guess I'm not sure if skills are really atrophying, or even if they are if it matters)

Edit: here's an idea or exercise or projects to work on. Maybe people should find clear documentation of pre-AI processes in case you need to go back and learn them. Or create such documentation if it doesn't exist (which would be an exercise to practice your skills to make you remember them).

It’s like skiing or biking, it comes back quickly.

Simple. I use my brain and write code without coding agents.

I am curious how the workflow of people, who do not write code at all, looks like, or what products do they build. In my experience LLMs are an excavator, but you still have to tweak the fine details with a shovel.

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I use AI for Kubernetes. On a day-to-day basis, it runs 80%+ of my kubectl commands. It’s the most steroidal auto-complete I’ve tried. But I do get dumber for it.

What I do to compensate:

  - make it my duty to own every change, i.e. cognitively debt-free:
  - write summaries on every new thing I do (blog post, memo to colleague)
  - contribute documentation to the open-source projects I rely on
  - practice for CKA/CKAD certificates which require pre-LLM muscle memory
  - build interactive learning material for what I’m trying to learn
  - work with things that LLMs don’t yet trivially solve
  - repeat or reconstruct my recipes to perfect workflows, 

We’re incentivised to take the short path. I’m trying to create at least one path through a subject that I have to walk myself, preferably several times.

I find it inefficient to use models for all possible uses right now even with the current subsidies. As the costs increase this will only become more true. Keeping that in mind will naturally motivate you to not lose your skills by engaging in inefficient token burn.

If we believe the people selling AI, keeping up your skills at code is like keeping your expertise at wooden wheel making during the time of the automobile. We have to ask ourselves if they’re right or not.

I think they’re wrong, but also that even if they were right I wouldn’t give money to some assholes that stole every book, movie, piece of art, and published line of code. To me it seems clear that a company “forcing you to use AI because efficiency” is exactly the same as “welcome our new external team you’ll be interfacing with! They’ll write that pesky code.” Fuck that, I’d bail, I can read the writing on the wall.

Also these AI data center pricks want to drink up all the water and make us compete on our power bills with Google and Microsoft. That sucks. They suck.

You can watch your coworkers de-skill themselves in real time. Why would you not want that? Less competition - if you think it’s still a valuable skill.

I do.

I sometimes have claude or the coding-agent quiz me, Socratic style.

It persists in asking questions at deeper levels until you arrive at the answer yourself. This forces you to think hard about a problem, and this effort helps with understanding, learning and retention. Of course I made a Socratic-quiz skill for this, to use with any coding agent or similar:

https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/plugins-detai...

For example I’ve used this to better understand counter-intuitive things about diabetes/insulin, dopamine and motivation, catching up with a codebase, Claude’s implementations, etc (to combat so-called cognitive debt).

Strong LLMs are surprisingly good at this type of quizzing, they display a semblance of “theory of mind”.

[Edited - link fixed]

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What skill atrophy? I'm building more programs than I ever was and learning about so many software building related subjects.

Just don’t use them!

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