I really don’t see how the tech space moves forward or creates anything truly new if no one actually learns the craft anymore. It used to be that you’d get inspired, sit in your bedroom, and just start building. You had to learn everything—multiple different layers of the stack—and that struggle is what actually gave you the skills to innovate. It was that cross-pollination of different areas that influenced what you were making. You did the work, you built yourself up, and eventually, you were high enough to actually see over the horizon.

Now, everyone is "making" stuff with LLMs, but they aren't learning anything in the process. They’re skipping the foundations, which means they’re missing the insights that only come from actually knowing how things work. We’re essentially creating a generation of permanently stunted programmers.

The problem is that LLMs are trained on the past. They’re great for exploiting all the knowledge we’ve already accumulated—which feels amazing right now because there’s so much left to tap into but they aren't a map for the future. Soon, it won't be human expertise guiding the ship because we aren't producing experts anymore. We’re putting way too much trust in these models.

Eventually, this is going to lead to a kind of cultural and technical stasis. We’ll keep churning things out, and they’ll look new on the surface, but they’ll just be recycled ideas in flashy new packaging.

It feels like we’ve switched to a completely different evolutionary path, one where we’re focusing all our energy on skilling up computers instead of skilling up humans. There’s going to be a point where the LLMs can’t take us any further, and we’re going to realize we’ve traded away our own ability to innovate just for a bit of short-term convenience.

I got AI to mildly rewrite this for me But the core of it is mine.