Will technical skill even matter at all?
Comments
By notepad0x90 2026-01-2718:333 reply What skills are atrophying that would be useful in the future?
If you're letting LLMs do more than assisting, don't. That's my advice. But if like you're title they're just assisting you, then what skills are atrophying? You still review the code and understand it right? You still second guess the LLMs proposed solutions and look for better approaches right?
Articulating how LLM assistance is different than junior programmers writing code and assisting would be useful, everyone has different setups and workflows, so it's hard to say in my opinion.
Let's say you want to make an architectural change. There are two options:
1. Ask AI to come up with the different options and let you review it
2. You think about the options and ask AI for feedback
#1 is much faster but results in atrophy (you are not critically coming up with the architecture changes)
#2 uses your and AI skills but it's gonna be slower.
which one will you choose? currently i'm doing #1
By bauldursdev 2026-01-2721:01 I agree... I think the process of coming to a conclusion yourself is different than having that solution proposed to you and accepting it.
> What skills are atrophying that would be useful in the future?
Well for once, tech companies are still at large hiring via leetcode/livecoding interviews. I feel much less prepared now that I was a year ago.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-01-2721:58 Were you really using anything in your day to day work that had any relevance to preparing for tech interviews?
By icedchai 2026-01-2723:15 In my experience, many heavy LLM users do not review their own code. They'll blindly open PRs full of slop, making it the reviewer's problem.
By techgnosis 2026-01-281:57 IMO the code itself has become much less valuable. Most people in this thread are telling you to stay in the code but I would argue you need to stay current on how to architect a good project. What supporting infra do you need? Did you pick the right language? Did you break the project up into appropriate tasks? You need to become a really great PM.
Learn to wrangle your agent better than everyone else. Don't rely on the chat too much, break up your project into tasks, learn to use sub-agents.
Learn to use the new tools well.
This tool seems obvious but its message is really that what you prompt is profoundly important.
https://developers.googleblog.com/conductor-introducing-cont...
By kylehotchkiss 2026-01-2718:551 reply Have a personal site and passion (read: not side gig) projects you work on outside of work. Hand code, get frustrated, be ambitious, don’t open Claude every time you forget a tailwind class
If you don’t have ideas, spent more time away from the screen, they will come.
By mandeepj 2026-01-2718:56 > If you don’t have ideas, spent more time away from the screen, they will come.
Love that, and you stated a fact. Or, rethink other products!
