Thread

1. glouwbug · 1790613143 · focus · HN ↗

   When you write something you constantly remodel your understanding through refactors and rewrites until you internalize it. By internalizing it you gain the capacity to reason about it (during critical downtime) and communicate it. An entire team that can communicate can solve problems together, from one guy's vision to products white boarding to engineering's infrastructure to UX and UI's artistry.

   It boggles me we completely forgot that the world operated like this just 4 years ago

   1. enraged_camel · 1790614282 · focus · HN ↗

      The way I think about it is that understanding is formed in a top-down fashion now, instead of bottom-up. You can look at a feature developed by AI from the outside, and keep peeling the layers and examining them (or having AI explain them to you) until you learn how it works. It's like reading a textbook. It is different than writing the code yourself, or practicing the topic of the textbook yourself. But if you invest the time, it can be just as effective.

      The issue of course is that if you do invest the time, then you're no longer saving time by using AI. You're just spending it reading and trying to understand something you didn't write. And that can be unpleasant in its own way.

      My hot take is that for parts of a system that can be considered its core, forming a deep understanding is almost always important, and so is knowing how the different business domains integrate and where the connection points are. For many others, a high level understanding is sufficient. The difference is that now, with AI, you can make that choice. Before, you had to write everything yourself, and for any sufficiently complex and long-lived system it became impossible to hold all of it in your head.

      1. wholinator2 · 1790615263 · focus · HN ↗

         I disagree that reading a textbook is just as effective as solving problems yourself (this is what i read your statement to mean). It seems fairly obvious from university experience that doing the homework yourself gets you better test grades in the end. You can of course have the AI write the homework but you can't then just watch the AI solve it lest it be drastically muted in effect. Trying things that fail, working hard towards a problem, banging your head against something impossible, these are all worthwhile endeavors. Of course reading the textbook is useful too, very useful! But the textbook does not teach you experience.

         1. enraged_camel · 1790627761 · focus · HN ↗

            Sure, but what level of understanding do you actually need? Only you can be the judge of that obviously, but I posit that for the vast, perhaps even the overwhelming majority of any system's components, a high level understanding is sufficient. In fact that's how it already works: it is rarely the case that one person knows the team's entire codebase inside out. Instead different people specialize in different areas. With AI it's the same thing: you can achieve the level of understanding you want with the most important parts (either by having AI explain it to you, or architecting it and writing the code yourself), and delegate everything else to AI.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.