AI coding agents are amazing, but lean on them too hard and your engineering skills atrophy. Aviation already lived through this. Here's what we can steal from how they fixed it.
But subject matter experts provide a clean, well optimized abstraction — the programming language — so it’s OK not to understand assembly unless you’re solving a very specialized problem.
LLMs are not experts, do not provide any consistent abstraction, and do not indicate you from the details of what they produce.
I was taught with compilers you couldn’t trust. The old buggy ones that needed babysitting still beat doing everything by hand.
Even when they worked, you were expected to know assembly for inline optimizations, and my assembly education was surely terrible compared to my teachers’. That gap was okay, because things usually worked out. The point was using the higher-level tools to get more done without sweating every last detail.
Compilers make people worse at assembly.
But subject matter experts provide a clean, well optimized abstraction — the programming language — so it’s OK not to understand assembly unless you’re solving a very specialized problem.
LLMs are not experts, do not provide any consistent abstraction, and do not indicate you from the details of what they produce.
I was taught with compilers you couldn’t trust. The old buggy ones that needed babysitting still beat doing everything by hand.
Even when they worked, you were expected to know assembly for inline optimizations, and my assembly education was surely terrible compared to my teachers’. That gap was okay, because things usually worked out. The point was using the higher-level tools to get more done without sweating every last detail.