> I don’t want to help someone who opens with “I don’t know how to do this so I asked ChatGPT and it gave me these 200 lines but it doesn’t work”.
The skill has not been obliterated. We still need to fix the slop written by the LLMs, but it is not that bad.
Some people copy and paste snippets of code without knowing what it does, and in a sense, they spread technical debt around.
LLMs lower the technical debt spread by the clueless, to a lower baseline.
The issue I see is that the amount of code having this level of technical debt is created at a much faster speed now.
The copy-paste of usable code snippets is somewhat comparable to any use of a library or framework in the sense that there's an element of not understanding what the entire thing is doing or at least how, and so every time this is done it adds to the knowledge debt, a borrowing of time, energy and understanding needed to come up with the thing being used.
By itself this isn't a problem and realistically it's impossible to avoid, and in a lot of cases you may never get to the point where you have to pay this back. But there's also a limit on the rate of debt accumulation which is how fast you can pull in libraries, code snippets and other abstractions, and as you said LLMs ability to just produce text at a superhuman rate potentially serves to _rapidly_ increase the rate of knowledge debt accumulation.
If debt as an economic force is seen as something that can stimulate short-term growth then there must be an equivalent for knowledge debt, a short-term increase in the ability of a person to create a _thing_ while trading off the long-term understanding of it.
Take this snippet of code, and this is what each part means, and how you can change it.
It doesn't explain how it is implemented, but it explains the syntax and the semantics of it, and that's enough.
Good documentation makes all the difference, at least for me.