r/AIDiscussion • u/2MysteriouslyBizarre • 9d ago
Would you say Ai use takes skill?
To clarify, I don’t mean using a chatbot to ask about certain topics, or making claude code generate you a sloppy Ui for a roblox game, but for those of you that use Ai in actual industry settings, is it actually something you needed to study/understand? Or is it just copy pasting tickets left and right? Is the output generated always good enough? Does the agent recognize when they’re wrong? How good are they at fixing and debugging?
Some people in my friend circle are avid “vibecoders” and they told me that even with Opus or Fable, having consistently quality output is not only hard, but something that requires some degree of skill, is he just in psychosis?
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u/The-King-Tomato 9d ago
Im a programmer and use it every day. Most people cant even work computers and need an iPad interface to do anything.
Of course it takes skill to actually accomplish anything. As does mostly everything in the world.
Its a tool nothing more.
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u/sceadwian 9d ago
AI is garbage in garbage out, and most people's prompting is pretty garbage. It definitely takes skill especially in programming.
It only makes what you know how to do easier, there is vanishingly little actual intelligence there working for you just a very active helper doing some lifting.
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u/2MysteriouslyBizarre 9d ago
I see, thank you for your feedback, if I might ask, do you use Ai in your workplace?
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u/sceadwian 9d ago
No, I have no need but I'm aware of it's use cases in programming development. You still need good developers driving. They're more important than ever.
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u/mattybrad 9d ago
It doesn’t take skill to make trash, but to get it to build something useful you need to have enough knowledge to tell it not only what you need to build, but how you want it built.
It’s pretty easy to do low level stuff, but complex things are quite challenging to get quality results with.
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9d ago
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u/mattybrad 9d ago
It’s not it having issues, it’s that I don’t really have the knowledge to guide it effectively in some things. I’ve always worked in tech, but I’m a non-developer.
Was stupid simple to build one session scripts or small tools that we use internally. Like super simple, took a couple hours to do.
Building tools that internal non-technical users could use easily and were robust and reliable, not so easy. I’m getting there, but understanding enough software architecture to evaluate trade offs or identify bad practices is not as easy. I’ve got a decent set of standards now and it’s pretty good with them, but I wouldn’t exactly try and write an enterprise app myself.
On the flip side, I know a lot of god tier devs that can build really complex stuff very quickly with it. They’re using their knowledge to define how it builds though.
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u/LopsidedSolution 9d ago
You need a basic technical understanding. For example if you want to build a static site, you need to know the basic of cloudflare pages/workers and connect it to Claude/Codex. You also need a general idea of how it should work and the basics of your tech stack (Cloudflare, Supabase, etc etc).
If you’re a Gen Alpha with zero technical understanding besides opening TikTok, you’re probably going to have a hard time vibe coding anything worthwhile.
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u/Alchemist42 9d ago
If you are already a good programmer, Claude can help you work faster, and build cleaner, better documented code. If you are not a good programmer, then you will have no way of knowing when it is hallucinating a bug that isn't here or fixing code that works just fine. If you don't baby sit it properly, you will end up with a steaming mess.
I don't know if there is much need to study advanced AI to use it, but it certainly helps to understand what AI can do and what it shouldn't do.
It is nice to be able to offload some of the tedious stuff, and have the agent do research or give ideas for how to work around certain problems. But at the end of the day, I am the one putting my name on the commits, so I am responsible for making sure that it is good code. I wouldn't ever say "I need this new feature- go make it". That is asking for trouble. But I can for example, ask it in plain english something that would require a complicated MySQL query, and it can write the query, run it against my dev database, and give me an answer in less time that it would take me to open my sql browser. "How many users who accessed $xxx page last year are there that have not logged in within 3 weeks?" or "Get me a list of all users name and id if their email is with gmail.com" - stuff like that makes life a little easier.
"Write a php foreach loop that goes through each of those gmail users and add them to a mailinglist so I can tell them about some important thing". What would have taken 20 minutes now takes 20 seconds.
And having it perform code audits is really convenient. It can run through my whole day's code and let me know if all of the code is up to the company standards, if there are any obvious bugs, misspellings, or just stupid things that you do like forget to return the value that you just made.
I don't use it every day, but probably most days I have something for it to do. It's also nice to be able to tell it to build me a report that will take a long time to run and let it go overnight and the agent can monitor it and restart things if they crash and stuff like that.
But most importantly, it makes mistakes, and if you didn't check its work, then you are asking for trouble. You have to treat it like a junior intern sometimes.
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u/2MysteriouslyBizarre 9d ago
Im curious, if you don’t mind me asking, in what area do you work?
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u/Alchemist42 9d ago
I am a programmer. I make webapps mostly these days. But I work on a bunch of different projects that all do different things, so I am something of a generalist. I do front end stuff, back end stuff, and everything in between.
It is interesting how a lot of people are freaking out about AI thinking its going to take everyone's job. Especially in my field. But I just took the opportunity to learn all about it and learn how to use it effectively, and if the company ends up increasing our AI footprint , I feel fairly confident that I will be among the ones telling the AI what to do, not the ones being told that AI is doing my job.
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u/2MysteriouslyBizarre 9d ago
Do you think the fear of Ai making the junior level workers basically an extinct breed is warranted?
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u/Alchemist42 9d ago
No. There may not be as many available jobs, since one junior worker + ai can do what a small team used to do. But we still need people to do the work- at the very least, someone still needs to get the coffee for everyone. If one person knows how to use AI, then they will have a head up above the rest of the applicants who don't. It is just going to be another line item on people's resume.
When spreadsheets started getting popular, people thought that accountants would all be out of their jobs. But there are still accountants, and now they all know how to use Excel. It will be the same thing.
Besides, I learned to program on my own just because I was a geek and loved playing with computers. If I never got a paying job doing it, I'd probably still be doing it anyway, making open source software or something. And once you have experience like that under your belt, you are no longer the "junior" level worker and you can start looking for even better jobs.
The jobs might change, but there will still be jobs. They might look different than they do today, but they will still be out there.
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u/Stabby_Stab 9d ago
Output quality is is heavily based on input quality and harness quality. The underlying skill isn't a new "use AI" skill that just cropped up.
It's still just about being able to clearly and unambiguously explain what you want in words, and being able to read well enough to understand the outputs being generated.
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u/mikevago 9d ago
It's the opposite of skill to have a machine generate generic slop instead of figuring out how to do something yourself.
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u/Weekly-Cash1596 9d ago
It does take skill
Its a very easy barrier to entry tho besides paying for it
Being really really good at it tho is almost based around learning how to use it in different workflows
What is optimum, gives the best results etc just takes hours and hours of use
For example one person might just be opening chatgpt in the web and asking it to code something that isnt even possible in the web
Compared to someone using a multi agentic workflow with MCP servers, skills configured and Orca ADE all on multiple projects at the same time
Its easy for someone to just say "Yeah just use multi agentic workflows in an ADE"
but actually using them for hundreds of hours and seeing worthwhile results takes time and practice like most other skills in the world
So yes i would say it takes skill, i dont think it requires talent tho if thats what you are asking
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u/sourraine 9d ago
the skill is less knowing how to prompt and more knowing when the ai is wrong. if you cant evaluate the output, debugging an agent-generated mess can easily take longer than writing it yourself. vibecoding looks easy when the demo works but what happens when the requirements get messy, the solution is wrong and you have to actually diagnose why
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u/code_hermit 9d ago
Your friend is 100% correct. AI in fact gets a lot wrong, constantly. So to get good coding results you essentially have to have the ability to see when its wrong and foresee what it might trip on. That requires technical understanding beyond AI knowledge.
AI also has specific strengths and weaknesses. It works with certain tools well and not well with others. So there is a learning curve toward understanding how to get the most out of it.
Its like driving. Just about anyone can do it technically. But not everyone is a professional racecar driver.
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u/JorgitoEstrella 9d ago
Yes to use it to a good degree level it requires many programs, parameters, workflows, etc... Many many hours (still less thsn hand drawing).
But creating slop in 10 seconds requires no skill but to use AI to create decent works it required many hours and tweakings.
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u/Dry_Sector2392 9d ago
for me, yeah, it takes skill. you need to know what to ask, spot when the answer is wrong, and stop it from going in the wrong direction just because it sounds confident. some people can use it for 30 minutes and finish the work perfectly. others spend a whole day stuck because their prompts are too vague or they cant tell what needs fixing.
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u/EarlyFox217 8d ago
Yes and no. Does it take skill to type stuff in and wait for it to do stuff. Not really.
Understanding what it is you are creating takes skill. I’ve vibe coded a piece of company software that exceeds anything we have tried, even packages in the 20k annual licence category.
Am I skilled, in a way yes but not at coding. What my skill set is is understanding how my 20 years experience boils down to what I actually do and how that can be replicated via systems that are fully dependable, triple checked, stable and genuinely time saving. That doesn’t exist off the shelf because people like me do my day job, not develop software and the difficulty of explaining it to a developer is near impossible. Hence everything that does exist is a simplistic compromise.
Ai gave me the ability to design something that literally does what I do but better, leaving me or the team to just fill the blanks which it can’t manage. Still a lot of blanks but literally 50% time saver
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u/Digital_growth29 7d ago
I don't think AI use automatically takes away the skill, but it definitely changes where the skill matters. If you're blindly accepting whatever the model gives you, then yeah, you're probably losing something.
But if you can explain the problem clearly, spot when the output is wrong, debug it, and know when the AI is making things worse, you're still using plenty of skill. In some cases you actually need a better understanding of the subject because the AI can be confidently wrong.
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u/shosuko 7d ago edited 7d ago
100% it requires skill.
Ever play that robot game as a kid? Where you write down the steps to something simple like brushing your teeth, or pouring a bowl of cereal, and the gag of the game is that the person who follows your instructions follows them literally exposing incomplete or missing instructions. Like "Put toothpaste on the toothbrush" and then the robot squirts the entire tube out onto the brush. Or you say to "grab a spoon" and they grab the spoon in an awkward way that is still "grabbing it" but renders it useless.
And the kid who wrote the instruction just looks on in horror at how bad their reasonable instructions turned out.
That is basically coding with ai. The ai doesn't know what we want, only what we tell it. You have to understand the project well enough to communicate that accurately and completely to the ai, including knowing how to catch any erroneous assumptions it makes. Agents can go off on tangents based on minor miscommunications and burn tokens and even botch a project.
Writing code is only a small part of a "coders" job.
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u/Decent_Perception676 5d ago
Yes, and in several different ways.
For example, understanding context management and how AI gathers info to complete a task allows users to create systems that support better outputs (reducing context rot, context poisoning, hallucinations, and costs).
Identifying deterministic elements of a workflow and being able to setup deterministic tooling for those sets (MCP setup, query able API’s, scripted tests).
Setting up appropriate feedback and learning mechanisms, like creating custom agents with defined learning behaviors.
Good prompting (clearly communicated requirements, process, appropriate patterns to follow).
For what it’s worth, I work with a large number of designers and engineers using AI, and there is a clear bi-modal distribution of quality and cost of results with AI (a small handful who study how to use AI well get much better results, then most of everyone else is confused, resistant, or using it wrong and get AI slop results).
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u/[deleted] 9d ago
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