AI 是工具，善用 AI 需要技巧

Its probable that AI will roll out much faster than humans can develop that skill of using it in a way that increases not decreases human knowledge over time.

The current slew of excellent LLMs will probably cause a decades long dip in human cognitive ability.

If social media on smartphones had an impact of ability of students to concentrate, LLM AI will likely have a much greater negative impact on education.

There are trillions of dollars of investment pushing for humans to trust whatever an LLM says, and very little money behind encouraging people to tackle hard problems themselves and train themselves to think.

I have to say honestly, that AI looks like an apocalypse for human thinking [ Im glad Tao is warning people, I just dont think many people will listen ]

I go back and forth on this. For awhile yes it took a lot of workflow tweaks and finesse to get directionally correct outputs (thinking back like mid 2025). I invested time in figuring that out, mostly because I was interested, but those skills are all obsolete now, you don't need to worry so much about context management and special instruction recipes or anything these days.

The meta at this point seems to be mostly around "knowing what to ask for". Eg: I suck at prompting for specific design tweaks, because I don't have the design vocabulary to be specific and articulate what I want. It's a lot of trial and error. I hear people who are developing full scale applications without a tech background run into the issue writ large. For now, I have an advantage over these people when building applications. But perhaps that's just one round of RL away from being obsolete too. Supposedly the model will eventually have such good taste in design/architecture/whatever there will be little point in asking for tweaks.

The only thing that seems relatively future-proof is just being able to communicate clearly what you're trying to do. Not how to do it, or even what success looks like. Perhaps an element of it is even as basic as being honest with yourself.

> The meta at this point seems to be mostly around "knowing what to ask for"

We came full circle on the problem that also exists with Google Search, and why so many people don't get good results out of it.

> For now, I have an advantage over these people when building applications. But perhaps that's just one round of RL away from being obsolete too.

I don't have a crystal ball, but my eggs are in the basket of "It isn't, and it won't be"

> The only thing that seems relatively future-proof is just being able to communicate clearly what you're trying to do

This somehow contradicts the previous statement. The advantage you have is, because of domain knowledge expertise, you're able to articulate what you want. It's not that you knowing what LazyLoading is that you now can describe it better, you can immediately tell that when your Frontend stalls for 5 seconds after hitting the "Load" button, perhaps it eagerly loads and blocks.

Agree. Maybe such soft skills will become a lot more important soon, for instance also the ability to translate feelings into useful information, since LLMs cannot feel as humans do.

Personally I've been very hesitant to deep-dive into putting together the perfect AI-workflow, I've been sticking to just using the conversational/chat modality for pretty much everything, usually that gets me as far as I need. It's just really hard to justify spending time on it when it all potentially gets turned upside down next month again.

If you don't have specifics about what success is, what it looks like, and how it works, then it seems like correct output is almost anything.

Well, that’s true to an extent, but sometimes you need to ”play” a bit before you (or the model) can “work”, if that makes sense. And it’s hard to know the right kind of “play” without experience in the area, this is something the models can’t yet do.

As someone laid off just now, I wish companies saw this. I genuinely don't know where to go with my 'skills' as a software engineer, both pre and post AI.

The market is shrinking, the pressure to review code is so high, I'm kinda relieved to not be at the $last_place anymore, but looking on LinkedIn or calling around my network... there isn't a lot out there.

This is an argument about a framing issue.

Markets try to put things in perspective to sell more. Remember razors used to be for men only? But hte brilliant marketer (forgot the name) made it so that trimming makes women more feminine? Now razor sales doubled?

Anyways, same thing here. Those who want to sell AIs want to make it as non-tool but know-it-all do-it-all for you. Those who wants to use it view it as a tool.

Just frame it the way you like to see how you should use/view AIs.

I think 95% of the population wont get a choice of how AI is framed - the big money pushes how it will be framed for them, and most people have no training in a hard discipline like math or science, as a vaccine against that marketing push. t People will be corralled into trusting everything an LLM says as gospel, will be required to use if for almost all jobs, will have no actual choice in the matter - everyone who suggests otherwise is a luddite. [ Terence Tao is being painted as a luddite currently, for raising the concern of whether human-math will even survive ]

I‘ve been on both camps and been critized for it (see my comments), and now I think these are some of the most useless disussions on HN, as they are heavily skewed by all of our life situations.

Hmm... interesting opinion. I disagree, and will insult you for it. With any luck, this comment chain will devolve into a thread of unsubstantiated opinions and ad hominems.

The amount of skill it requires is decreasing every month. I would have agreed with GPT 5.3 Codex but Opus 5.5 is more or less foolproof

AI is incredible tool when you want to use it to enhance your skill (learn complex codebase, experiment different solution and understand the limit of complex system). However, most of people use it as a wishing machine and outsource their thinking.

Software engineering experience might be visualized as a panel with a few dozen buttons and levers. The engineers that are most successful with LLMs are the ones that understand more of that panel.

Agreed, in my experience as an engineer if you want to build a personal project on a weekend yes AI is good for that but the moment you start scaling your application, that's where real engineers who understand the engineering well are needed. The skill and expertise of a true engineer coupled with the speed of AI is my sweet spot

I am inclined to agree with the view that AI is merely a tool. And, incidentally, using it rationally isn't always easy.

I don't understand the point of this debate. Rich's point is good. Having a mini-army of highly intelligent beings at your fingertips is not an ordinary "tool."

And it minimizes the fact that these things are only getting smarter. Having an entity much smarter than you--could that entity seriously be considered your "tool"? Just your tool? Or are the people on the "just a tool" side of this debate not taking that possibility seriously?

While Factorio heavily features automation, I think it would be more accurate to describe it as a systems design game.

It’s a shame I cannot inspect the tool. It’s a shame I cannot modify it as I see fit. It’s a shame that I need to pay $200/month to use it. But hey, I am a 3X engineer and my boss likes it, so I guess it should be fine? Not really, but I still get to pay the bills (for now)

I miss the tools I used in the past (gcc, linux, sqlite,…)

just for a bit of context, “Huahai is an entrepreneur. He co-founded Juji, a company building an AI agent platform”

> AI Is a Tool. Using It Well Takes Skill.

And that skill is? Any concrete verifiable examples? That can be replicated, repeated by others or adopted by others?

> A compiler performs substantial work without the programmer continuously directing each operation.

Yes, and the compiler produces the same output for the same input all the time. And when it doesn't, it's a bug or a specified behaviour [1]

> Picking up a saw does not guarantee a straight cut. Holding a chisel does not make you a sculptor.

Yes, but you can learn the actual techniques that let you make a straight cut 100% of the time. And make you a sculptor.

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The rest of the small article doesn't even begin to approach the premise of the title.

[1] Yes, I know it's not strictly true. But compilers are 100% predictable compared to LLMs.

> Yes, but you can learn the actual techniques that let you make a straight cut 100% of the time

no you can't? not by hand? not without a jig?

> code me an app, AI.

...AI codes an app...

> I don't like it. Make it like this.

...AI codes an app...

> I don't like it. See this app? Make it like it.

...AI codes an app...

> I don't like it. Hmm. Draw me an elephant.

...AI draws an elephant...

> I don't like it. This AI is stupid.