AskHN:How do you handle skill atrophy from using coding agents?

It persists in asking questions at deeper levels until you arrive at the answer yourself. This forces you to think hard about a problem, and this effort helps with understanding, learning and retention. Of course I made a Socratic-quiz skill for this, to use with any coding agent or similar:

https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/plugins-detai...

For example I’ve used this to better understand counter-intuitive things about diabetes/insulin, dopamine and motivation, catching up with a codebase, Claude’s implementations, etc (to combat so-called cognitive debt).

Strong LLMs are surprisingly good at this type of quizzing, they display a semblance of “theory of mind”.

[Edited - link fixed]

What I do to compensate:

  - make it my duty to own every change, i.e. cognitively debt-free:
  - write summaries on every new thing I do (blog post, memo to colleague)
  - contribute documentation to the open-source projects I rely on
  - practice for CKA/CKAD certificates which require pre-LLM muscle memory
  - build interactive learning material for what I’m trying to learn
  - work with things that LLMs don’t yet trivially solve
  - repeat or reconstruct my recipes to perfect workflows, 

As if for example someone's skill lessened if they switched from assembly to a higher level programming language over time (like, does it matter?)

If you for some reason had to go back and program more manually, then you could do so as the need arises

Otherwise, LLMs appear to be here to stay and you don't actually need those skills that are even possibly admittedly "atrophying"

I guess we'd need a detailed pinpointing of what skills exist or existed and to identify if they actually ateophy (I guess I'm not sure if skills are really atrophying, or even if they are if it matters)

Edit: here's an idea or exercise or projects to work on. Maybe people should find clear documentation of pre-AI processes in case you need to go back and learn them. Or create such documentation if it doesn't exist (which would be an exercise to practice your skills to make you remember them).

I think they’re wrong, but also that even if they were right I wouldn’t give money to some assholes that stole every book, movie, piece of art, and published line of code. To me it seems clear that a company “forcing you to use AI because efficiency” is exactly the same as “welcome our new external team you’ll be interfacing with! They’ll write that pesky code.” Fuck that, I’d bail, I can read the writing on the wall.

Also these AI data center pricks want to drink up all the water and make us compete on our power bills with Google and Microsoft. That sucks. They suck.

You can watch your coworkers de-skill themselves in real time. Why would you not want that? Less competition - if you think it’s still a valuable skill.

I do.

Either you are doing something guiding the AI or you are in your hammock doing nothing. If you’re in a hammock find a crossword puzzle.