> And it doesn't freak you out that you're relying on thousands of lines of code that you've never looked at?

I was a product manager for 15 years. I helped sell products to customers who paid thousands or millions of dollars for them. I never looked at the code. Customers never looked at the code. The overwhelming majority of people in the world are constantly relying on code they've never looked at. It's mostly fine.

> How do you verify the end result?

That's the better question, and the answer is a few things. First, when it makes changes to my ad accounts, I spot check them in the UI. Second, I look at ad reporting pretty often, since it's a core part of running my business. If there were suddenly some enormous spike in spend, it wouldn't take me long to catch it.

I am currently using a Claude skill that I have been building out over the last few days that runs through my Amazon PPC campaigns and does a full audit. Suggestions of bid adjustments, new search terms and products to advertise against and adjustment to campaign structures. It goes through all of the analytics Amazon provides, which are surprisingly extensive, to find every search term where my product shows up, gets added to cart and purchased.

It's the kind of thing that would be hours of tedious work, then even more time to actually make all the changes to the account. Instead I just say "yeah do all of that" and it is done. Magic stuff. Thousands of lines of Python to hit the Amazon APIs that I've never even looked at.

I'll grant that it does extend beyond SWEs, but whether AI atrophies skills is entirely up to the user.

I used to use a bookkeeper, but I got Claude a QuickBooks API key and have had it doing my books since then. I give it the same inputs and it generates all the various journal entries, etc. that I need. The difference between using it and my bookkeeper is I can ask it all kinds of questions about why it's doing things and how bookkeeping conventions work. It's much better at explaining than my bookkeeper and also doesn't charge me by the hour to answer. I've learned more about bookkeeping in the past month than in my entire life prior - very much the opposite of skill atrophy.

Claude does a bunch of low-skill tasks in my business, like copying numbers from reports into different systems into a centralized Google Sheet. My muscle memory at running reports and pulling out the info I want has certainly atrophied, but who cares? It was a skill I used because I needed the outcome, not because the skill was useful.

You say that using AI reduces all these skills as though that's an unavoidable outcome over which people have no control, but it's not. You can mindlessly hand tasks off to AI, or you can engage with it as an expert and learn something. In many cases the former is fine. Before AI ever existed, you saw the same thing as people progressed in their careers. The investment banking analyst gets promoted a few times and suddenly her skill at making slide decks has atrophied, because she's delegating that to analysts. That's a desirable outcome, not a tragedy.

Less capability doesn't necessarily mean less agency. If you choose to delegate a task you don't want to do so you can focus on other things, then you are becoming less capable at that skill precisely because you are exercising agency.

Now in fairness I get that I am very lucky in that I have full control of when and how I use AI, while others are going to be forced to use it in order to keep up with peers. But that's the way technology has always been - people who decided they didn't want to move from a typewriter to a word processor couldn't keep up and got left behind. The world changes, and we're forced to adapt to it. You can't go back, but within the current technological paradigm there remains plenty of agency to be had.

It's also worth nothing that the "our" in that sentence is just SWEs, who are a pretty small group in the grand scheme of things. I recognize that's a lot of HN, but still bears considering in terms of the broader impact outside of that group.

I'm a small business owner, and AI has drastically increased my agency. I can do so much more - I've built so many internal tools and automated so many processes that allow me to spend my time on things I care about (both within the business but also spending time with my kids).

It is, fortunately, and unfortunately, the nature of a lot of technology to disempower some people while making lives better for others. The internet disempowered librarians.