AI Coding will Prevent Expertise – The need for friction in skill formation
larsfaye.com"prevent" seems too active a word to me, you can also use Ai to expand expertise, depending on how you use it
"will" is also making a conclusion or prediction, and to me we are still very very early in this technology, which will interact with socioeconomic cycles as things do
It's not a matter of what's possible with individuals today that matters, though. What's important is how AI will change the landscape and make it harder to require deep expertise. I mean, I think we've plenty of evidence from the past that when someone doesn't develop a skill by themselves, they don't acquire it, and too much automation prevents that development in pretty much any skill area.
Innovation changes the skills we need. Has lacking the know how to plow a field inhibited you? Is knowing the quirks of a computer language or technology going to be a required skill going forward?
For me, in CS, Ai enables me to focus on and build higher level expertises. Today I think you have to be an expert in a thing to make Ai useful for that thing, and I suspect Ai will enable more people to level up their understanding of topics.
Certainly some people will use Ai to learn and others will use Ai as a shortcut. It's not a one outcome kind of thing, like any tool humans have built.
> Innovation changes the skills we need. Has lacking the know how to plow a field inhibited you?
In a manner of speaking, yes. Now I've gotten to a point in my life where some more basic skills would actually be useful in pursuing the life I want to live. The problem is, it's good to know a lot of general stuff for the times when you need to pivot into doing something else.
But even in the same field, micro-pivoting needs to be done sometimes and AI also will make that harder because people will develop less manual skills to learn for themselves.
> AI also will make that harder because people will develop less manual skills to learn for themselves
I'm not sure I agree with this line of thinking. For most of our early learning phase of life, there is a lot oversight and guidance. As adults, we often go to others to ask questions. Ai has separated the expert knowledge from the human meatbody. I find learning of all types easier with Ai available to help me.
The extended title is more like:
"AI Coding will Prevent Expertise if We Continue To Focus on Code Generation rather than Socratic and Educational Workflow Design"
...but I had to compress it for brevity! The points and studies I bring up in the essay support what you're saying.
Problem is: I'm seeing very little movement in that direction, but a whole lot around the abdication of responsibility when it comes to AI coding in general.